Birth on the Threshold. Cecilia Van Hollen
of Nochikuppam since I felt an immediate rapport with the two WWF health workers who lived and worked there. Therefore the descriptions of Madras field sites which follow will focus on Nochikuppam. My work in BM Dargha was less comprehensive but important for my study since the majority of the residents in this neighborhood were Muslims, and I wanted to be sure to meet women from all three major religious groups in Tamil Nadu, namely Hindu, Muslim, and Christian. Both Nochikuppam and BM Dargha had small populations of Christians as well.
A fishing community, Nochikuppam lies on the southern end of Madras’s Marina Beach, the second longest urban beach in the world. Like other beaches around Madras, Marina Beach remained virtually empty all day, scorched by the hot sun. But in the coolness of the evening, it became a fairground. Parents brought their children to play on the slides. Lovers sat together quietly in the secrecy of dusk. And groups of young men met to smoke cigarettes and cool their feet at the water’s edge. For the residents of Nochikuppam, Marina Beach was practically an extension of their own beach front, and many set forth in the evening to try to sell snacks to the revelers. The stretch of beach directly in front of Nochikuppam, along its eastern border, was used as a staging ground for all the activities surrounding the arrival and departure of the fishing boats.
The temple of Ellaiamman, a Hindu goddess whose temples reside on the edges of many Tamil villages and towns, lay on the western edge of Nochikuppam.57 Ellaiamman both defines the spatial parameters of the community and protects those inside the boundary from the dangers which lurk outside of it. She was a special goddess for the fisherpeople of Nochikuppam. Fishermen worshiped Ellaiamman before they set out in their boats; and as their boats pushed out to sea, they sometimes stood to look upon the tower (kōpuram) of the temple and pray. Some fisher-women took pots of milk out to the beach on Fridays and prayed to Ellaiamman from there. They then entered her temple and poured the milk onto the statue of the goddess as a form of worship (abishekam).
As a community grows, it tends to extend beyond the boundary on which Ellaiamman sits. But in Nochikuppam her temple remained the geographic marker of the community since a paved thoroughfare ran along the backside of the temple. The residential and commercial areas which lay on the other side of this main road were connected by paved roads, whereas the government-subsidized high-rise cement buildings and thatched huts of Nochikuppam were connected by footpaths which were dusty in the summer months and muddy and slippery during the monsoon season. Above these narrow footpaths brightly colored saris hung flapping in the sea breeze, drying on poles which connected one high-rise building to another.
With no public roads running through the neighborhood, Nochikuppam remained somewhat secret and closed off from nonresidents. And many people from Madras, particularly from the middle and upper classes, had never even heard of this neighborhood. Those who had knew it for its reputation as one of the poorest and most crime-ridden sections of the city. It was in part because of this geographic boundedness that residents of Nochikuppam would often say their neighborhood was like a village (i
Nochikuppam got its name from the fact that the land used to be covered by a forest of nochi trees. The forest was gradually cleared as members of the fishing community began to build huts right along the beach. It was not until 1973 that the cement, three-story “housing board” complexes were constructed on this land by the Tamil Nadu Slum Clearance Board, while Dr. M. Karunanidhi, of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) party, was Tamil Nadu’s chief minister. After the housing board complexes were constructed, the government assigned flats to families based on a lottery system. Each flat consisted of one all-purpose room (used as living room, bedroom, and dining room), one small kitchen, and a bathroom. Often an extended family of six or more lived in one such flat. Initially each family was required to pay the government Rs. 12 per month per flat. In a later power struggle between the DMK and the AIADMK (All India Anna Dravida Kazhagam) parties, however, promises were made to do away with the rent altogether, and that remained the policy in 1995.
Electricity was installed in all the flats at the time of construction, and it was paid for by the flat owners. The supply of water, however, remained the greatest problem in many people’s minds. City water was not provided in the flats. Some residents had their own pumps which drew water from the community well, but that water was salty. Most residents got their water from the large water tanks which dotted the road that ran along the eastern edge of Nochikuppam, separating the houses from the beach. These water tanks, which brought in water daily, were provided by the Madras city government, which is called the Madras Corporation. Each nuclear family was entitled to three large pots of water per day. Although the water was supposed to be free of charge, the truck drivers demanded bribes for delivering the water, so each family gave a small fee (approximately 50 paise/day) to the panchayat, which used some of that money to pay off the truck drivers. As in most parts of India, in Nochikuppam the women were responsible for the daily collection of water. This was strenuous labor and often entailed waiting in lines under the hot sun for the water trucks to come.
For most residents of Nochikuppam, life centered around fishing. Fishing set a daily routine as well as created a daily state of unpredictability. Sometimes a fisherman might earn as much as Rs. 2,000 in one day; at other times he might go for weeks with no daily income at all. On average, the fishermen of Nochikuppam earned Rs. 500 (approximately US $14) per month, which came to approximately Rs. 6,000 (US $167) per year. The amount a fisherman could earn depended in part on a combination of skill and fate, and in part on the equipment he could afford. With a motor it was possible to earn up to Rs. 2,000 per day. Without a motor one could only earn up to Rs. 300 per day. The deep-sea fish brought in better profits, and it was only the boats with motors which could go far enough out to sea to catch such fish. The cost of buying and attaching a motor to a catamaran was, however, exorbitant, somewhere in the order of Rs. 26,000. So, despite the fact that there were government schemes and the local Fisherman’s Cooperative Society to help purchase motors, for most this remained an elusive dream.
As in most parts of the world, in Tamil Nadu fishing is a highly gendered occupation; only men go out to sea and women are largely responsible for selling the fish. Men would push the boats out to sea around four o’clock in the afternoon. Those boats which went out for shallow-water fishing would return in the evening around nine o’clock; those which ventured out to deeper waters would not return until the following morning. When the boats came onto shore the women from Nochikuppam were there, ready to collect the catch of the day and take it to the market to sell. Some fish were sold directly to buyers who came to the beach when the boats arrived or were sold on the roadside in front of Nochikuppam. The women from Nochikuppam took most of the fish to government-designated open-air fishing markets throughout Madras. Fish which were ear-marked for export were sold to middlemen who took them to an ice house in Chindaraipet near the Madras harbor. And, finally, some fish were kept for family consumption. The seafood included in the daily diets of most residents of Nochikuppam was nutritionally beneficial to pregnant women and breastfeeding mothers.
Although before marriage many women in Nochikuppam actively engaged