Poromboke Festival in Chennai: Celebrating the Livelihoods of Fishers, Farmers, and Artisans

For S Saratha and her friends, the Urur Kuppam beach, a small fishing village in Chennai, was the playground. As a child, she would spend all day playing the dice game dayakattai, and collecting seashells. And when she wasn’t playing, she would sit beside her grandmother and watch her work, while her father was away fishing.“That was how I learned the art of making karuvadu or dried fish,” says Saratha. “We were taught how to slit the fish in half and clean it thoroughly, rub salt in it, and use a spun thread to hang them up to dry. After my grandmother and mother, I eventually took on this work. My grandparents and parents also passed on the land to us. This land has been feeding us, providing for us and has been a source of our livelihood for generations,” says the 47-year-old, who will be talking about her life and work in the panel discussion on ‘Whatte Karuvaadu’ at Porombokiyal 2025, an event organised by Chennai Kalai Theruvizha on Sept 28. The event highlights the stories and experiences of fishers, farmers, irulars, and artisans on how poromboke land gives them livelihood.In Tamil, ‘poromboke’ once meant the commons, spaces that cannot be owned or sold, where communities draw food, water and cultural identity.“Women play a very important role in the fishing community, but that is not widely recognised. The talk will feature how they use the poromboke land. We will also talk about how they are being removed from their home,” says Dhaarani, the moderator of Whatte Karuvaadu.Sessions will feature voices from across Tamil Nadu such as a toddy tapper travelling from Villupuram who will share his craft, members of the Anaikatti irula community will speak about how they gather raw materials, and an instrument maker from Thanjavur will trace the making of the mridangam in a session moderated by vocalist T M Krishna.The event will also feature a student play ‘Oru Ooru La Oru Aaru’, set in North Chennai, which reimagines the Ennore river and questions how urbanisation has colonised natural spaces. “Ennore has been sacrificed in the name of development. The play questions how urbanisation has colonised natural spaces and pushes us to rethink what a good city could look like if we placed rivers and commons at the centre, rather than treating them as expendable,” says Nityanand Jayaraman, activist and one of the organisers of the event.