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Following Fish: Travels along the Indian Coast

First travelogue of its kind, eloquently sketched along India's long and diverse coastline, Following Fish by Samanth Subramanian will tug at your heart strings if you love sea and its myriad tales. He talks to Juhi Dua about what inspired him to take this unusual journey.

Your remarkably gripping fish stories peppered with details of culture, commerce, history, survival and of course delicious fish preparations can convert anyone into a fish aficionado. It’s safe to assume then that you are a fish lover who decided to follow the fish trail and write about it - giving in to your passion. However, right in the beginning of the book you reveal how a not so pleasant childhood experience put you completely off fish for many years to come. What then inspired you to follow fish and write a book based on fish inspired travel?
You’re right. I wasn’t a fish lover. In fact, I’m still not a fish lover. Essentially, I was looking for a slightly different way to write a travelogue, because I often find that travel writing today has become highly impressionistic, just consisting of descriptions of what writers see. I wanted to go one layer beneath, which is very much in keeping with my temperament as a journalist.

So when I considered the coast as a nice, self-contained route for a travelogue, I started to realise that fish really lies at the heart of many of the communities that live along the coast, especially outside the cities. It’s a food staple, of course, but it’s also crucial to their economic livelihood, and culture and religion also get intertwined. Fish, then, seemed to be a very flexible theme, which I could interpret and re-interpret in different states. It’s really a literary device more than anything else—an excuse to look at the communities that live on the coast. That was my main focus of interest.

So then is it safe to assume that you were led by the desire to travel and not the desire to follow fish?
The desire to tell stories, I’d say. In writing this book, I sort of inverted the traditional logic of travel writing, which is to travel first and write about what you find. I set out with a specific story to research. Of course, within the confines of that story—within each chapter—there was a lot of completely spontaneous travel and wandering. But the story is really paramount.

In nine essays across the book, you conduct rich journalistic investigations: among others, of the famed fish treatment for asthmatics in Hyderabad; of the preparation and the process of eating West Bengal’s prized hilsa; of the ancient art of building fishing boats in Gujarat; of the fiery cuisine and the singular spirit of Kerala’s toddy shops; of the food and the lives of Mumbai’s first peoples; of the history of an old Catholic fishing community in Tamil Nadu; of the hunt for the world’s fastest fish near Goa. Which is that one place and that one experience which will never get erased from your heart?
Pretty much every single experience that’s in the book is, I think, indelible. I’ll remember the Hyderabad trip vividly, simply because of how personal a connection I felt to the story I was narrating.

Tell us more about your stay with the Bathini Goud family of Hyderabad, famous for providing the ‘fish cure’ for patients of asthma. Did you leave their place with a firm belief in the cure?
No, I didn’t. But I didn’t set out to prove or disprove the cure, even to myself. I was more interested in the Gouds themselves—their history, and whether they thought the cure was real or not. Even that, I couldn’t conclusively say when I left Hyderabad. But I liked that it remained ambiguous. In such matters of rationality and belief, ambiguity is congenital.

Was it easy for you to convince people, especially at the boat building yards in the small towns of Mangrol and Veraval in Gujarat to talk to you- a stranger- and a curious one at that?
That’s a good question. In fact, apart from maybe one or two people during the course of my travels, everybody was very eager to talk, to sit and shoot the breeze. There are a couple of reasons for this. The first is that I always went into a community with somebody whom the people would know—I had what is called a “fixer,” an ugly journalism word that refers to a local who would introduce me around, sometimes translate, tell me when people were lying and when they weren’t, etc. Finding this fixer is part of a journalist’s job in any case, so I benefited from that.

The second reason is that I invariably talked to people who weren’t otherwise talked to much by people from the media. These are people outside the big cities, in small villages and towns, people in whom urban India otherwise seems to show no interest. So not only are they flattered at the attention, they’re also very un-jaded and un-cynical about the interests of journalists and writers such as myself.

You talk about subsequent growth of fishing as sheer commerce, and the dilapidation of waters, beaches and fish from over-fishing. Do you think our fishermen today are aware of this phenomenon or are they too tied down with their own survival stories?
Oh no, they’re absolutely aware of it. They’re very savvy about the ecology—they know what will harm their catch and what won’t. Of course, they’re concerned about their own survival, and who can blame them? But in this case, to be worried about your survival and to be worried about overfishing and the destruction of marine ecology are, really, one and the same.

How much has the trend of younger generation of fishermen getting pulled into other vocations and mechanisation affected the traditional fishing culture?
Mechanised trawlers are often irresponsible in how they catch fish, how much fish they catch, and what kind of fish they catch. So it’s decimating the fish population in many coastal areas. I’m more ambivalent about younger fishermen moving into other professions. If they’re educated and can make a better living doing something else and are happy doing it, good for them. If it’s a voluntary choice, that’s entirely up to them. But if it’s involuntary, such as being forced out by trawlers or the tourism industry, then that’s a pity.

After relishing plates after plates of fish cuisine- all interestingly ranging from those unknown roadside eateries to extremely plush gourmet joints- which are the tastes still lingering on your tongue?
The Mangalore rawa fry, I think. It was something entirely novel, and I still remember my first bite of that.

With such wit rolled in intelligently with observation, you could have very well thought of churning and turning your experiences a little and crafting them into a fictional account that could have attracted a wider audience. Did that ever cross your mind?

Not even once. For some reason, I don’t see myself as a novelist. I’m a nonfiction guy, both in terms of what I like to read and in terms of what I like to write. And when the experiences and encounters themselves were so remarkable, why fictionalise them further?

Well, we agree. And we recommend you take the bait and pick this book to live through Subramanian’s numerous fishy experiences and to relish some heartening fish trivia.

Following Fish: Travels along the Indian Coast by Samanth Subramanian
Penguin: Rs. 250

About the author
First by circumstance and subsequently by choice, Samanth Subramanian is a journalist. He studied journalism at Pennsylvania State University and international relations at Columbia University. By preference, he has gravitated towards the long-form, narrative version of journalism-waning today, but still rewarding and revealing to both writers and readers. He has written, among other publications, for Mint, the Far Eastern Economic Review, Foreign Policy, The New Republic, Foreign Affairs, The National and The Hindu. This is his first book.

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