In 1967, the mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot wrote the influential paper, How Long Is the Coast of Britain? Statistical Self-Similarity and Fractional Dimension. Mandelbrot’s paper starts with a figure reproduced from Lewis Fry Richardson’s work on the relationship between border lengths of neighbouring countries and the probability of war. The figure reproduced in Mandelbrot’s paper illustrates the coastline paradox — that the length of the coastline depends on the size of the ruler used to measure it.
Imagine yourself as a young researcher venturing to measure the coastline of India. If you are traveling on foot, you are going to get hungry, and fish is as good a food option as any in coastal India. After traveling through the nine coastal states, you may decide to give up the idea of adding another dataset to Richardson’s figure and instead write about your travels. The resulting book would not be too dissimilar from Samanth Subramanian’s book Following Fish. It is a travelogue covering the Indian coastline in a clockwise manner — starting from West Bengal in the Bay of Bengal coast and ending in Gujarat off the Arabian Sea.
What I like about the book is that each chapter is sufficiently independent in theme and can be read in any order. Like any good travelogue, the book is rich in anecdotes and observations. This is how Samanth tries to weave together football and food in two sentences in the first chapter On hunting the hilsa and mastering its bones: “The hilsa can be a symbol of Bengali identity, but also of the sibling rivalry between East and West Bengal. It participates in another rivalry as well: A hilsa dinner is a tradition for fans of the East Bengal football team when it wins, just as prawns are for fans of Mohun Bagan.”
The Kerala chapter, aptly titled On an Odyssey through toddy shops, is more about toddy culture and less about fish. But they do mingle together in this almost farcical description of kappa-meen curry: “But the staple of every toddy shop is its kappa-meen curry combination. The kappa—bland, steamed lumps of tapioca, tempered with coconut and chillies—is such dense starch that, according to the laws of physics, light should not be able to escape it. It would be inedible without its thin, oil-slicked fish curry that, in happy symbiosis, would in turn be inedible without the kappa. All toddy shop meen curries come furiously red with industrial dosages of chilli powder.”
In spite of the generally pleasant and anecdotal tone of the book, it manages to touch on some serious subjects. The chapter on Goa titled On grieving for bygone beaches and fish is about Goa’s environmental and economic situation. As one local comments to the author, “‘...if a fisherman who earns Rs 100 a day can sell his land for Rs 10 lakhs, start a lease-a-motorbike service, make Rs 1,000 a day by renting out five motorcycles, and sit at home all day playing cards and drinking, who wouldn’t do it?” While local fishermen are giving up fishing, Goa’s waters are overfished by trawling and longline fishing by fishermen coming in from other regions.
Surprisingly, I found the introduction and the afterword more insightful than the main body of the book. Because they answer the ‘Why’ questions as opposed to the ‘What’ and ‘How’. The introduction reveals that the writer of the book didn’t touch fish till his early 20s after a regretful first encounter in his childhood. Naturally, Samanth thinks of himself as the ideal person to write a book about fish, assuming that distance gives him objectivity. I disagree. I don’t think that distance brings a nuanced perspective when it comes to food habits.
A more convincing answer to the question ‘Why travel around the coast of India?’ can be found in the afterword:
“A place is always hotter or wetter or colder or drier than you suspect it will be; people will always turn out to have stories different from the ones you set out to hear; a society will, when you think you’ve got it all figured out, always turn itself inside-out like a sock, to reveal its frayed threads, its seams, its patterns of stitch work.”
“The real process of discovery works not by revealing things you knew nothing about, but by revealing how wrong you were about what you did know. The standard India story rightly emphasizes the gamut of differences from one state to the next. What struck me more, however, were the similarities of the coastal communities I visited, right around the country. A fisherman in Tamil Nadu looked very much like a fisherman in Gujarat, as slender as a mast and scorched dry by sun and salt.”
That is as good a goal to travel around the coast of any country as measuring the coastline to settle border disputes.
