The Far Shore

THE RUKMAVATI RIVER FLOWS south through western Gujarat to the port town of Mandvi, from where, at high tide, wooden cargo boats up to four storeys high are periodically towed, empty, into the Gulf of Kutch. The boats, a kind of mast-less dhow known locally as vahan, which range in capacity from approximately 300 to more than 1,500 tonnes, are bound for dockyards around the Arabian Peninsula. There, the vessels will be fitted with diesel engines and conscripted into the millennia-old sea trade of the Indian Ocean, voyaging as far as Zanzibar and Madagascar to ferry goods—from dates and fish to timber and cloth—between Africa and Asia.

For hundreds of years, the boats, which were originally equipped with elegant triangular sails, have been built on the riverbanks in Mandvi by craftsmen using hand-tools and ancient techniques. A senior craftsman called an architect oversees each project, directing construction according to a plan that he may sketch out or simply carry in his head. The work begins with a single beam of curved hardwood, around 20 metres long, which forms the base of a ship’s hull. Around this spine are bent ribs, or timbers, to which long planks, running from stem to stern, are affixed using steel bolts. The wood is often cut, planed, chiseled and drilled by hand. To make a vessel watertight, thin cotton cord, soaked in oil, is wedged by hammer and chisel into seams between the planks. In all, it takes at least 25 labourers roughly two years to build a single boat, but a well-built ship can survive the rigours of Indian Ocean seafaring for 50 years.

Boatbuilding families several generations old still operate in Mandvi, which was founded as a port town by Rao Khengarji I, king of Kutch, in the late 16th century.Their materials, tools and techniques remain largely unaltered; but some changes have occurred. Before the use of machined bolts, washers and nuts, hand-forged iron spikes held together each ship. Alongside hand drills and old curved saws, power tools and chainsaws can now be found. And, because of deforestation, the wood, which was once sourced from regions across India, is now mainly imported from Malaysia, where an abundance of Shorearobusta, or sal wood—the boat builders’ material of choice—is produced.

The vahan-building industry’s fortunes have also risen and fallen over the years. In the 1960s, one scholar wrote what he called an “obituary” for the entire Indian dhow trade. By the beginning of 2010, however, the Economic Times was hailing the industry’s recovery, buoyed up by the comparatively high costs of trucking and the relative inefficiency of super-high-capacity cargo ships; in the space of a few years, Mandvi had gone from constructing four or five vessels a year to manufacturing upwards of 30. An increase in orders led to an influx of labourers from as far away as Andhra Pradesh and Orissa, who make an estimated Rs 200 per day working as carpenters. The boats themselves sell for anywhere between Rs 20 million and Rs 35 million.

Today, the industry faces an old but resurgent threat—a threat exacerbated by the very seaworthiness of the industry’s products. An increase in Indian Ocean piracy, which menaces all sorts of shipping around the Horn of Africa, has hit the dhow trade particularly hard. For, as it turns out, dhows are pirates’ conveyance of choice; pirates capture the boats and use them as so-called “mother-ships” to launch attacks on larger vessels. In early 2010, seven Indian dhows were hijacked, and 97 sailors were taken hostage, within a space of a few days. (Many of the seamen were from the district of Kutch, in which Mandvi is situated.) This led the Indian government to restrict dhows from sailing south of Oman.

The ban, which has been in place since March 2010, has hobbled both the dhow trade generally and shipbuilding in particular. According to an estimate reported in one Gujarati news outlet, 75 percent of dhows in the state were inactive in early 2012. And this has impacted manufacturing in ports such as Mandvi: Mint reported that only 12 boats were being built there in 2012. But according to Dr Edward Simpson, an expert on the Kutch dhow trade at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, authorities in Dubai are dredging its creek and building new facilities for wooden boats, an indication that they see future revenue in dhow shipping. Will another obituary need to be written for this centuries-old trade and the boat-building craft that supports it—or will Mandvi and its vahan once again sail on a rising tide?