Did you know where the agar-agar in your favourite dessert comes from? The answer lies in Rameswaram, where we join women divers on their quest for seaweed While the men went fishing, the women collected seaweed.
Used for making agar-agar, the marikolundhu variety is sought after, and the women of Rameswaram go to great lengths to collect a sackful, which will probably end up in a bowl of payasam hundreds of kilometres away.
The women casually march into the water — the sea bed is lined with slippery coral; this is their workplace for the next two hours. They will scour underwater for seaweed, some varieties of which are also used in the pharmaceutical industry and to make fabric dyes.
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