By Sunil Amrith
Rachel Carson’s 1955 book, The Edge of the Sea, is one of the most poetic works of science writing that I know. Some of her most evocative descriptions were reserved for the mangrove forests of the U.S. Atlantic coast. “Mangroves are among the far migrants of the plant kingdom, forever sending their young stages off to establish pioneer colonies” she wrote. Mangroves excelled in “creating land where once there was sea.”
By Sunil Amrith
A recent trip down the Tamil Nadu coast took me further inland, to the heart of Chettinad. The Chettiars of this region once had a commercial empire that stretched from their arid corner of the Tamil plains to Rangoon, Penang, Singapore and Saigon.
In the early-twentieth century, Chettiar agents could be found in every small village in Burma, and they were the main bankers to Burmese rice farmers. Young men from this tight-knit community moved constantly back and forth across the Bay of Bengal. The usual pattern was three years in Burma, and then a period of “home leave.” Read the rest of this entry »
