‘Siviyar’, which is one of the Kannada-speaking communities in Coimbatore, is unlikely to know that this name of their caste was given to them by the Tamils. A small street beside the bustling Nawab Hakkim Road is still called ‘Siviyar Veethi’, for it has been the colony of ‘Siviyars’ ever since they migrated from Mysore in the 18th century.
‘Siviyar’, which is one of the Kannada-speaking communities in Coimbatore, is unlikely to know that this name of their caste was given to them by the Tamils. A small street beside the bustling Nawab Hakkim Road is still called ‘Siviyar Veethi’, for it has been the colony of ‘Siviyars’ ever since they migrated from Mysore in the 18th century.
“The Siviyars of Coimbatore say that they are Besthas, who emigrated from Mysore in the troubled times of Muhammedan usurpation,” writes Edgar Thurston in his landmark work The Castes and Tribes of Southern India”.
Interestingly, with ‘Sivikai’ meaning ‘palanquin’, Thurston writes further in his book:
“The name ‘Siviyar’, they say, was given to them by the Tamils. They were palanquin-bearers to officers on circuit and others in the pre-railway days. Their main occupation at the present day is tank and river fishing”.
River Noyyal and its tanks must be free from pollution when Thurston interviewed Siviyars, the fishermen of Coimbatore. But, today, with the water bodies of the city including Periyakulam, Valankulam and Kulatheri being polluted with the discharge of industrial effluents, fishing there is, indeed, a difficult task.
“I still see the fishermen, casting their nets for a catch in the Periyakulam, when I take a walk on the tank bund every morning. With their occupation being handed down for generations, the fishermen continue their ancestors’ line of work. They eke out a living with their everyday catch of fish, which they sell to the merchants at the fish market in Ukkadam” says ‘Cine Arts’ V.Jeevananthan, a renowned artist and film critic, who bagged the national award for his book Thirai Seelai on Indian and world cinema.
Fifty-seven-year-old Balappan, a fisherman from the Siviyar community, recalls:
“The right for fishing in river Noyyal and its tanks around the city was given to us after our ancestors migrated to Coimbatore from Mysore. I was just around twelve years when my father taught me fishing in Periyakulam, the large tank near Ukkadam. As I could not pursue education beyond class II, I had no other option, but to continue the line of our traditional occupation”
Many hardly know that the work of the fishermen in Coimbatore is rather rearing fish than catching them.
“We buy the young fish varieties Mrigal, Rohu, and Cuttle at Aliyar and Pykkara and release them in the tanks of the city. Once we let the fries in the local tanks, we wait up to six months for them to grow. Since there are also thefts of fish, we, the fishermen, in turn, have to guard at the lakes throughout nights” explains Balappan.