Bonjour, Bangalore! 

As Alliance Française de Bangalore gets ready for the pending 50th-year celebrations, its director speaks about the milestone  
(Photo Nagaraja Gadekal ​)
(Photo Nagaraja Gadekal ​)

BENGALURU:  This year, Alliance Française de Bangalore (AFB) is looking to celebrate what was three years ago. The cultural centre, formed in 1970, is turning 53 in 2023. It’s 50th year, however, was in 2020 but the celebration couldn’t happen as the year was shrouded by the deathly clouds of Covid. So their golden jubilee elapsed in quarantined quietude. Meanwhile, as the world coped with chaos, AFB’s new director Jean Christian Randrianampizafy arrived in the city in September ’20 in likewise silence. 

For Randrianampizafy, the move to the city was not without its challenges. “When I first came here, it was the height of Covid. So, I couldn’t even meet my staff until much later. But there was another set of challenges. Due to some internal problems, we haven’t had a committee at AFB since August 2021. But this year, we plan to sort it out as we have to organise the pending celebration,” says Randrianampizafy, adding that the tentative date for the golden jubilee is scheduled for June.

A cheerful man, he sits in his office on the first floor at AFB in a space with walls decorated with artwork and a picturesque map of France. The fourth child in a family of five, Randrianampizafy grew up in Madagascar, East Africa. “My father is from Madagascar, but my mother is from Bordeaux, France. The wine capital as you call it (laughs). After working with Alliance Française (AF) in Africa for 20 years, I chose to move to India for my curiosity about this country. But then I saw that Bengaluru was one of the top five AFs in this country and that made me really want to discover the centre. AFB is huge. We host around 3,500 students here. Of course, during Covid, it took a hit, but now things have fallen into place again,” he says. 

Outside of the 50th-year commemoration, the main goal of Randrianampizafy and AFB is to encourage more artiste collaborations between India and France. “We want to organise cultural exchanges in multiple artistic fields like music, film, painting, and photography, among others because artists from France need to be connected with people here and vice-versa. We want to support young artistes,” he shares.

In his journey of trying to understand the cultural ethos of Bengaluru, Randrianampizafy suspects that there exists a veiled aspect to the city. That in a way, the true cultural nature of Bengaluru is hidden in plain sight. “A few weeks ago, I was in Indiranagar. When I spoke to my friend about it, he asked me to go to this place that had a beautiful space for literature.

That was ARAKU Coffee. But it is totally hidden, as if in a haze. I had a conversation with the manager to organise a collaborative activity. And we did. We did a nice literary evening. I had asked a French author to present her book there. That is what I mean by ‘hidden’. If my friend hadn’t urged me to see this place, I would have never known. You need to be connected with people to understand this city,” he concludes.

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