DEVELOPMENT
An empty sea, a silver beach
SUSAN VISVANATHAN
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Following the tsunami, the artisanal fishermen of Alappuzha face many threats that affect their traditional livelihood.
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Photo: Johney Thomas
Threatened existence: Fishermen on the Alappuzha coast find it tough to make a living.
PETER THAYIL, spokesperson of the Fisher’s Forum in Alappuzha, waits for me at Paravur Junction, near Punnapra with its famous rebellious and historical past. Today it’s a different story. His colleagues, who run the main office in the ba
ckyard of Leo 13th School in Alappuzha town in solidarity with the Fish Workers, put me in touch with him by telephone.
Peter is in the field, helping fishermen repair houses. We go to his house — he on his motor cycle, I more sedately in an auto rickshaw he has summoned. Peter is known to everyone; people smile and wave as he moderates his speed to match our vehicle. He has worked as an activist for decades in the Church and in the Fishers’ Voluntary Groups. He has organised what are called “self-help” groups. That is the story I have come to Allepey to hear... the condition of fish workers on Alappuzha beach.
Peter Thayil insists on paying the auto fare (Rs. 20) for me and his authority is such that the auto driver refused to take money from me saying, “Appacha said he will pay.” Appacha means grandfather, and Peter must be 45 years old. His son Tom has just finished school, and wants to become a social worker. Peter’s wife, wearing an ebullient gown, the conventional dress of many women in Kerala now in informal contexts, roasts peanuts for us. She is quite baffled that I want to go to the sea-side in the hot afternoon.
We walk the kilometre to the beach in the blazing light of an April afternoon. One of the self-help groups is now engaged in hiring chairs, vessels and canopies for weddings. There is a wedding tomorrow, so they are all in a state of excitement.... work is miraculous for these unemployed men.
No work
Further down the road, on the beach, a crowd of fishers are listlessly playing cards. “No work,” Thayil says. After the tsunami, the sea emptied of fish and left them without an occupation.
When I first came to study them in 1994 and 1995, it was a flourishing beach. There were hundreds of boats and shops, agents were bargaining and the reed baskets were full of glistening catch. The boats were of all sizes. Some were large and archaic; others small and quick with outboard motors. Japanese companies had stalls selling machines because, unable to get a ban on the trawlers, the artisanal fishers were using imitation as their device to stay afloat, sowing the seeds of their own destruction. Ten years ago there was a thriving sense of market, but local fishers knew even then that time was running out.
Now there is nothing. The boats rot in the tropical sun. Those few who still go to sea take unbelievable rafts made of thermocol, a new invention that costs nothing. They are able to catch a few small fish, but it’s really not worth any one’s while. In the nets appear a new malignant crab, which destroys everything — nets and fish simultaneously; also a ferocious small inedible fish that they call sea frog or kadal makri.
The trawler ban, which they fought for so long and so hard arguing for natural and ecological regeneration, was never put in to operation. They were able to get it only for 45 days instead of 90 during the spawning season and even that was broken with impunity.
In early 2006 I spoke to a company of state scientists in the fisheries department at the Centre for Disaster Management. They listened attentively while I spoke of Freire and the Pedagogy of Hope. This involves paying attention to local knowledge and incorporating the native Intelligentsia in Science and State projects. Within the fortnight, I read in newspapers of a government directive for the industrialisation of fishing — laboratory in a globalised market in a simple linear chain.
The job of the sociologist is to record. Many problems of modernism are truly about the extinction of occupations. Artisanal fishing is such a case. If diversity was the rule of nature, then rather than shrugging off communities in harmony with nature, our responsibility is to give them the space to breathe and live.
A lot of the “aid” that the tsunami brought in its wake never reached the fishers. The groups who were given this money diverted it to other channels, other dependencies, other “clients”. Patron-client relationships within the church and political parties are often based on traditional mechanisms of caste class hierarchies. The fisher people got excluded because the power brokers actually doled out a small percentage to the fishers and then diverted the rest to other needy non-fishers. It is imperative that these funds are audited, otherwise a large number of those affected by the tsunami will die as beggars and forgotten communities.
Forgotten community
Artisanal fishers seem to be a forgotten community in Ponnapra-Paravur. Those whose houses were not replaced live like perpetual refugees, according to Thayil, without toilets or medical help. The other 144 families have neat modern two-room dwellings with tiled roofs. But they have been rendered incompetent by the combined forces of unregulated trawling and post-tsunami aid politics. The women are the main earners now — going out as domestic labour and untrained helpers to the sick and old in private homes with salaries of Rs. 1500 a month.
A new generation has not been trained to fish but, with basic school education, now work as shop assistants. Manual labour is the other option but as the fishers say, “This is not their world and if they are victims, there must be a solution.” The 200 self-help groups, which Thayil co-ordinates on behalf of Fisher Workers Federations, is the first step towards autonomy till the sea is refurbished by Nature or culture, and these artisans can return to their traditional occupation which underwrites an organic perception of the sea.
The author is a novelist and anthropologist.
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