Kaveri River

IHistory

The Kaveri rises at the spring of Talakaveri in the Kodagu hills, in the Western Ghats, and flows east for some eight hundred kilometres — through Karnataka and Tamil Nadu to the Bay of Bengal. By the sea it spreads into many branches across a broad delta, and that delta is the rice bowl of Tamil Nadu.

For Hindus the Kaveri is one of the seven sacred rivers, called Dakshina Ganga, “the Ganga of the south”. In Tamil Nadu she is fondly called Ponni. Temples stand on her banks, and on an island in mid-river stands the town of Srirangapatna.

On the Kaveri stands one of the oldest water works in the world still in use — the Kallanai — in Tamil its name means “stone weir”. By tradition it was built by King Karikala of the Chola dynasty around the second century. It has divided the river’s water between the delta’s canals for almost two thousand years.

Above the entry is Srirangapatna from the north-west, engraved by John William Edy after a drawing by Robert Hyde Colebrooke, 1805. The island town was Tipu Sultan’s capital; in 1799 the British took it by storm. In the foreground is the Kaveri: a broad rocky bed, shallow water between boulders — as it runs here in the dry season.

Further downstream the Kaveri drops over the Shivanasamudra falls. In 1902 one of Asia’s first hydroelectric stations was built at the falls — its power went to the gold mines of Kolar.

IIWhat is there now

The Kaveri today is a river whose water is divided. In the 1930s big dams rose on it — Krishnaraja Sagar in Karnataka and Mettur in Tamil Nadu — and almost all the river’s water went into canals and onto fields. How to share it between the two states has been argued for more than a century, and the dispute has more than once reached India’s Supreme Court.

But for an angler the river’s great story is the mahseer.

British officers fished the Kaveri from the nineteenth century, and its fame went round the world: mahseer of more than fifty kilograms lived here. In 1972 the Wildlife Association of South India leased a stretch of the river, drove out the dynamiters and the poachers with nets, and set up camps for sport fishing. The fish were caught, weighed and let go — and every one was written in the log.

In 1976, to make more fish, fingerlings from the Tata company’s hatchery in Maharashtra began to be released into the river. They were mahseer, but different ones — blue-finned, from the rivers on the western slope of the Ghats. They took extremely well.

More than thirty years later scientists went through the logs of the Galibore camp for 1998–2012. In 1998 there were four blue-finned fish to every native, hump-backed mahseer. In 2012 — two hundred and eighteen. The hump-backed mahseer had almost stopped breeding: only old, big fish were being caught. More in the entry on the hump-backed mahseer.

In November 2012 fishing in the Cauvery sanctuary was banned: under the wildlife law, angling in a sanctuary counts as hunting. The camps became just camps. And in 2018 the hump-backed mahseer at last received a scientific name — and at once the status of a species on the edge of extinction. Tata pledged to stop releasing foreign fish into the Kaveri and to help save its own.

IIIWhat is taken here

Hump-backed mahseer — the “tiger of the Kaveri”, the native, with a hump behind its head and orange fins. One of the rarest fishes in India.

Blue-finned mahseer — the hatchery incomer; today it outnumbers all others in the river.

Catfish — big river catfish that lie in the holes below the rapids.

Murrel — the snakehead, a predator of the backwaters that can breathe air.

And tilapia and carp in the reservoirs — fish of ponds and the market table.

IVHow it is taken

Recreational fishing

The main thing first: where the Kaveri mahseer is famous — in the Cauvery sanctuary, at Galibore and Bheemeshwari — fishing has been banned since November 2012. The camps still take guests, but the rods there stay in their cases.

Outside the sanctuary fishing is allowed by the local authorities, and the rules change from stretch to stretch: in one place a state fisheries licence is needed, in another permission from the owner of the stretch or the forest department. Ask on the spot and in advance.

If a hump-backed mahseer is caught — let it go. It is told by the hump behind its head and by orange rather than bluish fins. It is one of the rarest fishes in India, and every adult counts.

How it was fished in the camps. With a ball of ragi paste — finger millet — on the bottom, in a pool; with a heavy spoon in the run below a rapid; with live bait. The fish was kept in the water, weighed in a wet net and released.

The trade

Fishing for trade on the Kaveri is small and local: small nets, traps, the parisal coracles, round as bowls, in which fishermen have gone about the river for centuries.

The river’s great plague is not nets but the dynamite and poison with which poachers kill fish. It was against them that the first anglers’ camps fought.