The Battle For Catfish

The Battle For Catfish - Puri - India

First published in Farang Untamed Travel in 2005

The Andhra fishermen of Puri on India’s east coast are fighting for cultural, financial and spiritual survival.

Part 1

First light on Puri Beach. Pentacotta fishing village, which grows like a misshapen appendix from the resort’s northern beach front, is coming to life. More than 10.000 people from Andhra Pradesh live in small one-storey stone and mud houses with thatched roofs, little electricity and no sanitation.

The beach is lined with hundreds of boats ready to brace the uncertain pre-monsoon weather. Thick clouds are rolling out of a gray dawn and the breakers crashing into the shore are foaming. In another couple of weeks, the rains will make trips into the Bay of Bengal near impossible.

Tata Babu is just 23 years old and commandeers one of the boats.

“Namaskar, good morning, we are getting ready to leave, to make an early morning catch.”

The young man is excited, “We have a new engine, first time today.”

Babu gathers his crew of six. The men, dressed in torn shirts and lungis carry nothing but their lunch in metal pots. Other crews assemble around their vessels. It takes more than twenty men to carry the heavy boats down to the water’s edge.

“There are twelve people in my crew. But usually only five or six of us go out. At the end of the day, we share the catch amongst the whole group.”

Babu shouts for his men, they are ready to go. The crew, up to their waists in the breakers that role in from the Indian Ocean, are pushing the boat into the surf.

One by one they jump on board. The driver, Dos, lowers the screw into the shallow water and cranks up the new engine. The boat jerks forward, the next outsurge carries us into open water.

A second boat stays close by. Babu waves and shouts across. “One net for two boats, we drop the net and then pull it in from two sides.”

A mile off the Indian coast, the two boats separate. The net, almost a kilometer long, drops into the dark water between them. The boat falls silent. Sette, a wild looking thirty-something with curly hair and a shirt that reads ‘GAP’, has a plastic bag wrapped in his shirt, containing matches, bidis and chewing tobacco. The men light up and watch the sun rise.

Orissa, one of India’s poorest states, has a population of over 35 million. Agriculture is the staple income and Oryans have never taken to the sea, despite a seven hundred-kilometre coastline rich in fish stocks. The British first introduced fishing in Orissa by encouraging fishermen from Andhra Pradesh to migrate to Puri in 1866. In 1956 another wave of Andhra people followed. Many of the inhabitants of Pentacotta village still have contacts to their home state and Babu makes several trips a year to se friends and relatives. As the fishermen from Andhra only marry within their own community, men regularly visit their southern communities to look for suitable wives.

The Andhra fishing communities are Hindu but their prayers are unique. Gods of the sea are offered sacrifices in the shadow of long bamboo poles, lined up in untidy bundles along the shoreline in front of the huts. Old inhabitants of the community, both men and women, are often sought after as mediums to communicate with spirits or deceased family members.

Babu arrived in Puri when he was six years old. “My uncle moved here with me and when I was thirteen, I went to sea.”

He remembers the first trip, “I was sick as a dog. But I got used to it quickly.”

There is little other work in the area. The men become fishermen and the women transport the daily catch from the beach to the factory or waiting trucks headed for the fish markets in Calcutta and Mumbai.

As the sun rises in milky clouds above the coastline, the crew signals to the second boat and starts hawling in the net. Dos, wrapped in a plastic sheet, pulls in the line with the markers.

“There are many jellyfish in the water.” The forty year old shows me his arms, covered in small pimples, caused by the stinging tentacles of the large brown invertebrates. Babu adds that some men have been killed by particularly vicious species.

The net is slowly pulled in and the six men take turns to free the meager catch from the line. Mackerel, small catfish, young sharks, hammerheads and reef sharks, and the odd puffer fish flop across the deck, but thirty minutes later, as the boats reconnect, barely ten kilos lie on Babu’s deck.

The sun is up; the now placid water reflects heat already. The two crews tie their boats together and head further out to sea. The Jagannath temple, Puri’s highest building slowly disappears in the distance.

Babu shouts, “Enough.” and the boats separate. Every move by every man on board is professional, well coordinated and never wasted. Pulling in the nets is extremely hard work and working days are up to 16 hours long. The crew, all good friends who help each other wherever they can, have little to say as the air around them heats up.

Babu looks worried, “Ten years ago, there were a lot more fish and we did not have to go so far out. These days, it’s much harder. Sometimes we catch nothing at all.”

Full page image published in Farang Untamed Travel by Aroon Thaewchatturat

Read Part 2 of The Battle For Catfish

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