Thoothukudi, India's Pearl City, has traded by sea for two thousand years
Pearl divers off Korkai, near modern Thoothukudi, were famous enough to appear in Ptolemy's geography, which described trade linking India with Roman Alexandria. Two millennia later the Tamil Nadu city still calls itself Pearl City, and its harbour, sheltered by Hare Island, remains one of India's major seaports.
The coast here has changed hands many times. Early Pandya kings used Korkai as their pearl port, and the Periplus mentions its fisheries. Cholas, sultanates, the Vijayanagara Empire and the Madurai Nayaks followed. The Portuguese took the port in 1548 and called it Tuticorim, the Dutch captured it in 1658, and it passed to the British in 1825. Earlier, in 1801, the Nawab of Arcot had ceded the surrounding lands to the British. The city was an important centre of the freedom struggle in the early twentieth century.
Harbour building began with a lighthouse in 1842, and a wooden jetty followed in 1864. From there ships carried salt, cotton yarn, senna leaves, palmyra fibre and dried fish to neighbouring countries, bringing back coal, cotton, copra and grain. Thoothukudi became a municipality in 1866 and a corporation in 2008, after 142 years. Its district, carved from Tirunelveli in 1986, first honoured the Swadeshi leader V. O. Chidambaranar before taking the city's name in 1997.
Today most residents work in salt pans, sea trade, fishing and tourism, and the Confederation of Indian Industry ranks the city second only to Chennai in Tamil Nadu for human development. It hosts the headquarters of Tamilnad Mercantile Bank, a medical college, a fisheries college and a maritime academy, and it is emerging as an energy and industrial hub.
The landscape is flat and low, split by the Buckle Channel, with thorny scrub to the north and salt pans to the south. The beach has such gentle waves that it can look like a broad river. Offshore, 21 islands between Thoothukudi and Rameswaram form India's first marine biosphere reserve, the Gulf of Mannar Marine National Park, home to around 3,600 species. Each August the city celebrates the festival of Our Lady of the Snows Basilica alongside its temple chariot festivals.
Source: Thoothukudi
