In the early 1950s, college youths were fully charged with an incredible enthusiasm for nationalism and sought to explore rural areas and to interact with the rural people in order to include them in the exciting developmental processes that were expected to take place after Independence. For the students of the Zoology Department of the Madras Christian College in Tambaram, the target ecosystem, along with its poor communities, for such participatory national development projects, was the 6500 years old Pulicat Lake, its 50,000 fisherfolk, and the ancient town of Pulicat itself.

Pulicat Lake is the second largest lagoon in India, with 65 fishing hamlets (kuppams) nestling all around it. In them live the Pattinavar community people, traditional fisherfolk, who descended from the ancient Sangam Age (200 BCE-200 CE). Their primitive craft (thoni/padagu) and a variety of cotton fibre gear enabled them to bring in prized catches of delicious prawn and mud crab (Pazhaverkad nandu).

Pulicat town itself is a unique, multicultural melting pot of eastern cultures – of the Chola, Vijayanagara and Golconda kingdoms – and of the Western cultures of the Portuguese, Dutch and the English, each leaving its cultural footprints on Pulicat’s sands and on the lifestyles of its fisherfolk. Despite the fact that Pulicat town was a flourishing international sea-port during the Dutch days (17th Century), there was no good road between Pulicat and Madras until 1957, with the result that even ten years after Independence, we had to travel between Madras and Pulicat by country boats from Ennore using the Buckingham (East Coast) Canal. An Ennore-built wooden boat with a wooden roof, which could carry about 20 passengers, would be dragged with coir ropes from the canal bunds or, in deeper water, steered with long casuarina poles.

Many years ago one day, around 8 p.m. after supper, we boarded the boat at Kathivakkam jetty in Ennore. With us were our bags, scientific supplies and a petromax light. The students also carried their guitars, mouth-organs, flutes, drums, box cameras and snacks, but no books! After the usual pooja marked by lighting camphor and breaking a coconut, the boat started off, punted by poles across the deep waters of the 400 metres wide Ennore Creek (Korttaliyar Estuary), to reach the Buckingham Canal in the north within ten minutes, thereafter to be dragged by ropes from the canal bunds for the rest of the cruise.

The women students preferred to sleep on the lower deck, but the men students and staff were up on the roof with the petromax light, playing card games, word-building and singing, right up to 2 a.m. The girls could not get even a wink of sleep, not only because of the merry-making on the roof but also because of the hordes of bed-bugs, boat-lice and even cockroaches crawling all over the boat. Pulling or punting the boat, the boatmen would initiate a cultural exchange by teaching their melancholic boat-songs to the students, and the reward that the boatmen got from the students was Gold Flake cigarettes, a rare luxury for beedi-smokers.

As for the study part of our tour, we first stopped by the aerial roots of the mangrove Avicennia, where that endangered fish, the mud-skippers, were hopping about on the mud-flats at low-tide, foraging for food as well as chasing their mates. Further up the canal, the expansive but desolate wilderness on the inland bund was betrayed by the distant but incessant chirping cicadas, insects that have attracted the attention of poets, philosophers and scientists of all ages.

The students were amused to learn that it is only the male cicadas that can chirp or sing; as the Greek philosopher-poet Xenarchus observed, happy are the cicadas, for they have voiceless wives! Closer to the canal bunds were packs of jackals, howling or wailing, hunting along the water-edge for the huge, weird-looking “Devil Crabs” (Peyi nandu), so called because of their emergence from their burrows only at night. True to our Panchathanthra stories, the hunting trick of these jackals is to poke a tail into a crab-burrow, provoking a crab to grab it, whereupon the crab is pulled out by the trickster jackal for a delicious midnight meal.

The tiny Fiddler (Dhoby) Crabs were darting up and down the tide, dancing for a mate as well as for catching their prey. Small Pony Tail or Silver Belly fish were attracted by the petromax light and leapt into our boat, only to be put back into the water. Lonely birds, like the grey heron, night heron, and egrets, stood on one leg in the moonlit waters, waiting patiently for an unwary fish or prawn. The monotony of the cicada-song was interrupted by the occasional screeches of the night jar or an owlet from the scrub.

The approach of the canal-side hamlets and their tea stalls was announced by packs of village dogs with furious, non-stop barkings, even frightening the students from alighting from the boat for their long-awaited tea, cigarettes, murukku and open-air urinals. The students were also nervous, as they had been warned earlier, about stepping carelessly on to the floating algal mats in coastal waters, under which the dog-faced water snake and the still more dangerous stinging canine cat-fish eel (thelimeen) would be lurking.

After tea, the Sri Lankan students broke into the popular baila dance accompanied by vibrant songs, rhythmic instruments and clapping and yelling by all, with the villagers also, young and old, joining in the energetic dance.

Before long, we got underway again and the exhausted students fell asleep, mindless of comfort, as the boat gently drifted with the tides.

As dawn broke, the boatmen shouted us awake and we sighted our destination, the Pazhaverkadu lighthouse, beaming rhythmically onto the silhouettes of the Dutch relics. And soon it was down to work.