Thoothukudi: The Pearl City and Its Gulf of Mannar Coast

Thoothukudi — the old Tuticorin — sits on a low, salt-bright shore where the Gulf of Mannar meets the far south of the Tamil coast. For more than two thousand years this stretch of water was famous for one thing above all others: pearls. Divers went down here in Pandya times, and the same banks drew Portuguese, Dutch and British fleets in turn. The pearls are largely gone, but the town they enriched still calls itself the Pearl City, and it guards one of India’s richest marine parks, a soaring white basilica, and some of the greatest shrines of the deep south.

The pearl coast of the Pandyas

Pearl diving off this coast is old enough to appear in Sangam-era Tamil literature, and the banks of the Gulf of Mannar were prized in the ancient world. The work belonged to the Paravar, a Tamil seafaring and fishing community centred on Tuticorin who dominated pearl diving, chank (conch) collection and coastal trade. Divers worked the submerged pearl banks in short, tightly regulated seasons, weighted with stones and holding their breath as they gathered oysters from the seabed.

Whoever ruled the coast ruled the pearls. The fisheries passed from the Pandya and Chola kings to the Portuguese, who established themselves at Tuticorin in the sixteenth century, then to the Dutch East India Company, which ousted them in 1658 and imposed a monopoly on the pearl and chank trade, and finally to the British at the close of the eighteenth century. Each power taxed the harvest and licensed the divers, and the wealth of the banks shaped the whole society of the shore.

Gulf of Mannar: India’s first marine biosphere

The same waters that once yielded pearls are now protected as the Gulf of Mannar Marine National Park, declared in 1980 and later recognised as India’s first marine biosphere reserve. It strings together a chain of 21 low islands — among them Hare Island, known locally as Van Thivu, off Thoothukudi itself — set among coral reefs, seagrass meadows and patches of mangrove.

It is one of the most biologically rich coastal regions in the country, credited with thousands of species of plants and animals, well over a hundred kinds of hard coral, and a large share of the world’s seagrass species. The seagrass beds are the reason the gulf still shelters the dugong, the shy, endangered sea-cow that grazes the shallow meadows — one of the last strongholds for the animal in Indian waters.

The great white basilica

The pearl trade also reshaped the faith of the coast. In the 1530s the Paravar of some two dozen villages accepted Christianity under Portuguese protection, and Tuticorin became a stronghold of the new church. Its centre is the Basilica of Our Lady of Snows, whose origins reach back to the sixteenth century; a revered statue of the Madonna is said to have arrived by ship in 1555, and the present church dates in large part to 1713. Raised to the rank of minor basilica in 1982, its brilliant white towers are the landmark of the town, and the shrine is honoured along the coast as a mother of refuge for the old pearl-fishing villages.

Salt, port and Harbour Beach

Where pearls once made Thoothukudi rich, salt and shipping sustain it now. Vast salt pans spread across the flat land around the town, evaporating seawater into glittering white ridges; the district is one of India’s foremost salt producers, and the trade has earned Thoothukudi the nickname of the Salt Capital of Tamil Nadu. Alongside it works the modern V. O. Chidambaranar deep-water port, a major gateway on the country’s eastern seaboard. In town, Harbour Beach gives a gentler view of the same working coast, its promenade looking out over the water that has defined the city for millennia.

Temple and fort on the southern shore

Two of the deep south’s great sights lie just down the coast. At Tiruchendur, a little south of Thoothukudi, stands one of the six sacred abodes of Murugan, the Arupadai Veedu — and the only one built directly on the sea, its towers rising straight from the shore where, by tradition, the god vanquished the demon Surapadman. Inland at Panchalankurichi is the memorial fort of Veerapandiya Kattabomman, the chieftain who defied the British and was hanged in 1799; the original fort is a protected ruin, and the present fort was raised in 1974 as a memorial to one of the earliest rebels against colonial rule.

Thoothukudi pairs naturally with the wider circuit of the far south. For the temple towns and coastal shrines beyond it, see /india/tamil-nadu/guides/deep-south-madurai-rameswaram-kanyakumari, and to follow Tiruchendur through the full pilgrimage of Murugan’s hill and shore temples, see /india/tamil-nadu/guides/arupadai-veedu-six-abodes-of-murugan.