I had come to Gujarat because I had heard and read so many stories about the fishing boat builders of Veraval and Mangrol: about how carpenters had been building fishing boats here for many generations; how they continued to build them to exactly the same design; how the entire boat was worked by hand, without a power tool in sight; how the engine was the boat’s only recent, grudging concession to modernity. (One source may even have murmured something about a long chain of boat design stretching right back to the Indus Valley Civilization.) Looking back, I’m not sure now what I had expected. I seem to remember visions of a little Mediterranean boat yard basking in the sun, where a carpenter with a practitioner’s deep knowledge of naval history worked languidly on the construction of a boat a year. Possibly I had imagined meeting an old boat-building codger who would complain about the decline of his art and about how power tools had sullied his trade now, just because these damn youngsters wanted to build faster to make more money, and that’s all they were interested in anyway, money, money, money. I know certainly that I had expected the gentle, educational pace of artisanry rather than the cold gallop of industry. And I know that I hadn’t expected so many boats.
Over the last three decades, the boat-building business has been nurtured, by the government and aid agencies and private well-wishers, into thriving life. On one particular stroll through the Veraval waterfront, I counted thirty structures in advanced stages of boatishness, plus numerous other avant-garde installations of wood that would become boats in the very near future. My fellow flâneur, a gangly, bearded man named Allah Rakha Sheikh (and nicknamed, as seemed the case with one out of every three middle-aged men I met, ‘Bapu’), pointed out boats that would go to Maharashtra or Karnataka, and he introduced me to the leading suthars—generic carpenters turned specialized boat builders—we encountered. The seven biggest suthars in Veraval, Bapu estimated, employ more than a thousand people between them; next to fishing itself, this is one of the town’s most vital industries.
If anything, in fact, it is too vital, because there is only so much harbour to go around. Just calling the Mangrol harbour ‘cluttered,’ as I did earlier, cannot sufficiently describe the astoundingly close packing of craft or my difficulty in spotting even a few contiguous inches of water. Veraval’s harbour, built for two thousand boats, now somehow accommodates double that. ‘There is a difference between having two sons and having six sons, don’t you think?’ Veraval’s port officer, C. M. Rathod, told me with winning wisdom, explaining that just as the more potent father would have a harder time housing his offspring, so the port authority struggled to find room for its boats. In 2003, a Gujarat Maritime Board amendment prevented fishermen with one boat from buying another. Five years later, after terrorists sailed into Indian waters from Karachi, took control of a Gujarat-registered boat called Kuber, and ploughed onwards to attack Mumbai, the hand dispensing new boat registrations closed even tighter. In Veraval in fact, Rathod said, the process had ceased altogether, precipitated by security concerns but fortuitously also addressing the space crunch. Naturally, this cramped the style of the region’s boat builders, but not as much as one would think. An old trick came to the rescue yet again: Boat owners continued to commission boats and then simply carried forward the registration of their old vessel to the new. Same identity, but a younger, bigger, stronger body—a transposition that mouth-wateringly approaches immortality.
To build your first boat, I thought to myself in Veraval, must be to move along a chain of seeming impossibilities. There is initially the envisioning of a boat where there is nothing but air, and then the fitting of planks to snatch that boat’s shape out of the air, without any frame or mould to serve as template. There is the counter-intuitive bending of planks, where a long piece of flattened, arced wood can be equally strong at every point along its curvature. There is the effort to make watertight and seamless a structure with so many, many seams. There is the slow bulking of the vessel, accompanied by the dawning bewilderment at the laws of physics that allow something so big and heavy to float on water. Maritime historian Basil Greenhill, in his definitive Archaeology of the Boat, compared boat building at its best to ‘an act of sculpture,’ but it’s actually that and a little more; Rodin didn’t have to float his Thinker out to sea and bring back a couple of tons of mackerel in it.
Murjibhai Koria built his first boat twenty-five years ago. His father had been a farmer, and Koria himself, having acquired a bachelor’s degree in Gujarati, had wanted to be a schoolteacher. ‘But there was more promise in this, if you get what I’m saying,’ he said, gesturing at the half-built boat that stood in his yard in Mangrol. Koria was perspiring hard, and streaks of sawdust-infused sweat ran down the sides of his round face; he had just been working over a saw stationed in the sunniest spot in the yard, guiding planks through its teeth to emerge curved and ready for the belly of the boat. (It was the trickiest part of his job, he said.) We stood now in patchy shade, which is all that an incomplete boat can offer, but Koria still shielded his eyes with one hand and squinted at me as he spoke.
In Mangrol, a yard full of incomplete boats
The boat under development was a thirty-ton fishing craft, being constructed (at a price, inclusive of the engine, of Rs 25 lakhs) for a local fishing boat-owner named Veljibhai Dhanjibhai. ‘He already owns four boats,’ Koria said. Then he looked up at the superstructure and said: ‘Can you believe that, when I first began doing this, we used to sell the boats for Rs 20,000 apiece? And that was such a lot of money at that time.’ He sounded almost incredulous of the contours of a past he had lived through. ‘We’d work on a boat for six or eight months, to finish it. Now it’s two-and-a-half, sometimes three months, and then it’s ready for the sea.’ Those first few days in the harbour, Koria said with a smile, were his favourite. ‘The boat is new, so it sits high on the water, and you can see nearly all the work we’ve put in. Then the wood begins to drink water, and it settles lower and lower.’
Half a dozen years after he has sent a boat out, it will be sent back to him, like an errant child from boarding school, to be whipped back into shape. ‘The international and local woods,’ he explained, pointing first to the light-coloured Malaysian sal used for the superstructure and then to the dense babul that forms the boat’s inner ribs, ‘somehow don’t go well together. So after six or seven years, we have to tear out the insides and replace it all with fresh wood.’ Another six or seven years after that, the boat will have sailed the course of its active life, and it will return one last time to Koria, reeking of fish and utterly spent, its spare parts and healthier wooden sections to be donated like organs into the therapy of Koria’s next case.
During this lecture-demonstration on the life cycle of a fishing boat, an aged, pot-bellied man with a pitted face had come into the yard, hollered a merry greeting across to Koria, and then started to stride around the boat, examining it with avid interest. Dhanjibhai (‘Please call me Bapu’) liked to drop in every day to look at his eventual boat, he said after he had finished his rounds and walked over to us. ‘That way, I feel like I know the boat well even on its first day in the water.’
Dhanjibhai came from a lineage of fishermen, and he had begun fishing very early in his youth. ‘A long time ago, before engines, I used to fish in those boats made out of a single log,’ he told me. In the sun, his pockmarked face offered a checkerboard texture of light and shadow. ‘You could only go out to a depth of around a hundred feet in that kind of boat. I fished in those for almost twenty years.’ When they went out for a night of fishing, they would cast a net into the waters and then row rough circles around it, to keep the boat from drifting away. If they ate, they ate with one hand and rowed with the other. ‘In November and December, our blankets would be soaked from the spray. It would become incredibly cold.’ Then he unshipped a toothy grin and said: ‘All in all, when we began to get engines for our boats in the 1960s, we were pretty happy about it.’
I had heard about these dug-out boats earlier in t
hat day, when I had met Ramji Gohil, the head of the local fishermen’s association in Mangrol. Amidst a flood of propaganda about Mangrol’s productivity, he had managed to inform me that the large logs for these boats used to arrive from Mangalore, in Karnataka, where the dug-out was virtually an institution. It had puzzled me when I heard it from Gohil, and it puzzled me now. ‘Dug-outs?’ I asked Dhanjibhai. ‘But haven’t you always fished in boats that looked like this one? I thought, in Gujarat, they always made fishing boats that looked like this.’
‘Fishing boats?’ Dhanjibhai said. ‘No, no, we all definitely fished in dug-outs.’ He thought for a few seconds, as if double-checking his memory to make sure, and then said: ‘The only boats that looked like this were the cargo boats.’
So that was the answer, neatly reversed: It was not that the boat builders of Veraval and Mangrol were scaling up their fishing boat designs into cargo boats, but that they were scaling down their cargo boat designs into fishing boats. The structural ancestors of these fishing boats I was seeing were the cargo carriers that had, since the first millennium bce, worked trade routes back and forth across the Arabian Sea, into the Persian Gulf, and perhaps even all the way to the Horn of Africa. The tradition of building these boats had continued in boatyards around Gujarat, preserving its techniques with such fidelity that they would often be the subject of marvelling remarks in the journals of visitors—as, for instance, in the memoirs of John Splinter Stavorinus, Esq.
In the latter half of the eighteenth century, Stavorinus, a Dutch rear-admiral, had traipsed extensively across Asia, faithfully recording his observations in three volumes of travel writing. The third of these segments of Voyages to the East Indies follows Stavorinus on his journey ‘from Surat to Batavia, the coast of Malabar, and the Cape of Good Hope; in the years 1775-1778,’ and after a chapter on Surat’s Parsees and another on the city’s commerce, Stavorinus comes to his own trade. ‘The ships which are built here, cost, it is true, very dear, but they are able to navigate the seas for a hundred years together,’ he wrote admiringly. Then, at what was called ‘the English yard’ in Surat, he watched a boat in the throes of its construction.
‘They do not put the planks together as we do, with flat edges towards each other, but rabbet them; and they make the parts fit into each other with the greatest exactness,’ Stavorinus observed. (A rabbet, I learned in Veraval, was groove cut along the longitude of a plank’s edge; in cross section, a plank with a rabbet looks like a two-step staircase.) ‘[F]or this purpose, they smear the edges of the planks, which are set up, with red lead, and those intended to be placed next, are put upon them, and pressed down, in order to be able to discern the inequalities, which are marked by the red lead … they then rub both edges with a sort of glue, which becomes, by age, as hard as iron… after which they unite the planks so firmly and closely with pegs, that the seam is scarcely visible, and the whole seems to form one entire piece of timber.’
Stavorinus noted two other unfamiliar techniques in Surat. The boat builders, instead of using bolts, drove iron spikes through their wood. (Even then, as with today’s Malaysian sal, the timber ‘must be brought hither from distant places, [making] ship-building very dear here.’) Finally, into the bottom of a completed boat, its builders rubbed ‘an oil which they call wood-oil, which the planks imbibe, and it serves greatly to nourish and keep them from decay,’ and for pitch, ‘they have the gum of a tree called dammex.’ The boat, with a keel one hundred feet long, would cost seventy-five thousand rupees—very dear, as Stavorinus pointed out.
It is this process, in large part, which has survived in Gujarat’s boat-building yards. Citing Stavorinus’ account in particular, G. Victor Rajamanickam, in a book titled Traditional Indian Ship Building, concludes: ‘Thus, we find that the boat-building techniques followed today … on the west coast is (sic) more or less the same form as described by our historians of the past. Not only have the ancient techniques survived … but many technical terms about boats are still in use, i.e. pathan, the term for keel, nal for the bow, and vak for the crossbeam and percha for the rudder.’
In Veraval, thanks to Bapu, I wheedled my way for hours at a time into the yards of two master boat builders. The first of these, Mohammad Razzaq, was a busy man, made surly by his busyness. In a yard that sat at the very edge of the water in the harbour, he commanded a large crew that seemed to need perpetual oversight; during our conversations, as we sat on one of the crosswise ribs inside his half-constructed boat, his eyes would skip constantly from me to one of the workers around him. Once, he even leaped to his feet in the middle of a sentence, hurried away to a woodworker in a corner of the boat’s shell, wrenched the tool from his hands, and put him through a quick show-and-tell session on how to do the job the right way.
Razzaq is part of his family’s third generation of boat builders, and he began working on boats even as a boy. ‘I did all this menial work too,’ he said, pointing to the men around him chipping and smoothing away wood with adzes of varying sizes. ‘It’s the only way to learn the entire craft. Otherwise, you get no formal instruction in this. I just had to pick it up as I worked.’ Here he paused to yell some exotic obscenities at a man with a hammer, pounding away so diligently that he had already sunk the nail into the beam and was now denting the wood around it. ‘This is a medium-sized cargo boat,’ Razzaq resumed, when the air had turned less blue. ‘A small fishing boat, with six carpenters or so, I can build in three months. If we do a really big carrier of many hundred tons, with even twenty carpenters, it could take two years. So we do a mix of both.’
This particular boat sat propped on wooden supports—sometimes solid, pillar-like logs but just as often stacks of leftover pieces that seemed in danger of disassembling at any moment. The teak keel, laid first, was the only section of wood that had already been oiled and varnished, and it shone a rich, dark brown in contrast to the dull yellow-white of the rest of the boat. (‘It’s tradition,’ Razzaq said. ‘We always oil the keel before we begin work on the rest of the boat.’) For a fishing boat, the keel consists only of one long segment of wood; for a carrier, such as this one, the keel was three such segments, bolted together end to end.
And, myth-bustingly, there were power tools. There was one hefty power saw outside the boat, to cut planks down to size. There were a couple of drills in use, whining away as they chewed into the meat of the wood. There was one electric sander. There were white power cords all over the place, like spilled spaghetti, finding their way ultimately to switch boards and electricity outlets temporarily screwed into the keel. I asked Razzaq when he had started using power tools, and he looked at me strangely and said: ‘Years ago. It cuts our work time down so much. Why wouldn’t we use them?’
Why indeed? Once the question is asked, it feels hypocritical for us in the cities—ever-ready beneficiaries of the efficiencies of technology—to warm to and celebrate stories of the old-fashioned (and so mostly menial) methods still in use in India’s smaller towns and villages. (For many of us, this is, I am convinced, part of a broader attempt to fool ourselves into thinking that we really would opt for the ‘simpler’ life if only we had the choice—when, actually, we do have the choice, and we just don’t want to give up our cell phones and power saws.) The truth, of course, is that the purely artisanal can no longer survive as a profession today—as a hobby or a subsidized exhibit of nostalgia, maybe, but not as a career that puts kids through school and savings in the bank. The old codger grumbles about new-fangled methods, in part, only because they’re putting him out of business. In reality, Mohammad Razzaq and other suthars could either have bought these electric tools to remain full-fledged boat builders, or they could have persisted with hand-cutting their logs of wood, taken triple the time to build a boat, and watched fishermen buy fibreglass instead. This kind of dilemma is no dilemma at all; the power saw is, in that sense, now a part of the natural order of things.
But it isn’t as if there is nothing of the past left to see. Stay long enough i
n Veraval’s boat-building yards, and talk enough to the carpenters on their shifts, and look around closely enough, and you’ll spot little remnants of the observations of Stavorinus and others. Razzaq’s workers still hammered at iron nails the length of my palm, although they also used nuts and bolts for some purposes. They also showed me tubs of shark oil and of dammar gum (‘dum-dum,’ one carpenter called it), both of which they used to waterproof the bottom of their boats. The dammar gum is of the ‘dammex’ tree that Voyage to the East Indies mentions, but even five centuries before Stavorinus, Marco Polo had learned of similar anointments to the boats plying the Arabian Sea. Some were ‘smeared with an oil made from the fat of fish,’ and others coated with ‘quick-lime and hemp, which latter they cut small, and with these, when pounded together, they mix oil procured from a certain tree, making of the whole a kind of unguent, which retains its viscous properties more firmly, and is a better material than pitch.’
Following Fish: Travels Around the Indian Coast Page 16