Established under the terms of the Treaty of Cession of French Territories in India, the French Institute of Pondicherry was inaugurated on 21 March 1955. It was initially engaged, under the leadership of its first director (Jean Filliozat), in the study of Indian civilization and culture, and more particularly in the history and the religions of South India. In the 1960s, a department of ecology
was created to collect information on the conditions and evolution of the environment in South India (vegetation, soil, climate change, etc.) with its focus on the Western Ghats, one of the world’s 34 hotspots for biodiversity. With the setting up of the department of social sciences in the 1980s, the Institute also extended its interest to the evolution and dynamics of Indian society. The development of research and the necessity to support it with modern methodologies and equipment led to the creation of a laboratory of geomatics (LAIG) in the 1990s. With it, the Institute acquired modern tools for the representation and analysis of the relationships in space and time between these entities and their environment. The installation of the LAIG as a common tool greatly helped in identifying new areas for research. The IFP also has a multidisciplinary Centre for Documentary Resources (CDR), which came into being as the result of a major restructuring of three research libraries in Pondicherry. This Centre holds specialized data of the research conducted at the IFP, which is augmented every year through a dynamic acquisition policy. The CDR is open to the public within a set of rules framed by the IFP.
“From Tradition to Modernity”, a document released on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the IFP, traces the history of the Institute from its inception to the present.
