What if there were more than just eight directions? Not just North, South, East, West, and their neat combinations that add up to the number eight. What if, for an entire community along our coast, North wasn’t even at the top of the compass? What if the very idea of direction was shaped not by colonisers’ maps, but by lived experiences, language, and land?
For the fishers of Chennai, this isn’t a thought experiment. Their wind directions aren’t plotted on a grid. They are drawn in winds, tides, and ancestral knowledge.
As they push their boats into the sea, something remarkable happens. On land, it’s the colloquial Tamil that one would fully comprehend. But once they cross the sea, the dialect changes. While some words may arrive with unfamiliar twists, some other words may seem familiar — like echoes of our own tongue — but slip past meaning. Spoken in the depths of the blue by those with salt in their blood is one such dialect, that neither you nor I hear. Out in the ocean, their dialect is shaped by the sea that they worship as their amma, and the wind they believe to be their guiding ancestors — paatta.
“Once we board our boats, we are no longer mamas and machans. The experienced are called periya aalu, and the inexperienced are called chinna aalu,” S Palayam, a retired fisher, explains. “The first time I ventured into the sea for fishing, I mistakenly used the word mama while addressing my experienced uncle who was teaching me to fish and I was immediately warned against it. I apologised, cupped some seawater in my hands, and offered it back to the ocean as an apology. That is the discipline we follow at sea,” he adds.
And the wind directions? There are nine in total, he says, adding that the compass for our coastline’s fishers, inbuilt in their bodies, unquestionably, points East. “We are on the East coast and when we venture into the sea, naturally we are headed Eastward,” he reasons.
Durga Moorthy, a coastal researcher, who learnt these wind directors from Palayam, explains them. “North is vaadai, West is kodai, South is kachan, and East is eeran. Then there are kachan eeran (Southeast to Northwest), vaadai eeran (Northeast to Southwest), neenda vaadai (South to North), and vadamara (Northwest to Southeast). The ninth direction is called kun vaadai. These are winds from the North and it’s commonly also called as vesha kaathu to denote a storm or cyclonic movement,” she says.
When there is no wind? “Then we use the word odukkam,” Palayam quickly responds.
Currents’ directions also have unique words in these fishers’ dialect. Currents from South to North are called thendi, while the currents flowing the other way around are called vanni. Easterly currents are called olini, while westerly currents are called memeri. “If memeri is noted, it could signify rains, and olini, meanwhile, could occur during tsunamis,” Durga adds.
This dialect even makes room for stillness at sea caused by opposing currents — iruva — and for a generally calm sea — vayil. “If the sea is turbulent, we call it sorappu,” Palayam says.
The dialect, however, is not limited to wind directions and currents, but also extends to the equipment that one may use at sea. Fishing nets, we refer to as valai in Tamil, are called kaani; the oar which is commonly known as thudupu, is called as thandu; the pole used to push the boat in shallow waters, where the ground can be touched easily, is called kol, and the flat oars used at the back of boats are called thala or seetpa.
Back when Palayam first started learning to fish, they would go into the sea in a model boat made from logs of wood tied together. “Although people call it kattumaram in Tamil, we call it vathai. The rope used is called ottukayiru, the mat we use on the vathai is saran — the larger ones are periya saran and the smaller ones are chinna saran,” he explains.
The food they take with them while going fishing — mostly kanji or koozhu— is called kolvanai. “We’d say kolvanai anayangal to say ‘eat the food’. See how beautifully our ancestors spoke while at sea,” he marvels.
“One of my first fishing experiences, back when I was young, was when my mama took me with him for kola meen (flying fish) fishing. He taught me to use a plant that would attract kola fish. My mama kept calling it a kola chedi while on shore, but once we went into the sea, he started to call it methai (used to denote bed in Tamil). After about 15 minutes of laying our net with the plant in it, the first few kola fish came into our net. But I was asked not to pull the net. My mama called them kaavalali (translates to guardian) and asked me to pray to those fish for a good catch. Eventually many more kola fish came into our net and we returned to the shore,” he recalls.
Even the names for fish in their dialect are different. “For example, at sea, we call sura meen (shark) as peelikaran,” Palayam says, and lists many other such examples.
But is this dialect used across the shorelines down South? Not all, some are, some aren’t, but these are some of the terms that fishers from the northern coasts of Tamil Nadu use. “You wouldn’t find 20-25 words we use even in Sangam literature, but it is what we have been speaking, all our lives, at sea. My father did, his father did, and it is an oral tradition that I am now documenting so it isn’t lost in the coming years,” he concludes.
More on their dialect
Many of these words from the fishers’ vocabulary have also been documented in ‘Sea Changed; Seasons Changed – A fisher Science View of Climate Change’ authored by Palayam along with environmental activist Nityanand Jayaraman. A documentary film, ‘Seaspeaker’ by Parvathi Nayar, screening in Chennai’s DakshinaChitra this July, also touches upon this dialect to tell the story of Palayam who has been collecting data about micro-changes in seasons and climate.