As tides devour villages, 16 ladies with cameras battle to avoid wasting their vanishing heritage. An exhibition in Chennai showcases their startling photos.
In Odisha’s city of Ganjam, there have been as soon as two women who performed on the seaside, in peals of laughter as they ran right into a glistening blue sea. Now, the seaside exists solely of their recollections: the excessive tides have devoured the sand mattress.
This is without doubt one of the tales captured in pictures taken by Ch. Pratima, a fisherwoman, displayed in Chennai’s Lalit Kala Akademi as a part of an ongoing seven-day exhibition in collaboration with Individuals’s Archive of Rural India (PARI) titled “Chronicles of the Tides: Migration, Battle and Local weather.” It’s open to the general public till September 29. The exhibition presents 400 pictures taken by 16 fisherwomen throughout the fishing communities of Nagapattinam in Tamil Nadu and Ganjam in Odisha.
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Each cities share a wealthy historical past with the ocean; this connection has not solely remodeled the city’s individuals and communities, however the very panorama itself. Nagapattinam is an previous Port City, relationship again to the Chola empire, when it was referred to as Naval Pattinam or “The town of ships.” In the present day, it stays a number one fishing port in Tamil Nadu, recognized for its excessive fish manufacturing. The State ranks third within the nation for fish yield manufacturing. Odisha ranks because the fourth largest fish producing State within the nation owing to its intensive shoreline, rivers, and water our bodies.
Fishermen fixing and loading their nets onto boats as they head out to catch fish.
| Photograph Credit score:
Karthik. B
Traditionally, fishing in Ganjam has been dominated by native communities who’ve relied on artisanal strategies. In Ganjam, fishing shouldn’t be solely a supply of earnings but in addition a cultural staple, with conventional fishing strategies handed down generations.
“Though a lot of the constructions I photographed have been swallowed by the ocean, as a result of these photographs exist, I can inform the following era that this village existed, that we have been right here,” says Pratima.
In certainly one of Ganjam’s tiny fishing harbours, fish lay in rows beneath the solar. These are recent fish that didn’t get offered on the market. To promote them, they should be preserved for future gross sales. Girls rub them with salt, wash them, and dry them underneath the solar for 2 or three days, turning them into dry fish, and giving them an extended shelf life. It’s this course of that Okay. Nagamma’s photographs depict. Nagamma explains how every {photograph} carries a narrative. She factors to a photograph devoid of nets and fish: right here, a bunch of ladies eat collectively out of their tiffin packing containers.
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“These are the ladies concerned within the drying course of. They eat proper the place they make the dried fish,” says Nagamma, pointing to a different picture of a small hut fabricated from wood logs and plastic tarp. Within the {photograph}, a swarm of flies buzz across the ladies. “They simply swat them away and proceed to eat. They haven’t any different place to eat as their houses are very distant [from the place the fishes are dried].”
Not one of the 16 ladies, starting from the ages 20 to 50, had ever held a digital camera of their fingers and even knew that they had tales to inform till they met photographer Palani Kumar who mentored them by way of a three-month pictures workshop performed earlier this 12 months by Dakshin Basis, an NGO.
They spent a lot of that point with their lenses turned in the direction of the fishing communities they have been raised in. Very similar to the photographers, the topics of the photographs had by no means been in entrance of a digital camera and infrequently lined their faces or walked away feeling shy, asking whether or not they have been vital sufficient to be photographed.
A fisherwomen in Ganjam sitting underneath the recent solar making Enduchepala or dried fish.
| Photograph Credit score:
Ch. Pratima
“At any time when they tried to seize random surroundings, they hesitated as a result of the digital camera was a overseas object to each [photographer and subject]. I requested them to persist, and defined what it was they have been attempting to do with the digital camera. For the primary time, the tales of those persons are being recorded by way of their very own views,” Kumar, the curator of the exhibition, informed Frontline. “The story is being informed by the individuals of the group reasonably than somebody from the higher echelons of society or perhaps a media skilled who would nonetheless be an outsider. These photographs are an important report within the historical past of pictures.”
For Kumar, this exhibition is each private and a hat-tip to Ambedkar’s ethos of giving again to society. His mom was additionally a fisherwoman, and he grew up in a home that all the time smelled of fish. “Each favorite reminiscence of mine belongs to the water. Water [the sea] is what heals me,” he provides.
Youngsters within the fishing group typically develop up taking part in on the shores of the seaside. Suganthi captures the enjoyment of two younger women chasing after one another.
| Photograph Credit score:
Suganthi Manickavel
The ocean is an inextricable a part of their being: it brings them consolation, but in addition leaves scars on their our bodies. In Nagapattinam, armed with eri koodais (handwoven baskets) of their mouths, ladies sink into the deep waters trying to find prawns. Suganthi Manickavel, 27, captures the faces of those ladies, the blisters and cuts etched into their palms and toes. “Once I started to take these pictures, I used to be capable of perceive my group and the struggles we face in our everyday lives,” she says.
Hospitals and healthcare are a luxurious for a lot of fishermen they usually typically dwell with such bruises and even severe well being situations with out ever getting handled for them. Pratima explains is a unending cycle they’re caught in: “If it’s a small chilly or fever, they take no matter they’ve at house and go to work hoping it can go away quickly. Solely when it persists for say, 10 days, do they go to the hospital and get themselves handled. Then they’re informed they’ve extra severe situations like hypertension or coronary heart illness. When the physician prescribes medicines, they will solely purchase what they will afford. And so, our illnesses proceed.”
Other than these inflictions, soil mining has added a brand new layer of to their issues. On account of its geographical location, Odisha is wealthy in minerals equivalent to manganese, iron ore, and coal. Whereas giant firms are available hordes to dig up sand, they upset the pure ecosystem in addition to the fastidiously crafted concord between the panorama and fishing communities. This causes excessive tides of the ocean to surge in and destroy houses, rob individuals of their livelihoods, and submerge the shores the place turtles nest. A Zoological Survey of India research, which tracked the nesting of Olive Ridley turtles from 1990 to 2022 discovered that the nesting grounds in Odisha have had a staggering 14km shift northwards as a result of extreme coastal erosion.
In Nagapattinam, fisherwomen arrange nets to entice prawns.
| Photograph Credit score:
Suganthi Manickavel
In keeping with Nagamma, the speed of migration has additionally elevated drastically: “When the fish declined in my village, migration grew to become survival, households had to think about the way forward for their youngsters as properly. Many got here to Chennai to work in building and others moved to coastal areas in Mangalore, Mumbai, and Kerala.”
The fishing group has no steady help from the federal government. At any time when the group voices their issues or difficulties they’re going through, authorities officers dismiss them. Months through the fishing ban interval are the toughest for the group as the federal government provides every fisherman a measly Rs.15,000 as compensation and more often than not they by no means obtain the cash or obtain solely a portion of it, compelling them to scramble to search out work as a way to feed their households.
An aged resident of Ganjam leaves his home behind as the ocean water has lastly reached his doorstep.
| Photograph Credit score:
Ch. Pratima
Kumar hopes that extra ladies get to carry cameras and dream past the shoreline. He factors to certainly one of Pratima’s photographs that he’s been taking a look at for some time. The picture captures an previous man leaving his home, holding on to a door: “The door is the one factor they will carry of the home, the one factor they will keep in mind it by. The remainder will belong to the ocean. In a 12 months’s time, Pratima’s home too will probably be underneath the ocean. By this exhibition, we hope to carry consciousness in regards to the fishing group, to result in some type of change regardless of what number of years it takes.”
