The Marina: second-longest beach
People celebrating New Year at Marina Beach. B. Velankanni Raj
| Photo Credit: B. VELANKANNI RAJ
Panaromic view of the world-famous Marina Beach in the evenings in Madras.
| Photo Credit:
THE HINDU ARCHIVES
AN UNUSUAL CROWD FOR KAANUM PONGAL IN CHENNAI ON MARINA BEACH. V.GANESAN.
| Photo Credit:
File photo
Where then is the longest beach? God knows. Some say it is in Miami. If so, all the best to it. We are happy with the second-longest. Over the decades, the Marina has emerged as one of the defining features of our city. It is in fact more an emotion. Before the 21st century pushed all Indian cities into look-alikes, each had a character of its own, a defining feature. And ours was the Marina.
In that time and age, it was compulsory to take all visitors to the Marina and they, when they went back, retained a powerful impression of it. To many, it was the one great takeaway from the city. To the locals, the Marina was, and still is, a go-to place. The crowds during the weekends are truly impressive though sadly, their civic sense is not on that scale. And the Marina gave us its signature dish – Thenga manga pattani sundal.
Not many who throng the beach reflect on how much it is an accident of ‘development’. Prior to 1875, there was nothing to distinguish it from the narrow strips of sand that existed to the east of Tiruvottriyur, Royapuram and George Town. It was the construction of the harbour that changed the face of the city, or should we say we were given a face in the shape of the Marina? It is entirely due to a phenomenon called littoral drift – the wind blows from the south for eight months of the year along the Coromandel coast and so, when there was an obstruction by way of the harbour, sand began accumulating to the south of it. Conversely, sand began eroding the north of the harbour, which is why, the Tiruvottriyur High Road has a perpetually cracked up shoreline with groynes to protect the land from sea incursion.
But by then, South Madras was what counted – it was where all the administrators and the moneyed lived and so they made much of the beach. The littoral drift created further patches of sand. Elliots (now unofficially Bessie) and other beaches came along. The neglected north is still fighting sand erosion by the way, not that we seem very bothered by it. Large tracts of beach to the north of the Marina have also been taken over by the expanded harbour, which means more sand to the south and so the Marina keeps growing.
The Marina is beautiful as it is, but because it is the symbol of a city, it also gets layered on with wholly unnecessary beautification drives. What it needs is just good maintenance, control on vending, and discipline among the public. What it gets are memorials, grottos, statues, and plenty of garbage. And attempts to remove the very people who inhabited the place long before the Portuguese or the British came along, and gave it character – the fisherfolk. In any other city, they would have been celebrated as part of the city’s heritage. But by repeatedly interfering in their way of life, and coming up with half-baked solutions to their problems, the city administration has only compounded the issue. The Marina is now developing wrinkles.
We have had other challenges for the Marina as well- a railway line proposed in the early 1900s, a plan to build condos like in Miami on the seafront to cater to the rich, an elevated road to Besant Nagar, etc, all of which the sea came along and nixed. For if the beach is a city icon and an emotion, its powerful neighbour too has its own ideas. Every few years, the waves teach us a lesson or two, demonstrating how powerless we are in the face of their fury. Even a small effort like dredging the mouth of the Cooum brings immediate repercussions by way of sea ingress to the immediate north of it. And so, we would be better off simply maintaining a truce and not intrude into its territory. The Pen Memorial it is understood has been given up, but we can never be too sure that some bright spark somewhere in the administration is not even now putting up a proposal or two to ‘improve’ on Nature’s handiwork.
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