Post Script

According to a friend of mine who works closely with the fishermen in the city, the kuppam in Triplicane has an interesting story about their relationship with the Parthasarathy Temple there. The fishermen claim that the temple actually used to be theirs, but that they ceded control over it a long time ago, although they still participate in many of the temple rituals. Ironically, the temple board is now claiming that the fishermen are encroaching on temple land, so the fishermen are fighting to stay on land that was once all theirs.

This makes sense. Even the Kapaleeswar Temple in Mylapore apparently used to be located right on the seashore. It, too, must have been a fishermen’s temple before it was moved inland.

The heat and the temple festivals

(I wrote this post a few days back, but I have been traveling and having some trouble with my computer.)

The heat has settled like a woolen blanket over the city, and people are adjusting as best they can. Vendors line up wedges of watermelon under glass covers to keep out the flies. These and tender coconut water sell quickly. An institution trying to do a good deed in Madras these days might mix buttermilk and salt in big buckets and hand glasses of it out on crowded streets.

It is also a time of temple festivals in Madras. The idols of each temple must be aired regularly; they’re taken out of their sanctums and taken around the streets. I attended the festivities at two of the oldest temples in the city, the first at the Kapaleeswar Temple in Mylapore. Near my house at the Marundeeswar Temple in Tiruvanmiyur, I saw two parts of the festival, and I liked it better than the one in Mylapore. Here, too, the temple deity, Shiva in the form of Marundeeswar, was taken on procession in the middle of the day. The chariot was a high one, with the deity and the priests standing at least 6 or 7 feet above the crowd, and devotees using two long ropes pulled the deity around the temple.

A few nights before that, I had gone out to dinner with a friend of mine. We were talking very late, till midnight, so he walked me home. As we turned into the area in front of the temple tank in Tiruvanmiyur, we saw a crowd under the large maidan where a band was playing. In the middle of the crowd was an enormous palanquin, on which was placed the decorated idol of Shiva, carried by a large group of young men. The idol was held facing the door of the temple. Two red flags flanked the palanquin with the sun and moon on them (Surya and Chandra), as well as two lamps. To our delight (we are both serious Bharata Natyam dancers), the idol danced! The palanquin bearers rocked the deity from side to side, while running back and forth on the maidan, the idol making a graceful zig zag. The lamps were moved up and down with the rocking and the flags were spun, horns were blown and drums were beaten, showing how the universe itself spun when Shiva danced.

More than the idol, I was mesmerized by the palanquin bearers who were intensely concentrated on their movements, at the degree of coordination needed in a group of that size in order to make the deity perform its intricate dance. Eight young men bearing Ambal’s palanquin ahead of Shiva did a pradakshanam around him, executing a kind of complex two step as they carried her. These men were closer to me, I could see their knitted brows, their profuse sweating, the order and beauty they carved as they progressed through the chaos of the crowds and smoke. These were obviously not priests, and because local people were involved with the rituals of the temple, this festival seemed to be much more concerned with reinforcing bonds of community, a kind of collective adoration of the god rather than the kind of individual awe invoked in bigger temples like the Brihadeeshwara in Tanjavur or in a cathedrals.

History, as I found in my reading, supports this intuition. The nadanam or dancing of the idol has been taking place in Tiruvanmiyur (thought to be at least 1,200 years old) and in a series of other temples in Tamil Nadu for hundreds of years. These boys who hold the palanquin were exercising hereditary rights to participate in temple rituals held by certain of the fishing communities in Madras in the temples of Tiruvanmiyur, Parthasarathy in Triplicane, Tiruvottriyur, Kapaleeswar in Mylapore and others. Srinivasapuram, the slum I’m studying, was born out of one such kuppam or fishing community, called Mulli Kuppam, which has a long recorded history. An important part of my project now has become about trying to find the earliest recorded mentions of this kuppam, which have proven and will prove to be useful in the slum’s struggle for rights to their land.

One historian of Madras, B. M. Thirunaranan, posited in a volume of essays written for the tercentenary celebrations for the city in 1939 that in the early days of the spread of agriculture, most of the early settlers in this area must have been fishermen. Slowly, as in-land lagoons dried, leaving behind clayey rich dirt, farming became more popular. He suggests that the early farmers, because they were in a minority, exchanged ritual status in the temples for permission from the fishermen to build and expand their holdings. The Kapaleeswar temple was originally built directly on the seashore, and then moved inland. When the British landed in what is now Madras in the 1600s, there was no city, only a handful of fishing villages. Madras the city was formed from the amalgamation of these villages and centered around Fort St. George.

Unlike most poor communities in the cities, the largest slums of Madras are built around the oldest residents, these fishermen. Their claims to traditional land rights will prove very important in the struggle for rights and resources after the tsunami.

A New Leaf Turned

I suppose I should start by introducing myself. My name is Nithya, and I live in Madras. I’ve been living here since last July, and most of the time, I still feel that I’m a newcomer to the city. Some time last October, I went with some union organizers to a meeting in Srinivasapuram, a cluster of Slum Clearance Board tenements and huts on one end of Marina Beach, next to where the Adyar River meets the ocean. Srinivasapuram is a striking place. It’s a slum on the beachside, and, like no other place I’ve ever seen, manages to visually encapsulate the dramatic fight between classes in the shaping of the modern Indian city. (The photographs here are not the best but they convey the basic idea, i'll try for some better ones.) Skeletons of gargantuan buildings now under construction on the opposite shore of the Adyar River loom menacingly like an advancing army over the roofs of tenements and huts.

I was later to find out that this visual drama is reflected in recent contentious history. In 2003, the community, along with other citizens’ groups in the city, fought against the Tamil Nadu government who wanted to build a Rs. 500 crore administrative and corporate complex along the beach. The beach, which was envisioned by one of the earliest governors in Madras Elihu Yale to be a “lung” for the city, was saved for the moment by the work of these groups. But the problem of eviction from their valuable beachside lands came up again in a different form a few years later.

On December 26, 2004, Srinivasapuram lost over 50 lives to the tsunami, as well as numerous homes and valuable property. As relief and rehabilitation became the stuff of daily news, Srinivaspuram residents were asked to leave their homes and move to temporary housing in Thoraipakkam, a strip of marshy land well inland. Some residents were intimidated into moving, but most refused and have stayed on in Srinivasapuram. Those who moved found that the temporary housing conditions were awful, tin huts that baked like ovens in the sun in an area that was far from any government services and sources of livelihood. Many have since returned. Residents and many of the groups working in Srinivasapuram felt that the temporary housing Thoraipakkam was part of a larger effort to move those residents of the beach who had the strongest claims to the land, the fishermen, away from their homes.

At their heart, questions of eviction in India tend to be closely allied with questions of modernity and development. What should a modern Indian city look like? For whom should it be built and maintained? What idea of the city do its citizens have and how is it different from that of the city’s government and bureaucrats? These are some of the questions I wanted to illuminate by looking closely at how the government and citizens have laid claim to the Srinivasapuram land, both in their day to day interactions and in their legal and official communications, as well as in media coverage.

I’ve been working regularly on my project, communicating with groups in Srinivasapuram and researching the history of slums, fishermen’s communities, and poverty in Madras. But it’s been hard to post because, to me, a posting seems like it should have some answers, whereas the longer I work in Madras, the more questions I have and the more complicated my answers have become. So I decided at this late moment in the game that I would use my blog, in the hopes that the blog format, forgiving and informal as it is, would allow me to put my writings and thoughts from Chennai more regularly in front of the SARAI community. I’ll discuss some of the difficulties I’ve faced in my research, many of the complications that have arisen in my original ideas, and also throw in some interesting asides from my life in the city.

Please check back frequently over the next three months, and please comment on the site. And wish me luck!