The Tsunami: Three Years Later
Little India revisits the villages hit by the Tsunami in South India.
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February 4, 2008 at 12:38 PM
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It's been more than three years since the water receded...and came back with destructive force.
With Katrina on our minds and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan returning to their dominance in the public sphere, the tsunami relief effort receded from the minds of even those who had passionately donated for tsunami relief. What happened to the people whose lives were destroyed in a matter of minutes? What happened to the promises by the Indian central and Tamil Nadu state governments about on development programs in the areas most affected? With those questions in mind, I returned to India in December. I was cautiously eager to see what had become of the Tamil Nadu coast, where generations of Tamilians have lived off the sea. As the son of Indian immigrants who have as much faith in the Indian government as most Americans have in George W. Bush, I knew my enthusiasm for India's post-tsunami recovery had to be tempered by the reality on the ground: mismanaged money, political fighting, and most importantly, indifference once the international spotlight went away. One of the first places I visited was Puducherry (more widely known as Pondicherry), my mother's birthplace and one of the areas hit hardest by the tsunami. Though Puducherry has had a thriving tourism industry driven by its French past and by the millions who come annually to the Sri Aurobindo ashram, the "real" Puducherry rested on a strong fishing economy. In the wake of the tsunami, many fishermen and women found themselves without boats, nets, and most of all, homes in the low-lying areas along the coast. What's worse is that many in the territory feared the sea, the very waters that had given Puducherry its reputation as one of India's wonders. Because of Puducherry's relatively small size and its unique position as a union territory (not exactly a state, but not a city, either), the Puducherry government was able to effectively handle its recovery, especially with the help of its foreign visitors.
But other parts of the southeastern coast are not so fortunate. Along the ECR Highway in Tamil Nadu, I saw remnants of villages that were leveled by the tsunami. More importantly, I noticed that the Indian and Tamil Nadu governments had "outsourced" the role of recovery to churches, which have had a growing influence in the South over the past two decades. As I passed small villages that had been moved to the other side of ECR road, giant new churches - a number of them belong to foreign Evangelical congregations - stood as testaments to an international and controversial Christian response to the tsunami. While secular NGOs and individual donors from the Indian diasporic community have poured in money, time and resources, churches - by their sheer will and persistence - have had stronger ground access. When I covered the tsunami recovery efforts, there were reports of fishermen preventing Christian aid groups from entering their villages because of the likelihood that missionaries would try to proselytize Hindus. Though they have faced resistance, especially from devout Hindu villagers, these churches along the coast are representative of a new, post-tsunami Tamil Nadu. However, the appearance of churches, including a Midwestern U.S.-style "megachurch" south of Chennai, and the government's attempts at "moving" villages to areas less susceptible to tsunami damage was not as indicative as quality of life issues. On my way back from Mahabalipuram, I stopped by a small village that had been severely damaged by the flooding caused by the tsunami. Tamil officials had told me then to write in assuring terms that international aid would be sent to the village along with others nearby.
Maybe as an American, I'd been conditioned to think that progress meant new buildings and new technology, the kinds of things that added to a community's infrastructure and its aesthetics. Yet the villagers were still washing clothes in the same muddy waters as their children bathed in. I asked my uncle Jayaraman, whose Rotary Club had helped several villages extensively in the weeks and months after the tsunami, whether recovery had actually occurred in some of these villages. "When their life returns to normal, that's all you can ask for," he said. "You cannot base these things on just what you see." At the Elliots Beach extension in Chennai, which had been ravaged by the giant wave, dozens of people perished and an entire fishing village was swept away. Three years later, a sense of normalcy has returned to the beach, thanks to government-led cleanup efforts. A group of teenage boys from the fishing village played a variation of cricket on the same beach that had been filled with debris and bodies in 2004. Nearby were some newly constructed huts. We marveled at how villagers had returned to their daily rituals, as if nothing had happened to them. We wondered aloud if this could ever take place in New Orleans, where thousands of people are still living in FEMA trailers or continue to rely on the federal government for help.
My family's driver, Vijay, a Catholic, remembered how funeral services were conducted daily in the days and weeks following the tsunami. He said that since then, the church used the tsunami as a rallying cry for the community among Christians. Now, he says, many members of the Velankanni congregation are more fervent in their faith. Similarly, the Ashtalakshmi Temple is usually filled to capacity for evening dharshans. Worshippers can walk to the top of the temple and see the waves crash against the beach only yards away, reminding them that the sea is ever-strong and ever-looming. With Chennai's beaches rehabilitated and its fishing and tourist economies recovering, the collective memory about the tsunami is fading. As an American, I remember almost everything about the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. However, it's unlikely that many Indians have given any recent thoughts to the tsunami and how it changed southeastern India forever in just a matter of minutes. Perhaps the urban reconstruction following the tsunami and Tamil Nadu's obsession with building new housing for the upper middle class has lessened the psychological impact of the disaster. But even as the southeastern coast has reached various stages of redevelopment, identities and ways of living are changing - and most Tamilians are oblivious of those changes. Just as urbanization and industrialization changed the rural landscape in southern India, so has the tsunami changed the way that coastal cultures and economies function. Redevelopment has focused on shifting the ways of living to Tamil Nadu's rapidly increasing demand for service sector employment.
Moreover, the programs established for tsunami recovery have made the coastal Tamilians more immersed in India's transformation from a rural, manual labor economy to an industrialized, technical one. For example, in Nagapattinam, the area most heavily impacted by the tsunami, foreign companies are implementing training programs for technical vocations, such as automotive repair and for aspiring entrepreneurs to start and maintain their own businesses. My uncle Raghuraman, a consultant on one of the many foreign recovery projects in Nagapattinam, says that in addition to the shift in education, new housing caters to the lifestyle changes along the coast. "The recovery is quite good," he says. While he acknowledges that some shifts in the local economy will take place, "the fishing economy will still be quite high. There will be some change, but it will be for good."
Will Tamilians and the rest of India remember the tsunami's significance decades from now? Or will the great wave disappear altogether from public consciousness, replaced by luxury condos, English-speaking Tamilians working at Subway, and other markers of India's full immersion into global capitalism? |
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I had the privilege of visiting Pondicherry 1 year after the Tsunami and saw the zeal and passion in the then governor Gen. M.M. Lakhera took in rebuilding the infrastructure and reinstate the economy. His ex military background must have helped with his work ethics. Pondicherry could resurface quickly after the natural calamity not because it was a Union Territory because Mr. Lakhera could get the Ngo’s involved and mobilize the Tsunami funds in the right direction.
When we have committed, honest and right kind leaders it is a boon to the country.
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