During our excursion to Pulicat Lake on January 6th, we visited various fishing villages. Prior to visiting the Pulicat Lake area, we read an article reflecting on fishing villages similar to the ones we would visit. The villages surrounding the Pulicat Lake make their livelihoods through fishing. There are two castes of people that fish on the lake, the Pattinaver and the Dalit, the former of which control the regulatory Padu system, which splits fishing time and area between the villages and is used to monopolize the fishing for the Pattinaver. The first village the women's group visited, where we had the coconuts and got to speak with the group of women, was of the Pattinaver caste, meaning they had more rights to use stake nets in the lake and were able to collect more fish than the people of the second village we visited. The people of that village were Dalit people, of a lower caste than the first, so they had to handpick prawns instead of using the more effective stake nets. It was interesting to see not only the difference in the quality of living between the two, where though the Pattinaver clearly struggled, they had more infrastructure and resources than the Dalit, but also the difference between the gender structures due to these economic differences: in the first village, only the men could fish, whereas the women cooked and cleaned and took care of the children. In the second, only the women did the handpicking, while the men stayed in the village doing the physical labor needed to maintain the village itself or working physical labor for wages elsewhere.
For part of the afternoon, we split into two groups. One group focused on women and culture, which was detailed in another blog post, and another group focused on religion and culture. In the religion group, we first traveled to fishing village that was 99% Muslim and 1% Hindu/other. A native spoke to us about the fishing trade, the ideas reflecting the article we had read beforehand. The village used to make 350+ fishing boats per year, yet in recent years, with the addition of fiberglass boats, the number has dwindled down to 0, so people have to find a different way to make a living.
In the Muslim village, we could see how religion and daily life are intertwined. The village leader spoke to us, with the help of a translator, and said that the main ideas he wanted us to know are that there is a “life after death,” and that “heaven is real.” We saw men gathered near the mosque--women had to keep a certain distance away, and young boys were allowed to openly play outside.
After visiting the predominantly Muslim village, we traveled to another lakeside village that had a well-known Christian church. We went inside this holy place, then talked with the Father and another minister. They showed us another building that the Portuguese built in the 1500s, which is part of the church grounds.
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Hindu temple
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| A church |
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Pulicat Lake
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| A mosque |
