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... 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.
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’s Memory 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
(Ashim Dasgupta, Himanshu Ray, Sinnappah Arasarathnam, Michael Pearson) nor in
texts on the Atlantic (Barry Cunliffe’s Facing 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, Vareethiah Konstantine. 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: Aazhi Soozh Ullagu (Ocean-ringed
World), Korkai and Hastinapuram. The first two novels span a wide
arc of time: Aazhi Soozh Ullagu 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, Aazhi Soozh Ullagu 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.
***
Vareethiah Konstantine 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 Ajantha Subramanium have written of them, as also in
a different disciplinary context, Aparna Sundar.
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, Neytal Veli, 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, Konstantine
choicelessly 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.
-------------
A Review on the works of Joe D’ Cruz and Vareethiah
Konstantine ((Address at National symposium on nature, at NCBS, Bangalore,
2016)
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.”
(From Aazhi Soozh Ullagu, translated by V.
Geetha)
Handout 2
The minutes rolled by and they stayed
quiet. Their catamaran was now on the aazhi, the point in the ocean where the
rocks that ran along the sea bed from the shore ended, and where the waves are
always in a tumult.
Suddenly, Soosai yelled out: “Old man,
loosen the sail-rope and the mast-line. Siluva, to the rope line that links to
the pegs! Take down the sail and rest it on your shoulders!” Soosai fussed
around, and seemed in a hurry. “Siluva!” he called out again. “Pull out the
plank at the bow. Old Man, have you pulled out those planks at the back?”
“Here’s a man who’s plied the sea before
me! To the oars, I say!” Godhra yelled back angrily.
They went about their tasks involuntarily.
Soosai who stood at the back and watched Godhra keep course observed: “Old man,
we’ll keep an eye on the waves. You keep course, keep going straight!”
“Hey! There’s a giant wave coming at us.
Don’t let the maram go under!”
“You two! Looks like we’ve hit the
still-water line! Row us out of this! Oh, and did you remember to secure the
kanji-can to the kotumal rope?”
“Holy Mother! Old man, that wave, it’s tall
and coming at us. Hold the maram to course! Siluva! Row faster, keep the oar down!”
Soosai yelled out instructions by the minute even as he rowed vigorously.
The catamaran cut through and sped along,
nosing its way through the white spume of the wave and beyond where it formed a
trough.
“Siluva! It’s a strong wind that’s taking
us along. Gather the sail, and pack it up. We’ll go along without it.”
“Ele, Soosai, not a being on the shore, not
a bird in sight!”
“Well, it’s late, isn’t it and so there’s
no one…”
“That means we can’t haul the maram up the
sands!” said Siluvai.
“We’ll anchor the maram and get to it in
the morning.” said Godhra.
They were nearing the shore, and realized
that the breakers were particularly wild where they hit the coast.
“Old man, the breakers are strongest at the
sea-face, where the shore curves in. Careful now with the maram! Give me a
minute or two! I’ll jump across with the nets, and return with the anchor” said
Soosai and with Siluvai helping him carry the nets went ashore.
“Ele! Come as soon as you can. Not young
anymore. Not a stitch on me, except for this loin-cloth. And this maram! How
the waves knock at it! Been a while since they crashed against the arching
shore like this… don’t know if I can hold on!” muttered Godhra.
Soosai and Siluvai walked ashore, and as
they trudged upland were swallowed by the dark.
Time moved slowly while Godhra waited:
“These two! What’s keeping them? What on earth are they up to?” Even before
these words rolled off his irate tongue, a gigantic wave dashed against the
curving line of rocks and as it receded, took Godhra and his catamaran with it.
Soosai and Siluvai who were just then walking towards the maram, anchor in
hand, were horrified by what they saw, and immediately dropped the anchor and
ran towards the sea. By then the catamaran was further away. The two plunged
into the waters and managed to get their hands on to the maram.
Wave upon wave tumbled over them. It began
to rain and in the pitch-black night, they could not make out a thing. They
were now in the deep sea and while they held on to the maram could neither get
on board nor push it towards the shore. Suddenly, a tall wave tossed the
catamaran away from them and into the wide stretch of the sea. For a while, nothing could be heard above the
roaring waves.
“Eyyah! The current’s from land to sea now
and the maram floats over the aazhi. Don’t climb onto it yet!” warned Godhra,
who by then had managed to get off the maram and was swimming alongside them.
The maram collided with yet another wave
that held it aloft and caused it to roll over on it side.
“Siluva! Don’t go near the maram. Stay
away! Should another wave come upon it, it’s bound to throw it around!” yelled
Soosai.
This time around the wave was ferocious and
it caught the maram in its upswing and brought it down. The maram broke into
pieces.
“Siluva! May you be safe! Keep off the
maram!” Soosai was desperate.
The waves refused to relent and kept up
their boom and burst. Sky and sea were yet an impenetrable black and they lost
all sense of direction. Even before they could ride a wave, another took over
and cast them into the whirling waters. They swam, ducked, almost drowned and
swam again. The sea seemed in spate.
After a while, the sea’s clamour died down
and it appeared waveless and very quiet.
“Maama! Maama!” called out Siluvai.
The undulating water and endless darkness
made it impossible for each to see the other. Each time his head showed above
the water, Siluvai screamed. At last, hoping against hope, he tried again:
“Maama! Where’re you? Can you see me at
all?”
“Siluva!”
Siluvai turned in the direction of that
voice. He saw a black huddle swaying with the flow and ebb of the sea.
“Siluva… eyyah!”
“Maama!” Siluvai’s relieved tone betrayed
both fear and hope, as he swam towards Soosai and held him in a hug. Soosai
felt the lad’s affection, his nearness. Siluvai’s hot tears warmed Soosai’s
cheeks and he felt flush with love.
“Eyyah! I am alright!” he said gruffly,
“But where’s the old Man? No sound of him!”
Siluvai trained his eyes into the dark.
“Maama, on the eastern side, there!!”
“Yes, I see something, a black shape!”
They both swam towards the shape. As they
got closer, they found Godhra, his head resting against a bark of wood that had
got disengaged from the southern plank of the catamaran, and drifting along
with it. The other two decided they would do likewise and soon all three were
floating on the wide sea.
“Old man, Old man!”
Godhra did not reply. Soosai touched him on
the head, and his fingers came away moist.
“Siluva! The old man’s hurt!”
Godhra floated along unconscious. The sea’s
ebb and flow pitched the bark about and them along with it.
(From Aazhi Soozh Ullagu, translated by V.
Geetha)
Handout 3
Simple and flexible – the catamaran
crowning glory is on account of these qualities. It can be broad and long
enough for four or five fishers to be on it. Or it can be a vessel for an
individual, suitably narrow and slim. The length and number of logs determine a
catamaran’s form. The catamaran can be easily and safely secured to the shore.
It does not capsize on account of sea water flooding it – for there are gaps in
its structure that enable the water to gradually drain off its surface. Even
were it to overturn in the sea, it may be turned upright easily. A wiry
catamaran can take on the angry and buffeting waves of the Arabian Sea. A
broad, expansively built catamaran holds out in the deep sea that stretches
away from the Pearl coast. On the north Tamil Nadu coast, the catamaran’s prow
is somewhat raised and curved to enable it ride the swirling surf. As Prof.
Vedasahaya Kumar notes, the catamaran is an expression of an ancient
community’s intelligence deployed to make nature’s power its own.
The catamaran’s strength is its
pared-down, essentially simple form. This is what makes it easy to ease its way
to a shore whose sands are constantly shifting. It is built to take on fishing
gear that is both line and nets. … To ride the waves: this is exciting and fearful,
and an adventure that traditional fishers happily undertake. … I recall a
seafarer from my village – his catamaran would pierce through the waves and
above them, and gradually he would unfurl a sail on a mast secured to his prow,
drop anchor and stand upright and majestic on his boat as it shot through the
waves…
…A fisher handles his instrument of
labour, [in this instance] the catamaran with reverence. …Even were it to
disinter, he does not cast it away. For, parts of a catamaran that can no more ply
the waves are used on other boats – as buoys, for instance. Nets that are old
and worn are transformed into ropes… masts and paddles, when they cease being
effective are brought ashore and used to set up pavilions… and tents.
(Vareethiah Konstantine, from Nethili
Karuvaathin Vaasanai, translated by V. Geetha)
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