Google Maps tells me I am approaching my destination. But the neighbourhood appears a bit altered from what I remember of it. There’s no sign of the crumbling old house by the sea, whose coordinates I had saved on my phone the last time I visited Uppada. “Oh, that house? It is in the sea now – there!” says T. Maramma, casually pointing to a wave gushing in from the Bay of Bengal.
I vividly remember the old structure that had offered a stunning, yet sombre, backdrop as I photographed Maramma and her family members a few weeks before the nationwide lockdown of March 2020. Perched perilously on a narrow beach, it was the only portion remaining of what used to be a large home where Maramma’s joint family lived until the early years of this century.
“It was a building with eight rooms and three sheds [for animals]. Around a hundred people used to live here,” says Maramma, a small-time local politician in her 50s, who once ran a fish business. A cyclone that hit Uppada just before the 2004 tsunami took away a big chunk of the building, forcing the joint family to move into different houses. Maramma continued to use the old structure for a few more years before shifting to a house nearby.
Maramma and her family are not alone; nearly everyone in Uppada seems to have moved home at least once because of the encroaching sea. Their calculations on when to quit a house are based on lived experience and the local community’s instinctive reading of the seas. “We can sense that the house will go into the sea when the waves start to bulge forward. Then we move our utensils and everything to one side [and start searching for a temporary house to rent]. The old house usually goes [into the sea] within a month,” explains O. Siva. At 14, he has already had to leave one house to escape the sea. Located in East Godavari district, along the 975-kilometre coastline of Andhra Pradesh, Uppada has witnessed a steady onslaught by the sea for as long as its residents can remember.
When Maramma’s family moved into their then new home around 50 years ago, it was located far from the beach. “Our legs used to ache a lot when we walked home from the shore,” recalls O.Chinnabbai, Siva’s grandfather and Maramma’s uncle. A deep-sea fisherman in his 70s or 80s, he remembers a time when the stretch leading from their home to the beach was dotted with houses, shops and a few government buildings. “That was where the shore was,” Chinnabbai points towards a distant horizon where some ships fade into the evening sky. “Between our new house and the sea, there was a lot of sand too,” Maramma reminisces. “When we were children, we would play in the sand mounds and slide through them.”
Much of the Uppada of these memories now lies submerged in the sea. Between 1989 and 2018, Uppada’s coastline eroded, on average, 1.23 metres every year; in 2017-18, the erosion was as much as 26.3 metres, says a study by researchers at the Andhra Pradesh Space Applications Centre, Vijayawada. Another study noted that over the last four decades the sea has claimed more than 600 acres of land in the Kakinada suburbs – with Uppada, in Kakinada division’s Kothapalle mandal , alone losing around one-fourth of that. A 2014 study quoted fisherfolk living along the coast north of Kakinada as saying that the beach had shrunk by several hundred metres over the last 25 years.
“The coastal erosion at Uppada, a few kilometres north of Kakinada town, is caused mainly by the growth of Hope Island – scientifically known as a ‘spit’ – a 21-kilometre-long linear sand body. That spit grew naturally northward from the mouth of Nilarevu, a distributary of Godavari River,” says Dr. Kakani Nageswara Rao, a retired professor of the department of geo-engineering, Andhra University, Visakhapatnam. “The waves refracted by the spit are impinging on the Uppada coast, leading to its erosion. Probably initiated more than a century ago, this sand spit more or less attained its present form in the 1950s,” explains the professor, who has been closely studying the coastal forms and processes along the Andhra coast for several decades. Official records dating back to the early 1900s confirm that the Uppada phenomenon was already recognised more than a century ago. The Godavari District Gazetteer of 1907, for example, notes that the sea had eroded more than 50 yards of land at Uppada since 1900 – in other words, the village lost seven metres of land every year in those seven years.
“Since coastal zones in general are very dynamic regions, with the interplay of complex global, regional and local phenomena,” says Dr. Rao, “the reasons for coastal erosion at Uppada are multidimensional.” Global warming, melting polar ice caps and rising sea levels, besides increased frequency of cyclones in the Bay of Bengal, are a few of them. A drastic reduction in sediment loads at the river mouths, caused by burgeoning dams in the Godavari basin, further exacerbates the situation.
As its land disappears into the sea bit by bit, Uppada gets recreated in the memory of its people. One of the villagers asks me to watch the Telugu movie Naakuu Swatantram Vachindi for a glimpse of the village that resides in their memories and their stories. I see a different Uppada in the 1975 film: the village and the sea lie at a comfortable distance from each other, a gorgeous sandy beach separating them. The sea and sand, captured in single-frame shots — the beach was wide enough to allow the crew to shoot from various angles — form the background to key sequences in the film.
“I watched the shooting of the film. Some of the actors who came for the shoot even stayed in the guest house here,” says S. Kruparao, the 68-year-old pastor at a church in Uppada. “All that is in the sea now. Even the guest house.”
The District Census Handbook of East Godavari published in 1961 has a reference to a guest house, too: “There is a very comfortable Travellers Bungalow with two suites of rooms about a furlong from the sea-shore. This is said to have been built after the previous Travellers Bungalow was swallowed up by the sea.” So the guest house that the crew of Naakuu Swatantram, occupied is at least the second one to have vanished under the waves.
The artefacts and structures taken in by the sea often resurface in archival records and in stories passed down through generations. Older villagers remember their parents or grandparents talking about a pedda rayi , a big stone, lying submerged in the sea for many years. The 1907 gazetteer describes something similar: “A ruin about half a mile out at sea still catches the fishermen’s nets, and children hunt the beach at spring tides for coins which are occasionally washed up from what must be a submerged town.”
The ruin also finds a mention in the 1961 handbook : “Old fisher-folk say that sailing out in their boats or catamarans for fishing, their nets or lines are often caught by the tops of buildings or trunks of trees about a mile from the shore, and that to their own knowledge the sea has been encroaching on the village.”
The hungry sea has claimed a lot more of the village since then: almost all of its beach, countless houses, at least one temple, and a mosque. Over the last decade, the waves have also ravaged a 1,463-metre-long ‘geotube’ built in 2010 at an estimated cost of Rs. 12.16 crores to protect Uppada. Geotubes are large tubular containers filled with a slurry mix of sand and water that are used in shoreline protection and land reclamation. “In 15 years, I have seen large boulders of around two square feet melt into six-inch pebbles because of the friction of the waves,” says 24-year-old D. Prasad, a part-time fisherman who has grown up in the neighbourhood….