By Leandré D’Sousa
Thirteen women are seated along the water’s edge at their village. In front of them lies a table filled with shiny crab heads, crustaceans, dried prawns, and fish coated in salt. A patch of gauze is handed over to them. Picking up the seafood, they begin to wrap the white bandage tightly over each specimen. Cocooned inside and resembling tombs, the fish is wound with a string and hung over a bamboo column. Mummification is an ancient technique, and, for an indigenous fishing community in the metropolis of Mumbai known as the Kolis,1 it has been a customary practice to preserve food passed on from the Paleolithic period.2 With great pride, the women show off their embalming skills. The action, interlaced with secrets of the ocean, is their story and forms the setting for this piece.
Contemporary artists Parag Tandel and Kadambari Koli belong to the Tandel family of the Chendani Koliwada (“village that opens to the sea”) in the district of Thane, Greater Mumbai. As part of their respective practices, each began chronicling how their surroundings were being altered—through reckless urbanization, the invasion of industry, the seepage of pollutants into the sea, and the effects on marine life and the Kolis who depend on it for sustenance. They observed how these intrusions affected the sociocultural and economic well-being of their community and how they had to cope and adapt to survive. With many young Kolis abandoning fishing altogether, and with major infrastructural projects threatening to displace entire settlements that have existed at the tip of Mumbai’s shoreline from the precolonial era, the Tandels feared their ancestral way of life was in danger of vanishing.
As witnesses to this transition who aim to reverse the process of decay, Tandel and Koli reinstated an existing fund from the 14th century that was once used to support families in times of need3 and launched the Tandel Fund of Archives (TFA).4 Operating as an interface between the community and the city, TFA positions itself as a pop-up museum. It is a repository and the voice of 500,000 Kolis inhabiting over 240 Koliwadas in Mumbai. Memories once forgotten that now exist as fables are being reconstructed. Personal stories can find shelter. The Kolis themselves are both subjects and protagonists of the archive, which mirrors the matriarchal nature of the community. Placed at the forefront of that archive, women steer the city’s fishing industry, supplying fish and running the markets and their households.
A Waning Culture of Ancient Seafarers
A visit to the Tandel home is like stepping into a portal where time drifts to a stop. With the chaos and cacophony of the city behind us, the Chendani village comprises cottages, one-story dwellings that overlook the Thane creek dotted with stacks of fishing nets, and boats floating on the water. Parag’s mother, Aai, prepares a simple meal from their morning catch. With the aromas of fish and the salty sea all entangled, you are taken on a voyage as Parag, Kadambari and Aai, speaking in a dialect known only to Kolis. They recount their past, like the story from their childhood about the sea monster mankaape (“neck-cutter”) who is ready to chop the heads of naughty children venturing out to the water alone. Or how they depend on the lunar cycles that control the tides to determine their fishing patterns. You’ll hear of sea creatures you thought only existed in legends.
For the Kolis, the ocean is their forest. Being in close proximity to it is paramount, as it ensures that the village can function independently and in isolation from the rest of the city. Parag provides a visual map of the terrain that encompasses freshwater wells; demarcated sections for socializing, drying fish, making salt, and docking boats; and the ocean. With pride, he narrates the history of the Tandels who were ancient mariners and navigators with acute knowledge of the stars and the ocean’s currents. But they faced severe losses under the pressures of industrial development along the coastline, chemical discharge, and later silting rupturing ancient fishing bloodlines. He recollects that they “used to trade dry fish and spices with Kochi, Sri Lanka, Burma, Japan, Saudi Arabia, Africa, and Oman. Kadambari’s grandfather used to trade for corporations in Mumbai and my grandfather with the British and Parsis.” Today they are fishermen for the city.
The story of the Chendani Koliwada is also peculiar. It was the first village to be connected to the main city after the first passenger train in India began running between Bombay’s Bori Bunder to Thane on April 16, 1853. Because of Chendani’s mercantile nature, its people were wealthy and educated. As a result, they were the first to lose their language. “Culture is protected by illiteracy. Once educated, you move away from your culture, language and customs,” states Kadambari. She continues, “Our financially wealthy status meant that different communities like the Shaivites, Brahmins, Portuguese traders, and Christian missionaries started encroaching on our land. [They] built temples but then banned us from entering them because we were fishermen and, at the time, crossing the sea was forbidden. So even though the temples were funded by us, we were not allowed inside them.”
At the end of the meal, Aai reminds you not to throw away the fish bones or shells of prawns and crabs as they are all preserved in her collection or turned into crafted objects adorning their home.
The Archive as a Tool for Empowerment
Working at the intersection of aesthetic and archival practice, the TFA project carves a new fissure in how we represent our past, how memory is revisited, and who tells the story. Encouraging a phenomenological approach, it turns into an instrument for creative and social agency. People are at its core, their stories, histories, and knowledge its greatest asset.
Parag and Kadambari call it an “autoethnographic project archiving the shifts in the lives of communities living on the peripheries of the ocean. We are interested in what people want in their museum, how they perceive and engage with the archive and how they disrupt existing patterns of knowledge creation. We want to build a living museum of memories.” Favoring a relational approach to representation not only enriches the collection but also enables a process of revitalization of the community—languages, epistemologies, pedagogies that privilege indigenous expression.5
Drawn from oral narration, folk song performances, community gatherings, ceremonial practices, and the daily tasks of fishing and trading, the material in the archive is shared by the community and consists of still and moving images, objects, tools, publications, pedagogical symposia, and crafts. In both tangible and intangible form, it is disseminated through creative projects, public pop-ups, contests, workshops, books, and discussions.
These nonlinear methods challenge processes of collection and cataloguing. The materials generated are vessels of information in which crucial data is encoded. By engaging with the evidence, we gain insights into artisanal fishing methods, tools, and cuisine. We extract information on patterns of thought related to the primordial interactions between humans and territory. In this way, colonial taxonomies—that is, colonial ways of knowing and classifying—are subverted.6 The archive emphasizes the physical act of making, along with ritualistic practices, gatherings, and discussions that bring our attention to how knowledge is produced, stored, and communicated.
Mapping the dialectics between loss and preservation, the archive traces alterations in language, livelihood, identity, culture, landscape, and home. Recognizing the need to safeguard this accumulated and ancient knowledge, TFA sits on the threshold between honoring memory and addressing the present context. It is the only visual testimony created from within the community. A vital record of imperial and postcolonial history’s impact on the fisherfolk, it also leaves space for the possibility of emancipation by initiating a process of decolonization.
Through various process-based initiatives such as Ek Bagal Mein Chand Ek Bagal Mein Rotiyaan (2017), Let There Be Bounty Everyday (2020), and Estuaries of Waning Sounds—Cycle 3 (2022), the archive—bound by the geography of place—alters into a performative space of lived experience.
Knowledge as Collective Experience
In 2017, as part of [en]counters—Daily Ration, a public art festival staged by ArtOxygen7 to interrogate the city’s food heritage, Parag—Kadambari and their families gathered the women from Chendani in a participatory project Ek Bagal Mein Chand Hoga Ek Bagal Mein Rotiyan (One Side Lies The Moon, On The Other Lies The Bread). The title takes a metaphoric glance at the two faces of the moon, referencing two key aspects—the moon and roti (bread). The moon refers to the community’s attachment to the lunar calendar for navigation and trawling fish. The roti stands for the community’s coping mechanisms during the economic shifts of the 1960s, when fishermen abandoned the trade and women began making and selling rotis for daily wages.
Reflecting on the drying up of trades and ecosystems, the women decided to host a dried seafood cooking contest. It is said that the fishermen used to dry up to 33 species of prawns that were then fried, pickled, or cooked as fast-food meals. This number has decreased to only 13, suggesting that the variety of recipes has also diminished. But the women retraced and revived recipes that had left their homes only to have them return to their kitchens. They resurrected 13 dishes once cooked by their grandmothers. The meals were served at the contest and judged by the entire village.
The occasion was held on November 12, 2017, a day of reverence, according to the Koli calendar, when the community remembers something that is no longer present. The women and Parag presented a manuscript documenting the survival of these dishes and carrying personal narratives and illustrations of a landscape that has succumbed to the pressures of uncontrolled growth. Supported and published by Parag’s gallery TARQ8 and handwritten by the women in Marathi, the text allows us to learn about the contestants from inside this network.
Unlike the others, Kanchan Ganesh Koli uses a machine to make her rice rotis, producing more than 1,000 that she supplies daily to 15 restaurants. Nital has presented a Bombay duck curry in coconut milk, while Bhoomika Koli, aged 73, has a wealth of recipes passed down from her ancestors. These chronicles are interspersed with 13 drawings by Parag. Reflecting both economic and cultural loss, the landscape is unrecognizable, depicted in jet-black lines against a white backdrop. In these drawings, the built and natural heritage is suspended, inverted, and trapped. Buildings and construction sites are afloat, while trees are uprooted, mountains fragmented, and fish skeletal and bloated. Accompanying the recipes and intimate stories, the drawings stir feelings of alienation and exile.
An exhibition of artifacts was also shown alongside the book and the contest. Showcased here were materials retrieved from the ocean, such as creek silt, bones, salt, terracotta residues, branches from the mangrove forest, shell sculptures, mummified objects made from dried fish, and rice totems (recalling that the fishermen were also rice farmers). The exhibition turned these materials into a dystopian record of the past.
From the Personal to the Social
March 2020 was an unprecedented time for the Kolis. Under a stringent lockdown, fishing activity had ceased altogether. To preserve and store food is a common custom among Kolis. Stocked throughout the year, dry fish is only used during the monsoons, which mark the end of the trawling season from June until September. However, with fresh seafood unavailable that March, Parag, Kadambari, and Aai had to open up their reserve of dried seafood.
At the time, Sunaparanta Goa Centre for the Arts9 initiated an online platform for artists titled Surviving Self-Quarantine, inviting cultural practitioners to share strategies on how to survive isolation. As part of this program, Parag began a video series taking over the foundation’s Instagram handle every Friday over 11 weeks. Spending the days cooking with Aai, he began sharing recipes using seafood and ingredients consumed only in Koli homes. Let There Be Bounty Everyday is a compilation of 11 videos shot on a mobile phone and superimposed with folk songs. The recipes are complemented with anecdotes from the archive’s reservoir.
In the kitchen, Aai washes the fish, chops the vegetables, and blends coconut, tamarind paste, and the famous Koli masala to enhance the flavors. Head, eggs, intestines are all prepared with vegetables. The bones of large fish are a delicacy from which the marrow is sucked out. Baby shrimp of many varieties is used for cutlets or pancakes. Gravies are often served with rotis, fried dough, or pancakes.
We learn that davla is a wild creeper that grows in salt marshes, rich in calcium and known among western coastal communities. Parag picks out the leaves directly from the mangrove forests. The creepers are mostly prepared with crabs or fresh river shrimps, but, during the lockdown, the fishermen were unable to connect with their local crab breeder and used dried shrimp instead. We also discover influences from the Portuguese after the 16th century, such as eating juvenile or pregnant fish, which was once not allowed. There is evidence that Omanis used to live in the Koliwadas. The technique of sun-drying fish using salt was adopted from Omanis, and Pir, the Omani saint, is worshipped by Kolis every Thursday.
The final video celebrates Nariyal Purnima (Coconut Day) on the full moon, which commemorates the moment fishermen across India return to sea. Offerings are made to the sea god as the fishermen embark on their first journey in boats adorned with flowers. On the auspicious occasion, a special recipe from Parag’s paternal grandmother (1901–1992) was made. As kippered swordfish and steamed rice were simmering on the stove, we were informed that the food stored at home had finally run out.
Between the Moon and the Ocean
Estuaries of Waning Sounds—Cycle 3, inquires into the community’s linguistic heritage. Presented in January 2022 at the exhibition New Natures by the Goethe Institut—Max Mueller Bhavan,10 it aims to create a dictionary of words spoken and written in Koli dialect, to trace their origin and to understand the role of language in shaping cognition. Investigated through poetry and folk songs, the project sheds light on the deep interconnection between Kolis and the ocean.
How did terms such as bocharee for barnacles or kavla for oysters find their way into the language? The project involved the Chendani, Vitawa, and Machimar Nagar villages in three different sites of the city (Greater Mumbai, Navi Mumbai, and Thane). Workshops were held at meeting grounds used for social events. The community came together to collate words and meanings from traditional songs and narratives of past and contemporary situations into Marathi, Hindi, and English.
We revere the moon and ocean and encounter the legacies of Dhavla in a compilation of folk songs titled Aai Majhi Konala Pavali? (referring to the goddess Ekvira). A poetry form containing rituals of Koli marriages, the Dhavlarines were said to commemorate weddings and births, and according to Kadambari, “we found a mention of the poetry form in a 12th-century Sanskrit text known as Manasollasa.”11
Performing Memory As a Site of Resistance
Memory is frail. It is susceptible to forgetfulness. Within the archive, it is forever protected. But TFA is deliberately impermanent, left open, as if echoing the very histories it contains and acknowledging that they are liable to erasure. Preservation and loss are in perpetual dissent. Change is inevitable. But the trauma from systemic marginalization, the destabilizing of lives (and livelihoods), runs too deep. In an attempt to suture festered wounds, TFA is an act of recovery. In this sense, it is a project of resistance. And a space where the marginalized can find utterance.
Inside the archive, the Kolis articulate their struggle and unrest. Using a language that is soaked in the ritualistic, TFA mutates into a powerful ideological field, the imagery and gestures that impact identity, a sense of belonging, and social reality. The body, as symbolic and physical, is situated at the heart of the archive, from which multiple narratives erupt.
Drawing on embodied knowledge and relying on performative gesture, women share their experiences, memories, and knowledge through the actions of roti preparation. They restore ancestral dishes to Koli cuisine, inscribing those dishes into a manual of lost recipes (Ek Bagal Mein Chand Ek Bagal Mein Rotiyan). We witness how memory is brought to life and transferred from the personal to the social, functioning as an archaeological site from where subjects on food insecurities, artisanal fishing practices are excavated (Let there be Bounty Everyday). Our senses are intensified as the word bank evokes memories pertaining to questions of habitat, labor, and their ties with the ocean (Estuaries of Waning Sounds—Cycle 3).
With the contributions of multiple authors, the archive morphs into a space for reciprocity and co-creation, enabling a state of constant enrichment and renewal.12 In perpetual flux, this porosity provides space for both dialogue and contestation, encouraging different perspectives and producing new reflections.
Thus, what TFA builds is a counternarrative, a reconfiguration of power relations.13 Questioning the validity and meaning of existing authoritarian and hierarchical structures, it puts forward methodologies and approaches that are concerned with notions of emancipation, empathy, and equality. It is precisely this level of emancipated creativity that provides an empowering model encountered through collective memory.
Parag remarks, “Since independence we have contested the State’s manipulations as [when] our homes were demarcated as slums and our people classified under categories like ‘Special Backward Class.’ What will be left of our identity if the fishermen are extracted from the oceanfront?”
Mumbai’s present urban policies continue to be detrimental to its original inhabitants, who have until now remained the main custodians of its waterways. Once the ocean’s caretakers are erased, their lineage and legacy will cease to exist.
Parag, Kadambari, Aai, and the Kolis assert their presence. The archive is their guardian.14 As we revisit their histories, we learn new lessons from them. As they share their memories, we become part of their experience. Emotions are aroused as we celebrate with them. The archive beats and continues to live.
Leandré D’Souza is the curator and program director at Sunaparanta Goa Centre for the Arts. She is the founder of ArtOxygen, a collective aimed at curating and producing art projects in open spaces. From 2010 to 2018, she organized [en]counters, a festival dealing with issues affecting the everyday life of Mumbai. She was invited to curate the participation of Indian and international artists at the biennial Haein Art Project in South Korea in 2013 and curated the 2015/16 & 2018 editions of Sensorium at Sunaparanta Goa Centre for the Arts. In 2014, she received an award for Culture and Change from the Prince Claus Fund for Culture and Development
Footnotes
1. The Kolis of Mumbai are an indigenous population of Maharashtra occupying the western region of India. They are a traditional fishing community, whose name derived from their occupation as fishermen in both sweet and salt water bodies. It is said that before Bombay (now Mumbai) became a colonial city, it was a fishing village of seven islands inhabited by Kolis, the city’s natives. They named the main island Mumbai after their patron goddess Mumbadevi. Their traditions and culture are closely connected with the ocean, their entire socio-economic system dependent on it for food, habitat and survival. Before the British reclaimed and connected the islands, they were estuarine lands formed by the Dahisar, Mithi, Oshiwara, Poisar, Tansa, Tasso and Ulhas rivers. “The estuaries are not just meeting points between rivers and oceans, they are thriving forests of flora, fauna and breeding grounds for marine species. But, rising pollution and reclamation has resulted in deserted water bodies,” explains Parag Tandel.
2. S M Edwardes wrote: “But older than the cocoa-nut palm, older than the Bhandari palm-tapper, are the Koli fishing folk of Bombay.” According to him, among them one could find “the blood of the men of the Stone Age,” in the Gazetteer of Bombay City and Island, Vol II, The Times Press, 1909.
3. The Tandel Fund in Chendani Koliwada, Thane (a central suburb of Mumbai) was founded by the Tandel families at the beginning of the 14th century to economically safeguard the community whilst the men were at sea.
4. Tandel Fund of Archives (TFA) is a “socially engaged archive and ethnographic pop-up museum of the Koli tribes (fisherfolk) of Mumbai. We are an open artist collective, the co-founders of this collective are Parag Kamal Kashinath Tandel and Kadambari Anjali Mahesh Koli.” https://tandelfundofarchives.org.
5. Hal Foster, “The Artist as Ethnographer?,” in The Traffic in Culture: Refiguring Art and Anthropology, ed George E Marcus and Fred R Myers, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1995, p 304.
6. Kristin Ross, “Translator’s Introduction,” in Jacques Rancière’s, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, vii–xxiii, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1991, p xi.
7. Founded in 2009, ArtOxygen (ArtO2) is a Mumbai-based art initiative curating and producing art projects in urban spaces. From 2010-2018, it organized [en]counters, a yearly art project in public spaces exploring issues related to Mumbai’s urban landscape and encouraging creative ideas & actions that transform the city’s everyday life. Daily Ration was the 8th edition of its festival, examining the city’s food culture. On the occasion, Parag Tandel was invited to develop Ek Bagal Mein Chand Ek Bagal Mein Rotiyaan, reflecting both his ongoing research as well as the deep knowledge that Kolis in the city possess. Given the symbiotic relationship to their natural environment, we wanted to develop a project not just in close association with them but where they would actually determine the shape and final form of the work. https://youtu.be/1_DvggiWres.
8. TARQ, Sanskrit for “discussion, abstract reasoning, logic and cause,” is a contemporary art gallery in Mumbai dedicated to nurturing a conversation around art and its multiple contexts. Founded in 2014 by Hena Kapadia, it was envisioned as an incubator for young contemporary artists pushing the boundaries of how contemporary art in India is exhibited and perceived. Parag Tandel has been part of several solo and group exhibitions namely, Chronicle (2016), Resurgence (2020), Event, Memory, Metaphor (2022). https://www.tarq.in.
9. Sunaparanta Goa Centre for the Arts was founded in 2009 as a not-for-profit, process-based arts foundation by Dipti and Dattaraj V. Salgaocar—today with the patronage of Isheta Salgaocar—with the vision to nurture, promote and encourage growth of the cultural ecosystem in the State of Goa and India at large. It was started with the aim to preserve the artistic and creative legacies of Goa, to encourage and promote innovative work in the visual arts, to serve as a bridge between the Goan art community and the national and international art communities. The Foundation has emerged as a premier cultural institution in India and abroad that harnesses excellence in cultural research and production; nurtures collaborations with arts professionals from the entire spectrum of creative fields; builds creative knowledge and capacities through pedagogy and aims at enhancing community engagement and participation. Sunaparanta is a leading cultural body dedicated to building sustainable partnerships in the region, nation and globally to promote cultural innovation and to develop the creative industries.
In 2020, in an effort to remain connected to its community, it announced #SurvivingSQ (Self-Quarantine) an open call inviting artists to share strategies on how to cope with isolation. The initiative was aimed at actively engaging with the community and to encourage a more participatory, thought-provoking and introspective dialogue. As part of the campaign, Parag Tandel launched Let There be Bounty Everyday. https://youtu.be/QNtiFhWGIQg, https://www.sgcfa.org.
10. In 2018, the Goethe-Institut/Max Mueller Bhavan, Mumbai initiated a lecture series titled State of Nature with interdisciplinary artist Ravi Agarwal that addressed the current ecological crisis. New Natures: A Terrible Beauty is Born is the second chapter of the project, curated by Agarwal in the form of an exhibition. Bringing together seventeen artists, it is a “conversation between different artistic positions and reflections on the worlds they inhabit and to invoke an ethics of healing, care, and responsibility.” https://www.goethe.de/ins/in/en/sta/mum/ueb/hmm/ex22/sn2022.html.
11. Written the Kalyani Chalukya king Someshvara III who ruled present day Karnataka. It contains details on the socio-cultural life of 11th and 12th century India.
12. Umberto Eco borrows from Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in Phénoménologie de la perception (Gallimard, Paris, 1945), where he reveals: ‘Consciousness, which is commonly taken as an extremely enlightened region, is, on the contrary, the very region of indetermination.’ … ‘We might see these poetical systems’,… ‘as expressing the positive possibility of thought and action made available to an individual who is open to the continuous renewal of his life patterns and cognitive processes. Such an individual is productively committed to the development of his own mental faculties and experiential horizons’. … ‘Our main intent has been to pick out a number of analogies which reveal a reciprocal play of problems in the most disparate areas of contemporary culture and which point to the common elements in a new way of looking at the world.’ Umberto Eco, ‘The Poetics of the Open Work’, in The Open Work, Anna Cancogni, trans, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1989, pgs. 17 & 18.
13. Chantal Mouffe stresses the importance and urgency of cultural and artistic practice to challenge the present dormancy of the capitalistic system of production. She refers to the public space as constituting ‘the battleground where different hegemonic projects are confronted without any possibility of final reconciliation.’ Chantal Mouffe, ‘Artistic Activism and Agonistic Spaces,’ vol 1, no 2, in Art & Research: A Journal of Ideas, Contexts and Methods, STUDIO 55, Centre for Research in Fine Art Practice, www.artandresearch.org.uk/v1n2/mouffe.html, 2007.
Mouffe puts forward the agnostic approach in critical artistic practice that “engages critically with political reality,” … “explores subject positions defined by” …“marginality,” … “investigates its own mode of production and circulation,” … experiments and “imagines alternative ways of living: societies or communities built around values” that question “capitalism.” Mouffe, “Art and Democracy: Art as an Agnostic Intervention in Public Space,” no. 14, in Cahier on Art and the Public Domain: How Art and its Institutions Reinvent the Public Dimension, NAi Publishers SKOR, 2008, pgs. 12 & 13.
14. Citing Suzanne Lacy, Suzy Gablik writes: “Like a subjective anthropologist,” … “[the artist enters] the territory of the other, and… becomes a conduit for [their] experience. The work becomes a metaphor for relationship—which has a healing power.” … “This feelingness is a service that artists offer to the world.” Suzy Gablik, “Connective Aesthetics: Art After Individualism,” in Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art, ed Suzanne Lacy, Bay Press, Seattle, Washington, 1995, p 82.