Ocean's 7

Along India’s coastline, a rising wave of women is healing our oceans, moving beyond the margins of shore-bound roles traditionally ascribed to them.

- By ARMAN KHAN.

As a child, Santhy Mari Ruth, born into Tamil Nadu’s Kadaiyar fishing community, lived in a state of constant confusion. The seaside rocks of Olaikuda village in Rameshwaram, polished a glowing black by the lapping waves, were her permanent perch. Looking out to Palk Bay, her questions were invariably the same: Why were the fishermen always returning with negligible catch? Did it all boil down to luck? What were the fish so afraid of?

Ruth has found answers since joining the not-for-profit organisation Dakshin Foundation as a researcher on sharks and rays a year ago. “Many things make sense now,” says the 40-year-old over Zoom. “There was barely any catch because of overfishing. Entire habitats were destroyed by irregular fishing patterns and trawlers.” For the first six months at her new job, she focused on collecting data: logging sharks that washed up on the shore, identifying species that must not be fished and observing how coldblooded stingrays move to deeper parts of the seabed to escape the warmer shallows.

Ruth knows that to live by the sea is also to make peace with its currents. She has witnessed what it does to fishermen when they venture too deep. “The fish that sustain our lives also take away the lives of our loved ones,” she writes in the Tamil poem ‘The Echoes in a Fisherman's Life’, which a friend translated for me. “We can only watch helplessly as the sea swallows them. We—women, children, elders—watch in silent prayer. At times, our lives are caught in the echo. Often, our lives are the echo.”

Ruth’s life as a researcher from the fishing community is in itself an achievement. “In my world, only the men go to sea and the women stay home, waiting for them to return. But not anymore,” she says. A 2024 study published by the