Following Fish: Travels Around the Indian Coast (19 page)

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 that 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 in 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.’

During one of my vigils at Razzaq’s yard, I watched two men mark off a section of planking, to be cut to fit a particular slot in the boat’s frame. With a length of thin rope, they obtained the measure of that slot, and then they carried the rope over to the wood. One man held his end firmly down, while the other strode along the plank, chalking the measured length of the rope. When he finally reached his end of the rope, the chalk traced a long, straight line, ready to be guided into the saw. Except that, the first time, the line wasn’t quite as straight as the men would have liked it, and after standing over it in hushed conference for a few seconds, they began at opposite ends and scurried towards each other, carefully brushing the chalk off with their hands as if they were flicking insects off the wood. Then they repeated the exercise until they got it right. It was a charming, inch-tape-less vignette.

A short walk from Razzaq’s lot was the yard of Arjanbhai, another of Bapu’s friends. Arjanbhai’s yard was quieter and less manic, and Arjanbhai himself, working as he was on just a single small fishing boat at the time, was more patient and welcoming. (He also had a dark sense of humour. ‘You know why a wooden boat is better than a fibreglass one?’ he said. ‘If it sinks, you can always hold on to the planks and save yourself. But if it’s fibreglass …’) The boat, nearly completed, sat in the dead centre of the rectangular yard; its two future owners sat in plastic chairs, under the bulk of their vessel, trees managing to provide shadow long after they had been stripped of foliage and turned into lumber.

Via a rickety ladder, Arjanbhai led me on to the boat’s planked deck, smelling strongly of that morning’s coat of linseed oil. He pointed out two perfectly square gaps—one leading to a hold for ice, and the second to a larger hold to store fish—that would soon be covered by metalled hatches. Another gap in the deck waited for the installation of the boat’s wheel; peering through it, I could see the drilled-out hole in a longitudinal beam far below, through which the wheel would connect with the rudder. Within the boat’s innards, a carpenter was laying down pre-cut sheets of plywood to serve as the floors of the holds.

‘Is there anything happening today that is being done exactly as it was a century or two ago?’ I asked Arjanbhai out of curiosity.

Oh definitely, Arjanbhai said, and led me back down the ladder and towards the prow of the boat. Here, a boy in his late teens was dipping strands of braided cotton into a mix of oil and resin, and then inserting the strands into the crevices between the planks with the help of a chisel and a mallet, pounding them into place until the crevices were full. He worked with his face turned up, and drops of resin-oil mixture fell occasionally onto his forehead or his cheeks, mixing with his perspiration and running down to stain the collar of his shirt an even deeper brown. And thus he caulked the boat into absolute watertightness, the cotton and resin-oil unique to the boats of the Arabian Sea, but the technique itself, in its essence, exactly the same as that used for hundreds of years by boat builders all over the world.