Object No. 11: Chinese Fishing Nets

The Chinese fishing nets along the front in Fort Kochi, and scattered throughout the backwaters, must be one of the most photographed objects in the world. They stand for the mystery and history of South India and in addition they are extremely photogenic. It is so easy to catch them with the setting sun behind them and during the day they make a dynamic setting for the working life of the town.
Searching for the definitive photo I am struck by just how many pictures we have of the nets, up, down, against the sky. I think my favourites are the ones of the nets as they exist in the community, on the edge of the backwaters.

The nets probably originated in China, links with the East being well established long before Fort Kochi was established following the earthquake in the 14th Century. The Chinese had come to India in the first Century CE in search of pepper and set up their main trading port in Quillon (Kollam). Supposed to have been brought to India in the 1400s by Chinese traders, the spidery Chinese nets are found only in Cochin and China. They have huge, counterweighted nets strung horizontally under fingers of rough timber. The nets are dipped in to the water and after a time, they are raised to see what they have scooped up. In the backwaters they fish at night, a lantern attached to the top of the gantry attracting the fish. The date of their introduction probably relates to the well-documented voyages of the Chinese Admiral Zheng He, who is thought to have taken his fleet of large ships as far as the coast of Africa.

The earliest contacts with the far East were probably along the silk routes, entering India to both the East and West of the Himalayas. This is the way that Buddhism would have made its journey across the continents. Maritime trade quickly followed, and it is likely that ships were following the coastal routes to the North-Eastern Ports by the 7th Century CE. Exactly when this trade reached Kerala is unknown.

Today the nets in Fort Kochi have been restored and are now working hard for the tourist trade. They rarely catch fish, but one can usually be fished out of a bucket for a photograph to add to the obligatory tip.

Kochi-Muziris Biennale and some news

I haven't posted here for a while. This has been partly because my laptop melted down on me, courtesy of Windows 8.1 eating my graphics card. I had backed up some things, but not for a while, and lost the first two chapters of my next book, which caused me to go into grief mode for a couple of weeks while I frantically tried to retrieve everything I could.

While I was doing this I reflected on how different it is today from a few years ago. Much of what we do is in the cloud, my email and contact lists were safe, my book was on Amazon (although I had got a back up of the next-to-final proof-read version) my blog content was online and many of my pictures existed elsewhere.

Part of me was excited by a fresh start, a computer which is clean of everything, including software! Alerts for various things kept coming in to remind me of the ones before and I was in constant receipt of invitations to events at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, which obviously I could not go to, but liked to see.

So, how did the great art show go? This article says a lot about how it is seem in the aftermath.

http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/features/kochimuziris-biennale-is-here-to-stay/article7054382.ece#

So half a million people visited? Really? I remain open-minded about this. It depends how you count. If it is ticket sales, then the figure is likely to be accurate. If it is the number of people attending the venues, then it is likely to be wildly out, as there were so many different places to go, all accessible by the same ticket, but able to be counted as separate attendances. Plans for the next biennale are already being made, and I hope it is as successful in artistic terms as this one. It was, unlike the first one, truly international, amazingly varied and brave.

As KPM Basheer wrote:

"At a time when individual freedoms are shrinking and moral policing is expanding across the country, the unlimited creative freedom enjoyed by the artists at the biennale was envied by many visitors. The wide variety of media – metal, stone, paper, video, light and shadows, lit electric bulbs, audio and the wild imagination excited even the casual visitor. " 
That tolerance and freedom are under review in India is indisputable. Prime Minister Modi's honeymoon period is nearly over, and there are worries about the place of women in society and increasing religious divides.
While we were in Fort Kochi we visited the Teapot cafe, one of the unchanging features of a fast-changing town. The Muslim waiter who had told us that he was going to vote for Modi at the election was less enthusiastic now. "We will have to see." he said. "We have not seen much change so far, but it is early days."

Washing at the Dhobi Khana

P.S. We visited the Dhobi Khana in Kochi and found it turned into a tourist destination! The people were hard at work bashing the washing in the usual way, but also allowing tourists to try out their charcoal-heated irons. Amazing!

A small woman with a massive iron

Another feature: Risky Tours

Home again after our visit to the Kochi-Muziris Biennale

We arrived home a day late after our latest trip to India and Sri Lanka. I will not go into the misery of a delayed flight, 24 hours after a bout of Sri Lankan food poisoning. It was strange not trying to research anything, but I did do a couple of nifty visits to book shops to promote my book. They were very keen on a general, readable history of Kerala, so perhaps I shall resurrect the project and get writing again. Apart from a whistle-stop tour of the major tourist centres with our friends Karen and Mike- their first visit to India- I planned to visit the Kochi-Muziris Biennale. In the event, it was an even more whistle-stop tour of the exhibitions.

I wanted to see the art, but I also wanted to gain access to some of the warehouses which are not usually open, the main one being Aspinwalls. I wish we had had a fortnight to see it all! The organisers, mostly artists themselves, had done a fabulous job in getting together a show of such high quality in such difficult spaces against the problems which had bedevilled this year's exhibition. Add the India factor to this and I take my hat off to them. On the day we visited it was fairly quiet, apart from gangs of school children who seemed appreciative of most of the work.In the town, the general consensus was that the Biennale had not attracted much extra trade, but I hope this isn't so. Visitor numbers last year were high, and I hope they were not all school parties!

The incomprehensible title, Whorled Explorations, led to an exhausting round of trying to read the equally convoluted and incomprehensible descriptions of the artists' work. I have written this stuff myself. Sometimes the art work is made with the title in mind and then the description seems to make sense. Sometimes the work, or its antecedents, exists, and then the description has to be bent to fit the exhibition title. Mostly I had to give up reading after a couple of paragraphs before my head exploded. I had to resist thinking that it was mostly pretension, but....... Possibly some of it was lost in translation. In the end I gave up trying to make sense of the work and enjoyed it for its own sake, and very enjoyable much of it was too..

Aspinwalls warehouse had had a bit of a facelift, but did not look as though it was in a state of terminal decay, in spite of its long empty years. The art was good enough to distract me from the building, Charles and Ray Eames video being engaging enough to delay exploration for some time.

Aspinwalls offices

We had to rush off to the Pepper House before I had time to see the Anish Kapoor, and took advantage of the handy electric golf buggy which ferried us along the most unpleasant and hottest part of the road.

Pepper House

I have written about Gigi Scaria's bell before, and we had seen it from a boat on the previous day and were keen to get a close up view. It did not disappoint. The subtle metallic tones and the fall of water made it a most beautiful and restful sculpture. Here India intruded and made me sad. The photograph we took shows very clearly that a great deal of work and effort to locate this piece to its best advantage was undermined by the fatal lack of attention to detail which dogs everything in India.

Underneath the bell, where the sump for the circulation of the water had been installed, there was rough soil and gravel and the inevitable rubbish, not much of it washed in from the river. No attempt seemed to have been made to clear it up , or the patch of depressing grass to the side, where plastic bottles, polystyrene and unidentifiable litter lay everywhere. Did it detract from the sculpture? A little. Would it have happened at any other major art show? I very much doubt it.

The organisers had managed to put on a well-organised and world-class exhibition and I hope that the next one is even an improvement on this one, but somehow I fear that it will not gain international status until it takes more pride in its wonderful location.

The clue of the Bellarmine jar

In the humid chaos of Fort Kochi it is difficult to get a feeling of the long history of the city. There are clues in the architecture and the remains of the wharves and boatyards, and the inlet from the sea still carries its share of traditional fishing boats. Staying at the Fort House hotel I was brought up short by a pot sitting in a case which displayed an eclectic mix of items. These, apparently, were for sale on behalf of a widow who lived in the town.

My first reaction was that I was looking at a reproduction or forgery, but then I realised that I had never known the pot in question to be reproduced because it was a curiosity about which little was known. It was a Bellarmine jug, about 30cm tall and in near-perfect condition.

This was undoubtedly a survivor of the Dutch trade with India in the 17th Century. The Dutch dominated the Malabar Coast from 1661, when they took it from the Portuguese, until 1795 when the British made great inroads into the Indian trade routes. The pots, with their bearded faces and decorative stomachs were made for about two hundred years, originating in Germany, but sometimes exported via the Netherlands, where they were very popular. They gained their nickname after Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, scourge of protestants and inquisitor, and as they were used extensively for beer, their name was not a compliment to the austere Cardinal. Drinkers delighted in smashing the face off the pot.

Later they were sometimes used as "Witch Bottles", containing animal remains and arcane substances and buried somewhere about the house for protection, or as a curse. I think it is a shame that the jolly beer flagon has been appropriated by the sinister followers of witchcraft, as I have always been fond of the primitive feel of these stoneware pots and their honest salt glazes.

I was very tempted to buy the jug, which was on sale for a modest amount. I looked up the price on a couple of antiques sites and told the hotel what they had, but could not see myself hefting a heavy, antique pot onto the plane home. It is something I regret now, as I would have liked to have one of the rare clues of Fort Kochi's past.

There is a very interesting article on Bellarmines here:
http://cka.moon-demon.co.uk/KAR007/KAR007_Bellarmine.htm

The Fort Kochi Lorry

One of my most enduring memories of Fort Kochi is the lorry. It sat outside the police station in Fort Kochi for years waiting the resolution of its court case, getting more and more forlorn and more and more spattered with bird poo and draped with vines every time we saw it.
It seemed appropriate on our last visit that it was gone, replaced by a selection of broken and deserted autorickshaws which would probably be gone before they got to their day in court.


The owner presumably did not have the money to release the vehicle, and possibly not the driver.
One night, on his way home and possibly a little fuddled from toddy, which he denied ever drinking, Narayan swerved to miss a cyclist and demolished a wall and the front of his car.

Anil was called to the police station in the middle of the night, where a terrified and intimidated Narayan was trying to explain that if he hadn't demolished the wall he would have demolished the cyclist. Large amounts of money changed hands to prevent the case going to court, a process which could have led to Narayan being in prison for several years and the costs going even higher.
To make matters worse, he lied about his age. Although he was properly licensed and insured, the police inspector thought that he was too old to be driving and took his license away. On reflection, and a further sum of money, it was only taken away for a year. This was bad enough as it was his means of support and there is no social security in India.An additional stress was his usual futile attempts to amass enough money to make a good match for his daughter.
Narayan spent the year working as "security" for Anil's brother, possibly as a night watchman and we doubted whether we would see him again. In the end he turned up at the wheel again, as cheerful and as gung-ho as before.

Text versus pictures

One of the most frustrating things about writing the book has been that I haven't been able to include pictures. Nothing shows the reality better than a photograph snapped in an instant of something unexpected.
Some of my favourite pictures show the way that the past and the present are always mingled together.

An elephant on the road

When we first went to India the Internet cafes were everywhere and always busy. For a few rupees you could struggle with the dodgy connections and eventually get an email through. Hotels were sometimes equipped with reasonable speed connections, but here too, you  needed patience and a non-urgent situation not to go mad as the times whirled and everything cut out at the crucial moment.

Today things are different almost everywhere you go, but a real revolution has come in the decision to skip land lines and go straight to wireless infrastructure.
Once there was a shack with STDC in large and wobbly letters on its side, where you could make a trunk call,. in every village and every stopping-place. These are now confined to remote areas, and even there the mobile phone is ubiquitous. Cheap tablet computers are advertised everywhere and the traditional PC has never arrived.
This picture of a mahout on his way somewhere is typical, phone clamped to ear for the next arrangement.