New Delhi, March 15 -- To the untrained eye, the remains of a former French establishment look puny on the map of modern India: a bit of land along the rim of the Bay of Bengal, like Chandannagar in Bengal and Puducherry on the Coromandel Coast, and yonder west, a stronghold in Mahe on the Malabar Coast. So sparse compared to the British it seems, that some would think the French were merely passing through. Not quite as expansive and invasive as the Raj or even as pioneering as the Portuguese, who sliced the Indian Ocean to inaugurate a trade route with South and South-East Asia as early as 1498, the French remain just a rung above the Dutch, the most minuscule of the Europeans in India (the Danes barely register).

So, how did the relat...