MARINA! What a wonderful world!
/மெரினா! என்ன ஒரு உல்லாசம்!
The Marina promenade in Chennai is a 6-kilometer-long strip of black asphalt with a smell of salt. It stretches along the shore of the Bay of Bengal, throbbing with the honk of vehicles, separating the hot beach sand from the busy city. This lane holds a history that is written in the waves that nearly wash it away.
The Marina shore, 13kms in length, is the longest urban beach in India. This beach came into existence after the Madras Port was built in 1881. The sandy beach is due to the port which stops the movement of the sand from south to north. This movement happens for nine months of the year, and the promenade unspools along it, from the south bank of river Coovum to Madras light house.
‘The sand used to look like gold, now it has all become black,’ reminisces Marippan (47) an ice cream vendor on the promenade describing the impact of pollution on the beach.
Marina Promenade has been traversed by generations of people: from freedom movement demonstrations, morning joggers, ice cream vendors, tender coconut sellers, water bottle sellers, cut fruit vendors, and many others. Built in 1884 by the British colonizers the promenade has served many different functions in the past 134 years.
Subramania Siva, freedom fighter, used the walkway to call for the freedom of the country in south India in 1908. Mahatma Gandhi, father of the nation, announced the non-co-operation movement on the path on March 20, 1919. The salt satyagraha, which mobilised the whole country for the freedom movement, also unfolded locally on the promenade. Ironically, today the Madras High Court has banned any protest from taking place on the beach after a recent mass protest against the banning of Jallikattu incident. Jallikattu protest was an apolitical, leaderless protest which brought the government to a standstill, people had come in hordes together as families along with their children to show their support for Jallikattu, a Tamil bull-taming sport in which the indigenous bulls are made to run through a narrow pathway to a wider path. The aim of the sport is to get the prize tied to the neck of the running bull.
‘To see the old Marina, look at the film Retha Kaneer,’ advises Ratchagan Sriram (60), an ice cream vendor in MGR Memorial, where the late chief minister of Tamilnadu M.G.Ramachandran rests.
Released in 1954, Retha Kaneer had progressive ideas for its time, and focused on life at the Marina Promenade. Cinema has been the bread and butter of Tamil culture dictating the politics of the state, the Dravidian ideology was spread using that medium. To illustrate the impact of Tamil cinema, Marina promenade was adorned with the statue of veteran actor ‘Shivaji’ in 2006 but was removed in 2017. It was removed because the statue on the side of the road caused traffic accidents.
Morakkal Kabali(64) has put up a shop selling bottled water bottle on the Promenade. ‘Those two boats are mine’ he says pointing east. A retired fisherman, he now wears several hats to make a living, while his son takes care of the family business at sea. ‘In my youth I would eat raw fish and I was strong as a bull’ Kabali says, drooping his shoulders and looking at distantly at the sea.
Further down the beach, Sivagami(47) a tender coconut drink seller says, ‘I was born inside of Citi Center’, says Sivagami (47), laughing as she cuts tender coconuts for her customers, ‘it was a garden at that time’.
Citi Center is an iconic mall twenty minutes from Marina, coming from a time before the mall culture in the city, and she was displaced to make space for it. The promenade has also been constantly built and rebuilt in the name of easing the movement of the people, beautify it, make it more accessible.
Few hundred meters away Bharat sat on a blue tarpaulin. ‘This was a deep cut, it needed stitching, but mom said stitching will cause infection. She applied some medicinal powder on the wound’ says the young fish vendor (13). The wound on his right foot near the last toe is half healed and swollen due to the constant contact with water.
Bharat aspires to learn any skills and monetise it. He goes fishing along with his uncle and sells the sea’s bounty on the roadside fish market in Pattinapakkam, near Foreshore Estate Promenade. The Marina promenade ends here where the Foreshore estate promenade starts. The dull grey cement road, with the fish market on the sea side and the housing colony on the other, smells strongly of the day’s catch.
Marina with its people, city and their stories are a character on its own it. Kingdoms fall and rise, even the force of nature cannot not demolish the spirit of the beach which sing the songs of the dead, and the living. Marina Promenade while remembering the past, enduring the present, is waiting for the future.