Fishing Communities near Trivandrum, Kerala (2007)

Tomorrow we leave for China. We've just arrived in Bangalore from Mysore, which was the last stop on our 7 day vacation. Things change; plans are never concrete. For me, the best part of this vacation was the time we spent just outside of Trivandrum in Thumba, a fishing community near the southern tip of India. Here was an entire community that had lived intimately, with each other and with the sea, for many generations. Fishermen went out with their nets, often in little more than a few strapped-together pieces of wood, and spent the night on the sea. It was beautiful, but the prevailing sense from the community was that things were changing rapidly.

The 2004 Tsunami, even though it never hit this side of the coast directly, dramatically reduced the catches. Large trawlers with bigger nets catch all the big fish, and it seemed as if these fishermen were left to clean up the scraps. It was depressing to see a man come back after an entire night of fishing, alone, with nothing more than a few pathetic looking fish.


About a week earlier, we had met some fishermen who had come up to Thrissur in northern Kerala to talk about the hard times they had fallen in. They came with Peter, the local politician who represented their community. A couple of students asked if it would be possible to join these fishermen. At the time, I honestly didn't take their plight too seriously; it all seemed so abstract. Sitting in that large forum in a 3 star hotel, it was difficult to imagine the dangers these fishermen faced-- the raging sea, the eroding coastline, the water pollution, the shrinking fish supply. Our original intention was to go nightfishing with the fishermen, and it was only when we arrived at Peter's home did I realize the potential danger of doing so. The last thing I wanted was to drown, at night, in the middle of the Arabian Sea with fishermen who didn't speak English. Ultimately, though, the Sea Gods (or Peter, I suspect, who understandably didn't want to be responsible for the deaths of a bunch of clueless American students) would not let us go off to the sea.





The first night, they said the sea was too rough. The second morning, they said that the fishermen said that the catch wouldn't be big enough to justify a fishing trip. Thus ended our fruitless attempts at nightfishing.

We were also lucky enough to go to one of the morning markets where they sold fish. At 5 AM, before the sun rose, we arrived at a fishing market where trucks would come in with the previous night's catch. Some trucks arrived from Tamil Nadu and beyond, perhaps because of the dwindling fish supply in Kerala. As each truck pulled in, men would scramble for the back in what appeared to be an auction for whatever that truck had. The auction took place quickly. Crates flew off the backs of trucks and within five minutes the truck was cleared and the men would scramble for the next truck that came honking in.




The highest bidder would take the crate of fish, and would often then sell them to venders in other markets.




After that first market, we visited some of the other markets around Trivandrum, where most people would buy their fish. It was still early morning, and fish blood splattered on me when I got close to the fish cutting and cleaning.






Throughout our time in Trivandrum, I was lucky enough to stay in the home of Peter, his wife Magdalen and his daughter Dona. A large percentage of the Malayalam people of Kerala are Syrian Catholics, an esoteric branch of Catholicism I know little about. Apparently, this branch of Christianity has been in Kerala for many centuries, long before the Portuguese arrived with Roman Catholicism. THere are Roman Catholics, who have surnames like Pereira and Saldanha. The Syrian Catholics, at least the ones I met in Kerala, have an interesting tradition where the children take their father's last name as their surname. So Dona's last name was Peter, and my last name would be Fritz. Our family treated us wonderfully, and by the time we left, we all felt that there was an enormous debt that remained unpaid.