We’d been working on synthesising historical stories about the arrival of the French, the temples that were documented in this town at the time, the maps in which we see them, and so on. In the process we came across temple images of those times, drawn by travellers and others who found Pondicherie such a curiosity. One was an image of what looked to us like it must have been the Perumal Koyil, so we took a break to go ask about this. But, no this was a non-starter: Dinesh Bhattacharya at main Perumal Sannadhi said the gopuram was constructed in 1998 and that the Sivan koyil gopuram is older. So what’s in our image cannot possibly be the Perumal Koyil. All these colonial era images are so much more about typecasting than they are about identifying monuments at specific places.