The Indian Ocean - Michael Pearson [29]
We can first consider the very narrow strip where the tide has an effect, what Winton called 'the distinct ink line where the water meets the shore – the ever-contested margin of high water.'30 As Lencek put it rather melodramatically: 'it was on the borders of continents and islands that the first living creatures crawled out from the sea to begin their inexorable march toward conquest of terra firma.' Here the ressac notion is even more compelling and appropriate than in our earlier discussions, at least in part because the term itself comes from geography. Again Lencek puts it well: 'one cannot help being intrigued by the face-off between land and water... Here, two titanic forces – one stationary and one in motion – engage in eternal dispute.'31 Dakin says the seashore is 'that narrow strip of land over which the ocean waves and the moon-powered tides are masters – that margin of territory that remains wild despite the proximity of cities or of land surfaces modified by industry.' It is a magic place: 'one of the most delightful and exciting areas of the earth's surface – the seashore, that marginal strip where the sea meets the land, and which is covered and uncovered by the tides. From the dark ocean abysses to the mountain-tops, from the desert to the luxuriant jungle there is no place with more variety and flexibility of life than where the tides ebb and flow.'32
This narrow strip, the quintessential littoral, is constantly changing. Sand dunes move back and forth, rocks are exposed and then submerged, the sea itself is always changing and moving. The littoral is always fluctuating, moving, changing, advancing and retreating. Standing on the edge of the surf, with your ankles in the water, you are precisely where land and sea meet. How pleasant this is, even more so with rod in hand.
What we have here is ambiguity, lack of definition and boundaries, a zone where land and sea intertwine and merge, really the fungibility of land and sea. Emily Eden looked at the Sunderbunds down from Kolkata in 1837 when she was travelling on a 'flat' or large barge towed by a steamer. The scene she saw was 'a composition of low stunted trees, marsh, tigers and snakes, with a stream that sometimes looks like a very wide lake and then becomes so narrow that the jungle wood scrapes against the sides of the flat'. Then she reflected, very acutely, that 'It looks as if this bit of world had been left unfinished when land and sea were originally parted.'33
We have been describing the beach, the area where land and sea meet. Humans are rather different here than are other species. 'Beaches are beginnings and endings. They are frontiers and boundaries of islands. For some life forms the division between land and sea is not abrupt but for human beings beaches divide the world between here and there, us and them, good and bad, familiar and strange'.34
The question is whether we can see people who live on the littoral as making up a distinctive society, one that can be separated from those further inland. And if so, can we find any commonality in littoral society all around the far flung shores of the Indian Ocean? Does location on the shore transcend differing influences from an inland which is very diverse, both in geographic and cultural terms, so that the shorefolk have more in common with other shorefolk thousands of kilometres away on some other shore of the ocean, than they do with those in their immediate hinterland?
Littoral society is usually considered to be the same as coastal society. Heesterman stresses that it is transitional, permeable: 'The littoral forms a frontier zone that is not there to separate or enclose, but which rather finds its meaning in its permeability.'35 Braudel wrote evocatively about coastal society, stressing that it was as much land as sea oriented. The life of the coast of the Mediterranean
is linked to the land, its poetry more than half-rural, its sailors may turn peasant with the seasons; it is the sea of vineyards and olive trees just as much as the sea of the long-oared galleys and the round-ships