Exploring Chennai, City of Fish

Text and Photos by Niranjana Ramesh

Uma akka's fish fry.

Uma akka, in my opinion, makes the best lunchtime fried fish in Besant Nagar. Yes, that’s the same Besant Nagar neighborhood that U.S. vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris traces her family origins to, where she claimed food was strictly vegetarian, not even including eggs let alone fish.

Uma akka—‘akka’ meaning older sister in Tamil, also an endearing but class-coded term used to address women who labor over food, cleaning and other essentials—comes from a family of artisanal fishers and, like many other women in her community, runs a street food business. She sets up her food stall around midday under tree shade, serving meals of rice, kulambu, rasam (both tamarind-based dishes eaten with rice), some vegetables and the famed fish fry. Her specialty is the fish fry podi—a coarsely ground powder of dried chillies, coriander, fennel and other ingredients that she brings to the stall in the very mixer jar it was ground in the previous night.

It is generous quantities of this spice rub that transform the oily, small to medium fish she bought at the market that morning into sizzling flaky bites of intense flavour on her hot oiled skillet. She also sprinkles the powder liberally along with ringed onions on her stirfried squid, prawns or anchovies. But it is a podi made for the plump oily fish like mackerel, king fish and red snapper popular in these parts. It was their spicy, fishy aroma that drew me to her stall the first time. I was on my scooter, returning to my temporary accommodation from a morning of fieldwork interviews, contemplating lunch options, when the flavors wafted over and I had to brake, rather suddenly. I have been back to her stall several times since then, and to other akka kadais (shops, primarily food stalls) that dot Chennai’s coastal neighborhoods, and enjoyed a range of seafood.

A catch of squid stains a boat black

Fishers laboring over a purse net on Elliots beach - standard activity on winter mornings.

Older women typically engage in drying the fish.

A rare catch of conchs which became an impromptu feast on the beach.

If there were only one food that Chennai is known for, it would have to be seafood. The liminal space between the busy city and the vast sea—whether in the city center, the industrial north or the affluent south—is home to communities of traditional fishers. Fishermen can be seen pushing their boats out the sand into the sea way before dawn or gathering their nets in, mending and drying them on the sandy shore, midmorning. Fisherwomen, although to a lesser extent now, were traditionally in charge of auctioning the fish that came in, buying, cleaning and selling them, fresh off the sea.

Yet, people don’t think of seafood typically when they talk about Chennai. Popular imaginations of the city almost always center the affluent neighborhoods on the south-central coast like Adyar and Mylapore, and feature upper-caste preparations, like filter coffee, dosai, sambar, even rose milk, as if these foods had anything to do with the land, water and the people who have made and continue to make the city over the years.

What this imagination does really is to uphold and perpetuate a powerful minoritarian aesthetic of food while marginalising the life, work and foods of fishers in their own coastal home. Chennai is the capital city of the state of Tamil Nadu in southern India, where Brahmins and other vegetarian upper castes constitute a numerical minority among a population that’s over 97% of meat eaters. Other cities in the region and even other neighborhoods within Chennai have different caste-food-space dynamics. However, in South Chennai’s prime coastal neighbourhoods, there is a spatial consolidation of upper caste-ness, which makes the marginalisation of foods and occupations like fishing starkly visible in urban space. Like in all big cities, it is too much trouble for residents of other neighbourhoods, mostly other intermediate castes, to patronise seaside fish markets or food stalls.

So, the akka running a breakfast stall hesitates before discretely offering you the fish kulambu made the previous night, a well-known delicacy, to go with the idli and pongal, both rice and lentil based breakfast dishes that she sells. The akka who sells koozh, a chilled millet porridge, needs you to really cultivate her trust before she will open a tiffin box to serve you delicious homemade karuvadu thokku, a thick, spicy chutney-like dried fish condiment.

“We’ve been told off many times before for selling karuvadu (dried fish),” she explains. “Someone in the neighborhood would complain to the city corporation that we don’t stick to cleanliness standards or that we encroach on the footpath. The local ward officials would give us a hard time about our permit to run a stall then.”

'pure veg' beach stalls in Besant Nagar.

These stalls play an important role of providing working-class food in affluent neighborhoods, and so vendors play it safe with vegetarian food lest their very existence is threatened. They are also standard day jobs for women and men from fishing families, given artisanal fishing is increasingly unreliable in generating enough income for urban life. This means even beach shacks, almost always run by fishers, advertise that they only sell “pure veg” fritters so as not to offend the regular local beachgoers.

To really get a taste of Chennai’s seafood culture then, you’ll need an invitation to fishers’ homes, where I’ve been fortunate enough to partake in a simple kulambu of sardines, soured with just tomatoes and no tamarind; or a beachside feast of a rare catch of conchs. The latter, the young group of fishermen who organized this feast told me, have been turning up in their fishing nets in unexpected numbers. There’s not much of a market for them, so they enjoy the shellfish themselves.

It is however in Pazhaverkadu, about 60 kilometers north of Besant Nagar, that one gets a sense of how abundant and everyday seafood really can be in this part of the world. Vadachennai, i.e. North Chennai, is often seen as distinct from its southern counterpart—historically industrial, working class and un-interfered by Brahmin homeowners. While industrial development has changed fishing villages and salt pans here irrevocably, Pazhaverkadu remains the last standing primarily fishing town. Made up of several fishing villages, some of which are on the brackish water lagoon and others on the seaside, there is a reverence for crabs, shellfish, freshwater fish, oily sea fish and everything in between here. I would learn about them while two, three and finally four crabs were generously added to my plate, already laden with fried fish cutlets, rice and a fish head kulambu.

If this is turning out to be a rather feverish description of various fish meals I’ve enjoyed in Chennai, it’s because there’s some urgency to the narrative of Chennai as the city of fish—fish that remains hidden behind “pure veg” signs on hotels; in food stalls that remain in precarious tension with their upper-caste neighbours; behind chain restaurants selling biryani and fried chicken; and within homes that caste and capitalist power shows no sign of accommodating, let alone celebrating in the future. The invisibility apparently extends to the boats parked and nets drying on the sand, and the once-busy fish markets succumbing to road building and other coastal “development” projects that routinely plan for eviction of fishers until protests bring some temporary respite to these long standing urban coastal residents.

Redeveloped fishing settlement next to the city's iconic Marina beach.

There is a broader history and geography to the marginalisation of fishing labor, including an agrarian bias against wild fishing and colonial notions of tribes and their place in urban publics like seashores. So, artisanal fishing off Chennai’s coast was never historically afforded the space and infrastructure to develop into a uniquely urban food source and market. Contemporary capitalism builds on this by planning ports and commercial fishing harbors out of public sight, reducing sea-fishing to little more than contract labor, even as the values and delights of artisanal fishing are erased from urban life. Writing on such coastal development projects uses the language of “livelihoods,” or ”urban poor” affected by development, almost never mentioning the pleasure of coastal food and as one fisherman put it, “organic!” foodways lost to the city. It is as much an issue with the urban food system as it is with urban ecology, inequality and housing—as much a politics of pleasure as it is of spatial marginalization. Just as food writers have been pointing out the value of drawing social, political and ecological connections to food, writing on urban ecologies, at least in this case, requires drawing connections to foodways and what that can in turn tell us about urban society.

Fishers have been valorized for the role they play in times of ecological crisis: when they arrived with their boats for rescue operations during the massive floods of 2015; when they act as de facto unpaid lifeguards in the city’s beaches; when their claim to coastal lands and marshes coincide with the need to preserve them as commons. But, for many, fishing is already one of two or more jobs, the boats and nets expensive investments for a part time job. They are, after all, in the business of producing and selling food, which, when not valued by the city, remains sustenance or, for the more fortunate, a hobby. This situation has only worsened over the pandemic when fishing wasn’t allowed to continue as an essential occupation until halfway into the nationwide lockdown, and fishers received negligible state support.

While Chennai’s watery environments including coastal sands and marshes have been getting increased media and academic attention after the 2015 floods, the same cannot be said of its coastal foods. Those are still the domain of akka kadais and entrepreneurial young fishers. There are fishers who endeavor to document and publish their community recipes, others who dream of setting up beachside barbecue shacks, and still more who would like to adopt techniques like canning and extracting squid ink for the export market.

Besides, “taking on the role of ecological guardians to this city still makes it feel like we’re being othered – like we belong outside the city of Chennai, like we are not urban,” rued a fisherman who had invited me home for the interview I requested. This othering makes it easy for fishing to be deigned a necessary casualty of urbanization rather than as an integral part of the city’s life and foodways. He continued, “We are of this city, perhaps more than anyone else, and are happy to share our food with anyone who comes here to make their life. Anyway, are you ready for lunch now?”