There’s a cry of desperation that has rung in author Joe D’Cruz’ ears for decades now. Against the music of the ocean, a woman in the seaside village of his hometown, Uvari in Tirunelveli, beat her chest and screamed in sorrow at the death of her fisherman-husband. “The fish have eaten his eyes even,” she wept in the streets, “What will happen to my seven children now? What will happen to me?” As a quiet child watching the lives of fisher-folk unfold from the confines of his house, Joe says, the seeds of his calling as a writer were sown then.
Speaking at the Madras Book Club’s Founders Day celebration in Taj Connemara, on ‘Why I am a writer’, Joe, winner of the 2013 Sahitya Akademi Award in Tamil for his 1,000-page novel Korkai ( Kalachuvadu Pathippagam ) , says he also writes from a deep love for his people’s history. While he barely scraped through Math and Science classes in school, Joe remembers aceing History and Geography all along. Although “barely a reader” till 2004, this knowledge of the past coupled with a detailed absorption of life all around him, led to his first book Aazhi Soozh Ulagu , about Tirunelveli’s Uvari village fisher-folk and, later Korkai , about the history of Thoothukudi’s Bharatha coastal community.
Joe says he also writes to right wrong perceptions about his community. The Bharathas are not merely fisher-folk, he says; it is vital to recognise their roles as pearl divers, salt makers, and sailing vessel builders in order to holistically understand their lives, he emphasises. Joe himself has spent 28 years managing day-to-day operations in the shipping industry and all of his learning of the sea, from life, research and work, seeped into the making of Korkai . In order to contextualise the Bharathas in history, Joe traces their roots back to the 16th Century to the “pearl route” that wove through Tuticorin, to the 1532 communal clash between the Bharathas and the Musalmans, to folk songs and mythology, writings about them in the Silapathikaram and the Puranas .
“Alongside the history of my people, God has also given me a personal history of events in my life that have moulded and transformed me to become who I am now. That is a great responsibility. I am, therefore, not merely a writer; I am an activist for the coast, for the people of the neidhal, ” says Joe.
And what he shouts himself hoarse about is for the mainland to understand the Bharatha psyche. “People from the hills, deserts, woods and paddy fields find it difficult to understand what it means to be a person of the sea, because their lands are fixed; they never move. But the sea is always moving. The winds, waves, water currents and climate change every moment and fisher-folk have no control over them,” he says. It is the acknowledgement of this bedrock of uncertainty that will change how policymakers and politicians view fisher-folk problems, champions Joe, from straying into Sri Lankan waters to the destruction of the sea’s ecosystem by commercial, mechanised trawling.
His detractors are aplenty, though. At the close of Joe’s lecture, members of the Book Club questioned his interpretation of history as a “saffronisation of facts”, while others challenged his criticism of institutionalised Christianity and still others branded him too sympathetic of the fisherman’s cause, blind to the needs of International boundary dispute solutions, and strict regulation of waters. To it all Joe responds that his writing was, and always will be, born from a commitment to responsibility, to tell young generations about their links to the past. “You cannot hide the truth forever,” he says, “My novels are my messages to the people of the future.”
