A Passage to India

Somewhere in the Boote Archive I have some pics - old Agfachrome slides - from December 1978, taken by my girl on a new Pentax K2 SLR (which had to be written off a few months later after over nine months' fishy travel in India) of me fishing at KRS with several dozen daytrippers out of nearby Mysore - complete families with numerous children, the ladies in gorgeously coloured saris, the men with transistor radios blaring Hindi and Tamil film music - watching every move I made and practicing their highly variable though sometimes excellent English on me as I did so. Two days of this was enough: I caught two mahseer (and 6- and a 22-pounder), then bailed out to our next port of call, Tipu Sultan's fortress at Srirangapatna on an island in the Cauvery, the fortress that Sir Arthur Wellesley (later the Duke of Wellington) besieged and defeated Tipu in the Battle of Seringapatam in 1799, taking his Tiger - http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/01453/tipu_1453889c.jpg ). I had one VERY nice fish here, then finding the place netted to hell and the crowds of onlookers growing, moved on once again... Good luck, chaps. Same evening PS - Just twigged that the "KRS" in the text of A Passage To India almost certainly means the lake above the dam, not the river below it, particularly as there was something in the press a few weeks ago about the World Champ chap having his 130-pounder on carp tackle and boilies. I fished the wild waters below the dam - http://waterresources.kar.nic.in/proj_krs.jpg - but was aware (the Van Ingen brothers having told me in a letter) that there were mahseer in the great lake above (they used to camp sometimes in the forests above the dam and fish the lake for a day or two, it being very local water to them). But for them and for me, somehow mahseer were and are primarily a wild, open river fish...

It is sad that with New Money coming to India, it has given rise to personal feuds. With T.G (Tiger) Ramesh, bringing about the closure of Saad Bin Yungs, Bushbetta Camp. Saad in turn said that if he had to close, as it is in a reserve, that all camps on the Cauvery are illegal. This brought about, the closure of Bheemishwari as a fishing camp, and also Doddamakali, we got out old maps and found that part of Galibore, 2 kilometres of camp side, was not in the Reserve. But Saad on the one hand, still says its illegal and wants it closing. Then on the other hand, as there is a water shortage problem in Karnataka, Bangalore over 12 million people, they want to build Damns, all along the Cauvery, to stop this, the whole stretch, will have to be proclaimed a nature reserve, which will ban all fishing, and close all the camps. Catch 22.This has brought about the end of River fishing for me, and as I like to fish most days, and live in Mysore, I had to find somewhere else to fish. KRS is now very different, as you are not even allowed to walk on top of the Damn, armed officers at either end. I have managed to find, a piece of land, that is like a headway, about 3 Kilometres from the Damn, and cannot be reached easily. The last 2 Kilometres can only be accessed by jeep through the forest. The land is owned by a family of Farmers, and I have a 10 year lease, and as land prices have gone crazy from £1,500 an acre 3 years ago to £40,000 plus in such a short time. No-one is selling their land but want huge amounts to lease it, with a 10% a year increase.The Fishermens Co-op took the Government to court, and Won,for the rights to KRS Damn, and are stocking KRS, with huge amounts of fish. This year alone they have stocked 27 million, Common Carp, Grass Carp, and Catla (Indian Carp), we intend to stock 2 million Mahseer Fingerlings. When fishing is completely banned on the Cauvery, this is most likely the last season for Galibore, it will be a Poachers Paradise, and Mahseer will become extinct, as I was the last person to fish Bheemishwari and the Poachers moved in, while I was on the last session ever, with nets and dynamite. Therefore for me KRS is the only option left. If anyone says this is about money, look at the prices, take into account the cost of land, licence fees to the Fishermens Co-op, so no netting in my area. Staff, building a camp, supplying proper food, that people want to eat, and 7 pints of beer a day each,2 Litres Coke and 3 Litres water, bait etc, anyone can work out this is my retirement plan, not about making money.There are huge fish in KRS, with a 43kg Grass Carp netted last November sold for £12.80p, Huge Carp 40kg Plus and Catla 65kg plus, I have seen these netted. Mahseer of unknown size although the last of the Van Ingen brothers found a dead Mahseer in KRS in the 2004/5 drought at over 100kg, Mahseer over 10kg destroy nets, so are not favoured by netters, nets now cost more than they get for the Mahseer, nets cost £25, 10kg Mahseer at 26 Rupees a Kilos 260 rupees about £3. Joe

Thanks for the above, Joe - very interesting. The Cauvery and all of Indian fishing were in my thoughts only just a few days ago - this in an email to a life-long non-angler friend, a man who like me has spent a lot of time travelling and working in India, who had written in email to me after I had linked him this thread: 'I often crave to return to India, Paul.':- "Maybe, just maybe, in the next couple of years or so - if I can pull some money together - I will make one last trip to India, to fish at a spot I never talked or wrote about and which is still lovely and still holds good mahseer if you can spend a few weeks there. Swing past Kashmir and fish trout (not good fishing, but who cares...), too. Avoiding the Gap Yahs and the Goa Beaches Crowd like the plague, of course. No mention of my trip before I go and no record of it when I get back, not even taking a camera. There is much of India that I don't wish to see again ("Never go back..."), knowing how much so much has changed, preferring to remember it as it was, but we'll see..." In my thoughts only just yesterday too, for it was exactly 34 years ago yesterday, on September 18th 1978, that my girlfriend of the time and I boarded a Syrian Arab Airlines flight (the cheapest available ticket available, £255 from a Southall, Middx, travel agent) at Heathrow and left for our first epic trip to India. A lot has happened to Indian fishing in those years, some of it good, some of it far from good (some of the latter as a result of the activities of a few British greedy boys), so much that sometimes I will think to myself, or say to others, or even write occasionally on sites like this one, "I'm just glad I did what I did when I did it", but will say now, as I said to anglers in both talks and articles from day one after my return to Britain from India all those years ago, without any interest on my part of making a living out of either the fishing or out of them: "You MUST try this ... at it's best it's incredible - fishing, places, people - simply incredible ... life-changing if you can make the leap and stay there for a time...". Okay, the old Cauvery "fleshpots" - the great stretches where once upon at time you'd have miles and miles of river completely to yourself except for the occasional encounter with dynamiters, coracle netsmen and sandalwood poachers, or with old Major Radcliffe of the Nilgiri Wildlife Association out of Ooty for a week and camped up with a servant, jeep, a trailer and his coracle and fishing the river (only with spinning tackle for mahseer and with fly or carp - strictly no baitfishing, he considered it "unsporting"), or with one of the Van Ingen brothers camped at Galibore or at Van Ingen's Camp - have gone, but there are still wonders; not the instant fishy monsters that some foreigners crave for their trophy shots, but wonders still the same, if you approach the fishing with the right mindset. Good luck to all those who decide to give the Cauvery (or India) a go.