The Sea and the Coast
V. Geetha
(Address at a seminar on Nature at
NCBS, Bangalore)
I live in a coastal
city, but like many urban dwellers did not think much about how it shapes our
lives - until the tsunami forced some of us inexorably middle class urban
dwellers to reckon with the volatile ocean that we only often see as a changing
line of marble blue and dense grey. Since then, with the fervour of new
converts, we have come to view the ocean world with anxiety, trepidation and
wonder. It is from within this location that I shall try and understand how may
we think of the sea, the coast and the lives that they sustain.
In my presentation, I shall attempt
to sketch in the contours of our relationship to the ocean world, charting a
journey through writings on the ocean in Tamil, including to do with research
and activism around fisher rights. It seems to me that these texts and the
stories they narrate help focus attention on the life worlds of the ocean, the
fishers and the corrosive hinterland with which the latter have come to be more
and more integrated. In this sense, the sea as a living organism cannot be
thought of without simultaneously grasping the changing
relationships between different kinds of spaces, on land and at sea
and between fishers and others, as well as amongst fishers.
***
One of my favourite books is the
French historian Ferdinand Braudel’sMemory and the Mediterranean. Ocean
history at its best, nuanced, rich in detail and sweeping in the geographies it
speaks of, the book suggests we look at
the sea ‘again and again’ to understand how it has stood witness to an ancient
past. As Braudel memorably put it:
‘…this is a
sea that patiently recreates for us scenes from the past, breathing new life
into them, locating them under a sky and in a landscape that we can see with
our own eyes, a landscape and sky like those of long ago. A moment’s
concentration or daydreaming, and that past comes back to life (Braudel, 2002:
3).
Seeing the sea becomes a way of
knowing it, and for Braudel, such seeing is not of course merely looking, but
noting how this vast seascape changes, knowing its different contours and
coasts. To quote him, yet again, ‘The plural always outweighs the singular.
There are ten, twenty or a hundred Mediterraneans… to spend even a moment
alongside real fishermen, yesterday or today, is to realise that everything can
change from one locality to another, one seabed to another, from sandbank to
rocky reef… (ibid. 14).
I find his reference to fishermen
fascinating – even though the book contains almost nothing further on them. For
it allows me to position fishers as custodians of the sea, in respect of their
knowledge of it, their plying of the waves, and their acute awareness of how a
seemingly familiar coast actually comprises several micro-regions. It seems to
me that fisher imagination, in this sense, conveys a sense of the ocean – which
is a life world that exists on the cusp, to use those overused terms, of nature
and culture. Knowledge of how the sea moves is knowledge that is gained in the
doing, in actually being on the waters, and in this intermeshed relationship,
between gazing at the sea, living with it, and working it – lies a sensibility
that we have not yet fully acknowledged as germane to our understanding of the
oceans.
Yet, fishers don’t quite figure as
they ought to, in histories of oceans – neither in those monumental writings on
the Indian Ocean (AshimDasgupta, Himanshu Ray, SinnappahArasarathnam, Michael
Pearson) nor in texts on the Atlantic (Barry Cunliffe’sFacing the Atlantic).
Seafarers, mariners, peasants, merchants, lords and Kings populate these
histories of rivers and seas, but not fishers – it is as if this oldest of
subsistence communities is always already part of geography rather than
history, one with contour lines and sea swells, as if it has not much to do
with the changing rhythms of technology, trade and war. Truth be told, fish
have actually fared better than fishers in history, and I dare say, in
anthropology even, being subjects of cultural critique and analysis.
Significantly, fishers are present
in contemporary history – emerging as it were, in contexts where their lives
and livelihood appear overshadowed – and threatened - by capitalist trade,
technology and social relations. As ‘endangered’ beings, they are the subjects
of social movement literature on the one hand, and environmental studies on the
other. In other words, even as their life world stands on the brink of change,
which is sometimes viewed as cataclysmic, they gain visibility. Such visibility
has been hard-won, thanks to the efforts of Fisher federations, trade unions,
church groups, women’s credit societies – and as a people in resistance or
movement, fishers continue to make news, as is evident to us in Tamil Nadu at
least, where fishers protest almost the year around, when they are captured by
the Sri Lankan navy, when their boats are held hostage, when their kin
disappear, or when trouble breaks out on the coast, between those who ply
traditional boats, and those who steer trawlers. Further, fisher support and
solidarity groups, whether these have to do with the future of fishing and
fish, or with other political agendas, such as, for instance, Tamil
nationalism, have kept fishers in focus – with groups such as the International
Collective in Support of Fishworkers (ICSF) producing voluminous writing that
advocates fisher rights and entitlements across the world.
Yet, in all this, we seldom get a
sense of the fisher imagination. To be sure, we hear fisher voices, and fisher
knowledge of the sea is made available in memoirs, or in oral narratives which
speak of how things were in the past, and how they have changed in recent
times; there are accounts of fisher daring and familiarity with complex sea
geographies – but a fisher’s sense of his or her changing universe is not all
that easy to come by.
It is in this context that I wish to
present the work of two writers from Tamil Nadu, the novelist Joe D’ Cruz and
the writer and fisheries professor, VareethiahKonstantine. Both of them have
written, and continue to write on fisher lives, coastal ecologies and the
future of fishing – chiefly in Tamil, though Konstantine writes in English
occasionally. They write as insiders, having grown up in fisher families and
communities, and having been on fishing boats, when young. They also position
themselves as witnesses - to a retreating past – and as tentative voices of the
present and future. In their complex sense of the sea and fisher lives, I
argue, is present an imagination that allows us to see the ocean world as
changeable and yet enduring for those whose lives and destinies, memory and
selfhood continue to be beholden to it. This imagination also addresses us,
non-fishers, imploring our attention, both on behalf of a vulnerable coastal
and sea ecology, as well as the future of fishing as an occupation.
***
Joe D’ Cruz is from the town of
Uvari, near the Tuticorin coast – whose fishing waters are shaped by climatic
conditions in the Gulf of Mannar as well as the adventitious details of local
geography. Fishers in this part of Tamil Nadu are mostly Catholic, and the
coast, at least in the past, was marked by the towering spires of churches,
close to which nestled fishing hamlets, comprising mud and palm leaf roofed
homes. Linked to the hinterland through local trade ties and exigencies of
government, and historically to maritime trade as well as pearl fishing
operations carried out under lord and merchant auspices, paravas as fishers of
this coast are called comprise several occupational groups: those who fished
and continue to fish for a living; seafarers or lascars who plied and worked on
freight vessels to Ceylon/Sri Lanka and the Arabian Sea coast, all the way to
Ratnagiri; merchant marine men, who travel far and wide; men of the Church and
modern day professionals of various kinds, teachers, lawyers, and so on. Parava
women have been, and are, fish vendors, present in various Church committees,
teachers, and more recently active in credit unions. In the past, Paravas were
confined to the coast for the most part, but in social terms, they had to
engage with other castes – including traders, peasants and state officials of
various kinds and of course the layered worlds that make up the Catholic
Church.
This is the world that D’Cruz writes
of in his fiction, in intimate as well as expansive terms. His published work,
dating back to 2004, comprises 3 large volumes: AazhiSoozhUllagu
(Ocean-ringed World), Korkai and Hastinapuram. The first two
novels span a wide arc of time: AazhiSoozhUllagu examines the lives and
times of a fisher village from the 1930s to the 1980s; Korkai tells the
story of the modern city of Tuticorin, in and through the intertwined lives of
a bewildering number of parava, nadar and other families. Hastinapuram
is set in the present, and in Chennai – and narrates a life adrift in unhappy
conjugality against a background of brisk trade, and business to do with
shipping and freight forwarding.
When published in 2004, AazhiSoozhUllagu
surprised and delighted Tamil readers, with its sheer sweep, and the world and
lives it uncovered. The book was released a few days before the tsunami
destroyed parts of the Tamil coast – and ironically enough emerged as fit
testimony to life in an ocean-ringed society. The novel comprises two
narratives: one set in the present, tracks the fate of three fishers who are
adrift in mid-sea, after their catamaran capsizes; the other unfolds through a
longer period of time, as it tells the interlinked stories of three generations
of fisherfolk. We read, thus, of a world where the fisher, his catamaran and
the sea are tightly bound to each other – and the disentangling of this
universe from the 1970s onward.
The novel revolves around the
fisherman’s mastery of the waves: a mastery that is, not only account of his
daring, but also discretion and knowledge, and his appreciation of the teeming
life of the ocean, in all its interconnectedness. As the old fisher,
Thomanthirai gravely tells the young men on his craft: the sharks that wander
the sea, indeed all the large fish, are bound to truth, and the good fisher is
one who understands this, and whose hunting skills are leavened by a sense of
restraint (see handout 1). In this sense, fish are to be both hunted as well as
feared – and this makes for fraught intimacy, of the hunter and hunted.
Fisher labour on the sea marks
fisher society – skilled, demanding courage and having to reckon, at all times,
with the unpredictable. This makes for a form of dependence and cooperation
that is both intense as well as shot through with tension. On the other hand,
both on land as well as sea, it makes for a sense of communitas, most evident
in the system of shares – of the catch to which all on the boat, as well as
subalterns on land are entitled. The second most important influence in this
part of the coast is the Church: even as fierce pride and a sense of bravura
mark male selfhood, piety, along with an acute awareness of our propensity to
sin, and the possibility of remorse also shape consciousness.
Fisher women, as depicted in the
novel, are independent, in their labour and not confined to domesticity). In
fact the domestic such as it is in this context upturns our usual sense of home
and household labour. For one, women’s work is not confined to cooking and
provisioning. Working with the catch, assisting with mending nets and watching
out for their young at home, on the waves and on the shore – women too possess
an acute sense of place and geography, though they don’t work the waves or ply
craft. They are the virtual guardians of the shore, fiercely protecting their
young and old – while waiting anxiously for their men to return. Thus, in
fisher society, home is not merely the hut or a space enclosed within four
walls. Home is the surf and sand as well – spatially, fisher homes are seamless
with the space required for launching the catamaran, the areas marked and set
aside for drying fish, and the overwhelming space of the Church. However in
fictional terms, that is, as characters, they come alive only in the context of
their relationships with men – and their laboring social selves are what we, as
readers, may glean from the narrative.
Further, until recently, fisher
sense of property was not defined by a notion of the private – to be sure,
there were less and more endowed folks, but there was also a sense of the shore
as the commons or as John Kurien would have it, an interconnected world. In
fact this sense persists today, though negatively – as when State and capital
lay claims to the coast, often citing the lack of fisher claims and
entitlements in law and paper. D’Cruz’s novel maps out this sense of space for
us brilliantly – and we are made witness to how the shore and sea together form
a complex spatial unit, against which much of life happens. This makes both for
an uncertainty of existence as well as a richly experienced sense of the
elements – the ingenuity of human labour and effort as much as the elemental
force of the sea constitute the ‘truth’ of nature, so to speak (handout 2). We
realise that it is not so much a question of conquest or confrontation – as it
is a question of living with, in fear and awe of, and in love with the ocean
world. And most of all, having to reckon with the precariousness of life, and
the enduring power of the waves.
Perhaps this description of the
Coramandel fisherman from the early days of the East India Company in Madras
captures the essence of what it meant to live thus: referring to fishers, now
turned boatmen for the Company as amphibious creatures, a note on Madras
boatmen observes: ‘they can live on land or sea and are from morn to night
naked and exposed to cold and wet, plying their boats, to and from the roads
…and appear to glory in the sea…” Another account, referring to the catamaran
also pointed to the amphibian nature of an existence that knew the sea, in a
sensuous, embodied way: “It is very curious to watch these catamarans putting
out to sea. They get through the fiercest surf, sometimes dancing at ease on
top of the waters, sometimes hidden under the waters, sometimes the man
completely washed off his catamaran, and man floating one way and catamaran
another, till they seem to catch each other again by magic’.
This last description, invokes a
complex image, of the sea, the boat and the fisher melded together in a
combined movement - that it is impossible to speak of the fisher, without
speaking of his boat, and neither may one speak of the sea, as mere setting or
horizon, rather the sea comes alive in all its tumult in the face of fisher
labour. Yet, D’Cruz is no romantic: he pays tribute to a way of life that has
been in steady retreat, the life of artisanal fishermen, and makes that the
basis of fisher identity and of fisher claims to being considered equal and
dignified members of our social order. Their humanity, he suggests, is defined
by their relationship to the sea, a relationship that we need to grasp and
grant its due – in other words, he does not want to insert fishers within a
pre-defined human world; rather he asks us to consider the claims to humanity
of those whose sense of self is actively mediated, shaped by their relationship
to the elemental world of the sea. Braudel-like, he asks us to look at the sea,
and understand fishers as they relate to it. In essence, he turns our gaze onto
a natural world which is humanized through fisher labour, and which, in turn,
it shapes and transforms to produce a distinctive personhood.
Interestingly, this relationship of
fisher to the sea, as the novel imagines it, is mirrored in human
relationships, amongst fishers and fishers and others – often, these are as
tumultuous as the sea, as likely to excite passion and fear, responsibility and
violence. On the one hand, reciprocity and collective labour and life are
central to fisher existence; on the other hand, fierce battles are waged over
rights to catch, and to spaces that are viewed as traditional hunting grounds,
to be guarded from possible encroachments. This mirroring is delicate,
vulnerable – in the world of the novel, yet it appears a given. So much so that
social crisis looks to the elements for resolution; just as how the hurt caused
by the sea’s power over life and death is healed by social care and nurture.
So, when reciprocal relationships are thwarted, rather when human beings prove
traitorous in their dealings with each other – as happens when Soosai, a young
and sexually eager fisher rapes a pregnant woman, who is the wife of a man who
has sought refuge in the village – the sea becomes a space for absolution.
Soosai, one of the three men who attempt to stay afloat on a broken catamaran
decides to sacrifice his life in order that the son of the family that he
betrayed lives. Likewise, when the sea turns murderous, as happens in that
terrible tragedy which struck this coast in the 1960s, when a train was swept
off the Pamban Bridge, it is a fisher family that stands by a grieving father,
a nadar trader who has lost his son to the waves. The sea is not so much a site
of conflict or conquest, as it is a space that teaches a unique mode of
survival – life is not wrested from the elements, rather it appears to lie in
staying with them, keeping time with the rhythm of wave, surge and surf. This
also means letting go, even while holding one’s own – as is evident in D’Cruz’s
description of the shark hunt (handout 1).
D’Cruz’s second novel, Korkai
presents a world that is marked by a different sea – this is the sea of
commerce, of that traffic in people, ideas, beliefs and goods which delights
historians. While fishers of the sort who populated his earlier novel are
present in this one as well, they are not independent subsistence fishers,
rather they are ‘coolie’ fishers who labour on other people’s boats. The coast
we realise is not a given, rather it is shaped by worlds that lie beyond it, in
this case, the extension of road and rail, technology and factory labour, and
the growth of urban settlements; and equally by a burgeoning population of
non-fishers who flock to an emergent coastal town to seek their fortunes. The
simpler and relatively reciprocal world of fisher-and-trader we realise is
shadowed by the world of the market – already present in the earlier novel, and
a cause for intra-fisher competition and resentment, and violence, here we see
how the fisher world has become increasingly trapped within – and shaped by –
developments that affect fisher lives and livelihoods, but which they are
unable to command and shape at their will. In fact this is the substance of the
novel: the decline in power of the coastal paravas, especially those who are
not fishers, but who owned and ran freight boats, invested in commercial ties
with neighbouring Ceylon and the ports of the Arabian Sea, and in the new
garnets trade.
As the city of Tuticorin grows,
initially home to spinning mills, and later on, to saltpans and factories, and
finally to a modern port, parava fortunes decline, while other communities,
particularly the nadars acquire commercial and financial clout and power.
Coastal life is drawn into the political economy of the new Nation-State and
the fisher story turns increasingly desolate and vulnerable. While fisher
expertise, knowledge of the sea and its many moods, are still valuable, fisher
selfhood comes to be marked by fisher relationships with a growing number of
social actors, whose values conflict with their own, and which they are not
often able to resist. The sea retreats, as shaping force and fittingly enough,
it is human cupidity that fuels conflict. The Church is less a nurturing space,
and appears rather sinister in its machinations – though good priests are not
entirely absent. The modern world, we realise has drawn fishers into its orbit:
as education and the prospect of working and seeking their fortune in far flung
places animate their imagination. Meanwhile, that sense of the fisher as the
custodian of the sea, which was writ all over D’Cruz’s earlier novel suffers a
gradual fade-out as the 20th century comes to a close. While it
remains a revered memory, and inspires the novel’s youngest protagonist – there
are several generations of protagonists in it – to hone his values in
accordance with it, the active engagement of the fisher with the sea ceases to
be central to the making of the fisher self.
This alienation of life and labour
is of course not uniform – and even those who fish from trawlers and take to
other trades to do with the sea have to reckon with its power and be sensitive
and mindful to what it requires of those who ply its waves. Yet, it is evident,
at least in the world of the novel, that the sea is no more the commons, rather
it appears a resource. It is as if it had been made exterior to fisher lives –
and is not anymore the defining elemental force that holds them in. This exteriority
is particularly evident in the third novel …
D’Cruz’s fictional world charts for
us generational and historical change – and we are made witness to a double
movement at work in the fisher imagination that the novels express. The one is
towards a past time, when sea and fisher lives are intertwined and the other is
towards the future, where fisher lives are diverse and not as marked by their
relationship to the sea, except in the realm of memory and in the claims they
make on the State, as marginal citizens. The sea, we realise, is not, cannot be
imagined outside of the lives, labour and consciousness of those who have lived
with it, and who are of it. To be sure, it is possible to approach the sea in
its marine richness, or lack thereof, and in relationship to the flows of
current, wind and tectonic plates. But the sea as a space that we live with, as
nature may be gleaned only in and through the lives of those who work it – for
it is through such interactions is the sea knowable. When the labour that makes possible such
knowledge becomes intermeshed with other forms of coastal labour, and with
considerations of trade, profit, production, the sea and sand cease to be the
elemental things that shape the lives of those who live close to them, and
instead become objectified spaces – from being that which constitutes
particular ways of being human, sea and sand are transformed into reservoirs of
use, they become ‘resources’ and are recast as property.
D’Cruz insists that even in this
context, the fishers have to be counted, that is, they have to be integrated
into this changed universe. What this means, in his understanding, is that
fisher life be updated, through education and options for diverse employment,
including to do with the sea and plying it, and that they are not left behind
as ‘primitive’ others. While they ‘know’ the sea, so to speak, their role as
custodians has to be offset against what such custodianship can achieve for
them in a rapidly changing world. In his own professional capacity, D’Cruz has
demonstrated what it means to be a fisher-turned-shipper. He speaks for fisher
causes, drawing on a language of rights, particularly with respect to fishers
pursued and captured by the Sri Lankan navy; and he has been critical of the
Sethusamudram and more recently the Enayam port idea – in these latter
instances, he draws on his ‘expertise’, not only of coastal geography but also
technology and science, and his understanding of the movement of freight across
the Palk Straits, and more generally in the Indian Ocean zone. “The developers
of the Enayam port claim that there is 20-metre depth available at a distance
of two nautical miles. This means adequate depth is not available on the shore.
Lack of land is explained by the fact that they are going into the sea and
reclaiming approximately 820 acres. Reclamation of land will destroy the
fragile ecosystem and fish species”.
The sea, he makes clear, is
peculiarly and characteristically knowable to fishers, and it is fisher
imagination that needs to be made central to whatever plans one has for the
coast and sea – if this means that fishers become fish merchants, or in a
position to direct the fish economy, that ought to be in the scheme of things.
The hope of course is that if that is forthcoming the sea would not be
plundered – the various ‘spatially splintered’ arrangements, as Martin Bavinck
calls them, which have emerged all along the Tamil Nadu coast to restrain
fishers from ‘overfishing’ or from destructive contestation bear testimony to a
social ethics that is still in place. Likewise, with respect to technology as
well, it is possible to imagine a different relationship to the sea – as with
the artisanal – fiber glass – boats that Kanyakumari fishers have taken to the
deep sea and which are far less destructive than the huge ships from foreign
shores which are allowed to ply these waters.
D’Cruz speaks authoritatively, and
with a sense of ownership of the coast: he sets himself up as a spokesperson
and witness to what parava fishers were in the past, and given the trajectory
of his own life and career, what they could be in the future. It is as if he
were making a case for a differently modern vision of the sea and coast,
inflected by fisher sensibility, which, though, changing and open to the possibilities
of what the modern world may yet offer, can yet hold the ocean line differently
– simply because fishers know and have forged a distinctive human relationship
to it, and been shaped by such forging.
***
VareethiahKonstantine to whose
writings I turn next is from the mukkuvar fisher community that lives along the
westward curve of the Tamil Nadu coast. Originally part of the old Travancore
state, this region is contiguous with the Kerala coast, and fishers traverse
back and forth between the two states. Mukkuvar fishers have been the subject
of anthropological research – Kalpana Ram and AjanthaSubramanium have written
of them, as also in a different disciplinary context, AparnaSundar.
Konstantine teaches fisheries and
animal sciences in a local college (in the town of Thoothur), and has been
active, particularly in the post-tsunami decades – speaking, writing and
advocating fisher rights and entitlements in Tamil political and intellectual
worlds. Along with others, he has also been active in sourcing and publishing
writings by persons from fisher communities – and others – on the sea and coast
– under the imprint, NeytalVeli, the old Sangam world for the sea and the
environment shaped by it.
Konstantine marks the tsunami as a
decisive event – he argues that it foregrounded the coast and its fisher
population in unprecedented ways, and made the non-littoral hinterland take
heed of lives which, until then, had barely been acknowledged. His own sense of
what he owed his context and environment, he notes, changed from then on, and
made him aware of just how fishers were placed in modern Tamil society. This
was not only on account of the destruction wrought by the tsunami, which
effectively destroyed several fisher communities, their livelihood options,
gear and homes. It was also on account of how non-fishers dealt with the
disaster, oblivious to the nature of fisher lives, values and imagination. In
such a context, Konstantinechoicelessly turned researcher, chronicler and
witness – and in the event has produced a set of remarkable texts. Some of
these are descriptive summaries – in Tamil - of the various changes in fishing
economies along the coast, and governmental laws, regulations and plans for it.
In addition to a volume of short stories, there are texts that deal with
aspects of fisher life – labour, beliefs and customs (he has a monograph on the
mukkuvars); as also those which examine fisher cultural expressions,
particularly fiction as also non-fisher writing on the coast and sea. The most
remarkable set of texts though comprises his notes on the long trip that he
undertook, from the Coramandel Coast through the mid-coast, defined by the
ecology of the Palk Straits, to the sea he is most familiar with, shaped by the
Gulf of Mannar. This trip was undertaken in 2014, to mark the 10th
anniversary of the tsunami – and Konstantine navigated his way with the help of
fisher activists and intellectuals through fisher villages, large and small,
and home to not only ‘traditional’ fishers but also those who have adopted the
occupation for various historical and economic reasons. Much of Konstantine’s
writing exists only in Tamil – though there is one English text available as of
now.
Konstantine addresses a diverse
audience: fishers; the State; and a more amorphous and largely non-fisher
public that is invested in progressive politics but not necessarily
well-informed on the fisher question. His tone, arguments and the histories and
experiences he privileges are thus apposite to his specific purpose and
readership. Yet, running through his layered sense of the sea and coastal life,
is a delicate thread – and one which he holds lightly yet firmly and which has
to do with the fisher’s sense of the sea.
Let me start with his addresses to
non-fishers. Here, he has recourse to a set of themes that he never tires of
repeating: the ignorance and shallow knowledge that non-fishers possess of
fisher lives; the stereotypes that abound in Tamil commonsense in this regard –
especially the notion that fishers are impulsive, violent, naïve and in thrall
to the Church; the manner in which Tamil political life and economic planning
have consistently marginalized fishers, in contrast to Kerala, where coastal
economy, from access roads to technology, from concerns to do with safety at
sea to protecting the rights of artisanal fishers, is structured around
fishers, and fishing; the Church and its complicated relationship to fisher
lives, both protective and condescending, affirming and controlling; and most
important, the role assigned to non-fishers by the State when it comes to
making policy that affects fisher lives, the M S Swaminathan Committee being a
case in point.
Konstantine sets about responding to
such misconceptions as he finds problematic: for instance, he notes that if
fishers appear prone to impulsive action and violence that is not on account of
anything innate in them; rather these attributes ought to be understood as
defining a hunter society with a fierce investment in egalitarianism.
Contestation over fishing waters and rights, anger over trawlers overfishing
and the pressure exerted on the coast by those who did not understand it, like
fishers do, and who have not evolved habits and protocols of dignified survival
in a capricious environment like they have – these are some of the contexts in
which violence unfolds, notes Konstantine.
He argues too that the Church is no
doubt central to fisher life, but the moral economy that continues to define intracommunity
interactions in one way or another is shaped by fisher experience of the ocean,
as a plentiful life world that has to be handled with restraint. In other
words, fisher knowledge of the sea, their everyday interaction with a
changeable and unpredictable natural world and the ways in which they have
positioned themselves with respect to that world have equally shaped their
share economy, and their self-imposed rule systems.
While conceding that fisher lives
have altered, Konstantine points out that State-fueled policies might have
pushed sections of fishers to fish for profit but that there are yet
communities that continue to fish for a living; and even those who treat the
sea as a mere resource, he notes are not at the head of the extractive economy–
rather they have merely responded to it, and initially from a position of
seasonal penury and subsistence fishing. While fishers may have made money that
has not translated into value that would upgrade their status on a long term
basis or granted them access to modern political and cultural assets. Their
lives continue to be shaped by actors and policies who view them as cheap
labour or as associates that could be counted upon in profitable ventures to do
with the coast and ocean. (Significantly, Joe D’ Cruz too locates commercial
prawn fishing as a practice that the Church encouraged fishers to adopt in lean
seasons, when fish was not to be had.)
Konstantine is most troubled by the
nature of expert knowledge that the State values – which does not make any
concession to those who have lived by and in the sea and who have not been made
party to any of the deliberations to do with the ecological management of the
coast – resenting the very terms of reference, that is, regulation and
management, he draws parallels between the green and blue revolutions, and
positions fishers as hapless victims of policies that have led to the ruination
of their commons. In this context, he urges forth fisher claims to education,
occupational upgradation and professional mobility and suggests what may be
done to ensure the rights of inshore fishers, as well as those who seek to go
to the deep seas.
The State is of course an object of
critique – and here we find a strand of criticism that is not always voiced in
critical literature that has emerged out of fisher unions and social movements
of which they are a part. This is criticism of the Central government, and its
overweening authority over the coast, which Konstantine, schooled in a
decades-old tradition of holding an imperfect federal polity and State to
account, handles with great aplomb. Whether it has to do with policing the
coast, or signing agreements with multinational fishers, whether it has to do
with working on an all-India fishing policy, he objects to a State that does
not recognize regional differences, particularly of geography and contour
lines. He points to the manner in which forest policies, to do with
conservation have adversely affected fisher lives, particularly in places like
the Sunderbans. While the Tamil Nadu government and the Dravidian parties who
have populated the latter are also criticized, they do not figure as sharply in
his addresses as the Indian State does.
Konstantine also speaks to his own
people – rather he writes in a vein that assumes his readers to possess insider
knowledge of what he refers to, whether this has to do with fishing, fishing
gear, local customs, the Church’s acts of commission and omission, or the
changing lifestyles in fisher communities. He is reflective, self-critical, and
most important alert to differences amongst fishers – with respect to their
perceptions of the present, the specific dilemmas that they seek to address,
depending, literally, on their bit of the coast, and their acute sense of how
they are divided, by class, political power, and customary authority that sits
with larger villages and is imposed on smaller communities.
Importantly, in this context,
Konstantine also notes that in view of how complex and attuned to local
geography fisher lives are, there can be no one overriding fisher concern,
rather there exists a set of concerns, which may be shaped by a similar set of
factors, but in each instance different interests are at stake: thus, for
example, a small community of fishers off the Dhanushkodi coast continues to
live a life of subsistence, and their concerns are often not even visible to
the larger world – just as how they remain invisible, in their mud and wattle
homes on the coast. Whereas, in, for instance Pazhaverkadu, off the Ennore coast
in North Chennai, pollution, the setting up of factories, choking of the Ennore
Creek, and the mass displacement of fishers from Sriharikota produces a
different set of concerns, which cannot be addressed outside of the city’s
urban future and capital and State-driven investment in power plants. Then
there are fishers who lead environmental struggles, as with the urbanized
fishers of Tuticorin who have been fighting Sterlite Industries for a while
now, and whose concerns have as much to do with issues of urban health and
safety, as they have to do with coastal ecology.
An important strand of Konstantine’s
address to fishers has to do with how the sea and coast are both geographically
and historically linked to the hinterland, and the need for fishers to not
merely heed the sea, but also changes in land geography, particularly of
rivers, canals and streams, for the fate of the bay, estuary and reef are
closely linked to the fate of inland waterways. Referring to the crisis that
has beset fishing hamlets in parts of Kankyakumari, particularly the village of
Thengaipattinam, where inland water flow has been choked, he points to the need
for a notion of interconnectedness, between vulnerable fishers and those whose
lives are linked to rivers and streams, not only peasants, but also urban folk
whose futures appear increasingly defined by either water pollution or
waterless-ness.
In all this, what is fascinating is
Konstantine’s sense of the sea and fishers: He returns to this theme in all his
writings. Whether it is ‘explaining’ the sea and coast to people who don’t know
it, or getting biographical in the classroom; writing an essay on the long-term
effects of the tsunami for a magazine devoted to environmental concerns –
Konstantine invokes the sea and fisher worlds associated with it as a unit, as
if it were impossible to speak of the one, without speaking of the other.
His representations of this world
acquire a certain poignancy, shadowed as they are by his elegiac sense of the
present – for he is equally aware that developments on the coast which have
nothing to do with fish or fisher lives will permanently alienate fishers from
the sea. While he lists alternatives it is evident that he views ocean ecology
as closely linked to sustainable fisher futures.
For Konstantine, the sea has its own
calendar – as he wistfully notes of his boyhood days, in the 1960s, one could
mark the months with the names of fish, since much of the catch was seasonal.
This also meant that the labour and technology deployed to fish were matched to
the demands of the particular bit of coast that was a fisher’s provenance. It
was not that there were no adventurous fishers – there were groups that would
set forth to fish in faraway waters, carrying with them adequate supplies of food,
fuel and baskets of salt to bring back fish. But the more usual fisher routine
had to do with fishing in inshore waters. Konstantine notes that in keeping
with the seasonal nature of the catch, and given that fresh fish had to be sold
right away, women would pack the fish in palm or bamboo baskets and take them
as far inland as they would keep fresh – in addition, prize catch would be
shared with non-fisher families with whom fishers enjoyed fictive kinship ties.
Not all fish was sold – a lot of it was seasoned and preserved for home
consumption, as well as sold in markets – or to traders who procured them for
faraway bazaars. Typically fish were dried on the sand, or dried and then
smoked, by being hung over the cooking hearth. Some were salted and dried,
others in the raw. The science of preservation was highly sophisticated, and
attuned to fisher dietary needs.
Konstantine’s point is that the
fisher world, in keeping with its geography, possessed its own protocols of not
only labour and provisioning, but also of food, space, technology and inter
community relationships. Even if one of the strands in this intermeshed
existence were to unravel, that was bound to realign and disentangle the social
fabric. Thus, when trawlers were introduced, they not only resulted in what is
called overfishing, but also threw fisher worlds into disarray - taking a
critical lens to changing food and living habits, new forms of consumption and
the emergence of permanent concrete homes, Konstantine notes that these have to
be viewed in tandem with the emergence of a form of a new class of fishers,
whose well-being however cannot serve as an index of how the larger community
has fared. While the emergent class of educated, middle class fishers might
well be viewed as viable role models, the fact remains that they represent a
loose and runaway strand of an intermeshed world, the rest of which meanwhile
stands tragically disaligned in ever so many ways.
For Konstantine, the gradual
replacement of the catamaran with the trawler captures the essence of the
change that has beset fisher lives: while this has not happened in all
instances, and there are artisanal fishers who still ply the catamaran, or use
outboard motors on traditional craft, trawlers appear the symbol of all that is
alien to the long Tamil coast – alien, on account of the technology which
Konstantine notes has been adapted from another context and purpose. Used to
trawl ocean beds to look for mines dropped during wartime, trawlers have been
redeployed to scour the seas for fish, and in the event tend to scoop up the
ocean floor. While the catch is large, a vast multitude of sea life is
meanwhile destroyed in this scouring. Further, trawlers have not also always
benefitted fishers, he notes – no doubt there were easy returns in the earlier
days, starting from the 1960s, but by the 1980s, it was evident that the sea
was being depleted. Further trawlers were typically owned by non-fishers on
which many fishers worked as coolies, and even when they came to own trawlers,
they could not always find the capital to pay for diesel and for the upkeep of
the boat and gear. Technology, Konstantine points out, cannot be simply thought
of as a means, or an instrument: rather it has to be understood to be crucially
linked to the laboring human body and the particular natural space in which
that body labours (handout 3). A technology that eases human labour may deskill
as well as dehumanize the labourer, and alienate him from the larger world – in
this instance, the sea and coast – where he labours.
Konstantine is no Luddite. He makes
it clear that traditional fishers, like his own father, lived for the most part
in penury and hunger – and in thrall to the Church at least in southern Tamil
Nadu. To therefore be able to live steadily off fishing and deploying viable
technology is not a necessarily bad thing. In this sense, there is no question
of returning to the past - indeed that is not possible - but how may one
survive the present and into a viable future? His dilemma is that fishers are
being steadily alienated from a world that has defined their historical
existence – and their very humanity – and they are powerless to affect the turn
of events. Anchoring fisher claims to a dignified, sustainable existence in the
ways that they have evolved over the centuries, he makes a passionate plea to
recognize their distinctive conditions of existence. His description of fisher
literary expressions as they have come to be, these past decades captures his
sense of fisher existence, as both precarious and prophetic:
“The seafarer’s life is intertwined
with the sea – he is unable to remain tied nor is he able to disentangle
himself. Like an infant that remains stuck to its mother, he lives on. The
sea’s limitless nature and the contradictions of modern life on land – like
wave and shore, these remain, defined by their limits. Life on the seashore is
a bundle of contrary trajectories – much like the great ocean currents that
flow in contrary directions in the deep and under the quiet stretch of land.
The seafarer who plies his fragile craft on the ocean is alone aware of this
flow, its shudder. When he opens his heart out, the sea’s ebb and flow are
re-enacted. For these are not painted words, nor are they superficial.
Powerful, ironic and satiric, they become, all together, the rising sea’s
utterances. Who or what indeed can hold them back?”
It is evident that fishers being
articulate about their place in society, their productive labour and their
self-worth speak for the sea as they do for their own rights – and in the event
the class divides which keep them apart or turn them against each other fade
away, as has happened in the recent past, when trawler fishers and artisanal
fishers came together to protest the opening of the Indian seas to
multinational fisher operations. Further, in this context, artisanal fishers
have pointed to their own readiness, with somewhat upgraded boats, to ply those
very deep seas that have been turned over to large fishing combines. In other
words, they have viable alternatives that would allow them to retain their hold
on the sea – not merely in an occupational sense, but in the sense of the sea
being a habitat.
How does the sea appear to the
fisher? It is first of all a given, the very ground of existence – recalling a
phrase from the Tamil epic Silappadikkaram, that hails the falling rain,
Konstantine wonders if the phrase ought not to have, instead, hailed the great
ocean, which, after all is the very basis of life on this planet. Further, he
observes, the sea is not merely the waves and surf: the sea world encompasses
sandy shores, dunes, cliffs, rocks, mangroves, coral reefs, the ocean floor,
the delta, lagoon, estuary and even the riverine systems of the hinterland. In
this sense, it is a complete environment that is known in all its nuance and
detail by fishers.
He underscores its geological
antiquity, its role in shaping and defining the contours of land, and writes
with affection and knowledge of its teeming plant, animal and rock life. He also
marks the sea as inexorably historical, rather he notes that as far as the
ocean is concerned, geography is history. There is no one kind of sea,
something that he notes, rather ironically, was not evident to those who
introduced Norwegian trawler technology to these shores - thereby importing something that was not
suited to tropical waters, where fish were plentiful in the past, and it was
possible to be out throughout the year, except in the season of winds, and
fetch a large catch of fish; unlike the northern Norwegian sea where fishers
had no choice but to acquire the largest catch in the shortest period of time
and so needed powerful gear.
In as much as it is a vast and grand
element, the sea is also home and context – the coast is home, and fish are
fellow beings, whose names and ways are as familiar to fishers as their own kin
and family are. Konstantine underscores this sense of connectedness by
contrasting his own knowledge and sense of the sea with his children’s – for
them the sea is distant, and while they like know of it, and ask to know it, it
remains an alien space. The intimacy forged by fishers with the sea renders it
an element that cannot ever be known in its entirety or taken for granted – and
in the fisher’s acceptance of his own vulnerability in the context of the
immensity that is the sea, lies an entire way of being, of perception. To live
with that sense in the present, and not be constantly in want or be driven only
by competitive greed – this is the question that haunts Konstantine.
***
While there are overlaps in the ways
that D’Cruz and Konstantine understand the fisher predicament, the fisher
imagination each invokes is differently angled. Both are inspired by and seek
to preserve the values embodied in what they understand to be the artisanal
fisher life and labour. For D’Cruz that past is valuable because it serves to
anchor fisher lives in the present – their contemporary predicament appears all
the more terrible on account of their earlier ways of being, laboring and working.
Besides it is the past that lends credence to claims and entitlements that
fishers advance in the present – for it positions them as extraordinary human
beings, at one with the elements, and therefore simple, rugged and worthy of
civic respect and State support. For Konstantine, the past is not merely that,
since he insists that artisanal fishers are very much part of the present and
their sense of the sea and the skills they possess define fisher humanity in
fundamental ways – and that it is with this in mind that fishers ought to
engage with the present, whether they seek to protect the sea and its riches,
or demand that they play a role in charting its future. In D’Cruz’s fictional
universe, the subsistence fishers are clearly positioned as worthy forbears,
but the present and future belong to others – those who possess the acumen to
understand the turn of events and seek to mobilise their past skills to varied
present purposes, as his last novel makes it clear. Meanwhile, he also rues the
fact that fishers failed to do so and that brought about their ruin – and here
he is concerned, as I have noted, not so much with subsistence fishers, but
with parava shippers and seafarers.
Unlike D’Cruz, Konstantine is
troubled by inner class divisions, and he insists that fishers are of many
kinds, and that each set of people has to be viewed in their region-specific
and class-marked contexts – therefore there can be no easy integration with the
modern world, as far he is concerned, and while individuals might be educated
and prosper, fishers as a whole would continue to remain at the mercy of events
they cannot determine. In this sense, Konstantine wants a role and place for,
and an affirmation of the fisher imagination, as he defines it, whereas D’Cruz
is happy to draw on that imagination, in a rhetorical sense, while being at
home in the urban commercial present. Yet both are bound by their keen sense of
what they know as fishers – which knowledge either wears with pride.
Konstantine is more attentive to women’s
lives, and their centrality to fisher existence on land – whereas D’Cruz is
prone to frame women’s lives largely in terms of domestic and romantic
relationships and liaisons. In
Konstantine’s writing, women occupy an important place, possessing as they do a
well-defined position in fisher economic, social and importantly cultural and
religious life. To them, the sea is both a source of life as well a possible
site of loss, dispossession and death – and their sense of it is thus a mixture
of awe, fear and regret. As nurturers and providers, fisher women’s
relationship to the sea is defined as much by dread as by reverence.
I would like to conclude by raising
some questions about what is distinctive about either writer’s sensibility –
after all, much of what they have to say of the coast is present in writings on
the sea, on fisher struggles, on the movements that support them and their
unions. There is also social science literature that has attempted to account
for changing fisher fortunes, and a fisher way of existence and the ways in
which this has accommodated itself to the demands of the present – not only in
an economic sense, but also in a civic and political sense. Fisher knowledge of
the sea, and their close, existential sense of it have also been recorded.
However in the Tamil texts that I
have discussed so far, there is more: an intergenerational sense of change, for
one, and secondly, an embodied relationship to the sea. These indicate that the
fisher predicament is also a generational one, and secondly that it cannot be
understood outside of how fishers view themselves, their personhood – which may
be effective in civic, governmental and political contexts, but which in a
phenomenological sense, has been rendered fraught. This personhood is what
solicits our understanding, and demands recognition. And the sea, as the fisher
experiences it, is constitutive of it. To be faced with a life where that
relationship can only potentially be one of alienation is therefore deeply
troubling and for those who reflect on it – Konstantine more than D’Cruz – that
alienation is symbolic of much else, all that is being lost, left behind, and
destroyed, including fish, fishing seasons, nets and a moral economy that was
reciprocal in a complex sense.
Both men call our attention to that
alienation, since we are as much its cause, as anything else, and by producing
for us an earlier and more integrated, I dare say, amphibious ways of living
and being, their texts push us to rethink the fisher subject – not merely
worker or marginal citizen, but a distinctive kind of human person.
Handout 1
The sea glittered in the rays of the
early morning sun. Siluvai was awake. He had not lost hope yet. He believed
that somehow they would be saved. Whenever he could muster up strength, he
pressed his hands down on the floating bark and raised his head to look about
him. Soosai could barely move.
“Maama, would they have started
searching for us back on the shore?”
“What do you mean…”
“We’ve been floating on this sea for
days, and I am wondering if they’d have begun searching for us.”
“Of course, they would have! How
could they not? Just our luck that we are drifting in the deep sea! Those on
ships go west of where we are, while our fellows on their marams can’t even hope
to get here.”
“Maama, look sideways, if you can.
There, I see a single sail maram!”
Soosai could not lift his head up.
“Wherever it’s from, Holy Mother, we need to be on it and get ashore. Siluva,
pray to St Anthony. When that maram nears us, lift up your hand and wave, will
you?”
“Yes, Maama!”
“By the grace of that good saint, if
a maram does not come our way, we’re going to have a really bad time of it,
Siluvai.”
“For how much longer can we trust
this bark?”
As that distant sail neared them,
Soosai’s face darkened with fear. Siluvai continued to believe that it was
indeed a maram.
“Maama! Look! In front of that sail,
there’s something that spouts water, like a pipe…”
“Siluvai! That’s no sail. It’s a
large fish. But you must not be afraid, alright? That fish is bound to truth.”
“Will it swallow us?”
“Nothing like that.”
“Maama, why is your hand shaking?”
“I’ve seen such a large fish drift thus twice
before, but then I was on a maram. Now I am one with the water…”
“Looks like an entire town is going
by!”
“It’s bound to truth, that fish. So
long as we don’t trouble it. It’s not going to cause us any grief.”
“Oh!” Open-mouthed, Siluvai watched
the fish drift. “Maama!It’s head is as large as a keluthu fish! See how it wags
that large head, as it moves. That tail, that’s what must have seemed like a
sail!”
“If these fish get up to mischief,
we can’t ply these waters and fish!”
That large fish was still drifting
along, not far from where they were. From time to time it opened its mouth, and
then shut it and opened it again. It was as if a mountain was floating along.
The two prayed to every which god they could summon.
Such large fish seldom come close to
the shore. Those that lose their way end up dashing their heads against the
rocks, and shocked by that encounter end up attacking whatever marams and men
there are. At other times, they lose their bearing completely, when they hit a
rock and drift ashore only to die there. Many of these large fish are gentle
creatures, and in all the shoreline villages, fishers hold that they are bound
to the cause of truth.
“Maama, you say that these large
fish are bound to truth! But last year, the entire coast was abuzz with the
story of how Uruttiyar’s men who had gone fishing with the vazhivalai were
attacked by a large fish…”
“That’s a different story!”
“How so?”
“They were caught between two fish.
One hit at them with its tail from this side, and the other from that side.
Sail, mast, oars, nets – all these fell overboard. The three men that were
there on the maram held onto the nadumaram, held fast to the deck, glued
themselves to it, in fact.”
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