L23: Trades — Fishing & Agriculture

Good morning, everyone! I hope some of you had interesting experiences trying to teach a folk game last week. The best education is teaching — you learn something at a completely different level when you have to explain it to a child. Quick recap: Lectures 21 and 22 covered folk games of Goa — outdoor physical games, water and river games, board games, gender-specific game traditions, and the folk games revival movement. Today we make a significant shift: we move from play to work. Lecture 23: Trades — Fishing and Agriculture. [INTRODUCTION — 0 to 10 minutes] When we talk about trades and occupations in the context of cultural heritage, we are using the word trade in a broad sense. We mean a practiced skill, a body of knowledge applied to the production of food or goods, typically transmitted within a family or community and requiring years of apprenticeship to master. A trade is not just a job — it is a knowledge system, a relationship with materials and environment, a set of tools and techniques refined over generations. Goa's most fundamental trades are fishing and agriculture. These are not just economic activities — they are the material foundation on which all of Goa's culture was built. The rice paddy that fed the village allowed the village to have festivals. The fish curry that sustained the fishing community funded the fishing community's temple and music traditions. Without the rice and the fish, there is no Khatkhate and no Mando and no Dhalo. Today we will look at each in depth — fishing first, then agriculture — and we will pay attention to the knowledge systems, the tools, the communities, and the current threats. [CORE CONTENT — 10 to 40 minutes] Let us begin with fishing. Fishing is the oldest economic activity on Goa's coast, and it is conducted by one of Goa's most distinctive occupational communities — the Kharvi. The Kharvi are the traditional Hindu fishing caste of Goa, concentrated in coastal villages from Arambol in the north to Polem in the south. For the Kharvi, fishing is not just a livelihood — it is an identity, a spirituality, a cosmology. Their patron deity is the sea. Their festivals are timed to the sea's rhythms. Their village temples face the sea. Traditional Goan fishing operated on an intimate knowledge of the sea's seasonal behaviour — knowledge built up over centuries of observation and transmitted orally. Fishermen knew which months brought which fish — the Kingfish comes in September with the retreating monsoon, the Mackerel comes in dense schools in October-November, the Pomfret is best in December-January, the Squid season is February-March. They knew where to find fish — which seamount, which current edge, which season to fish the inshore versus the offshore grounds. This knowledge was a trade secret held within families and shared within the fishing community. The traditional fishing boats of Goa are themselves objects of cultural heritage. The Rampon — a large oar-powered fishing vessel — was used for beach seine netting, a technique in which a very long net is set in a wide arc from the beach, then hauled in by teams of men on shore. Beach seine fishing requires enormous collective effort — fifteen to thirty men pulling the net in rhythmic coordination. This collective labour had its own song tradition — hauling songs in Konkani that coordinated the pulling rhythm. When mechanised winches replaced the manual haul, these songs lost their function and began to disappear. The Machwa — a smaller catamaran or outrigger style vessel — was used for individual or small-crew line fishing in the near-shore zone. The Machwa fisherman operated alone or with one partner, going out before dawn, setting lines for specific target species, reading the current and the wind to position himself correctly. The knowledge involved in this solo operation — reading the sky, reading the water colour, reading the bird behaviour over schools of fish — is extraordinarily sophisticated. Traditional fish traps — called Khandava or Phad — were constructed from bamboo and wicker and set in river estuaries and mangrove creeks to trap fish on the tidal current. The knowledge of where to place a Phad — which eddy, which tidal phase, which season — was held by specific families who had fished particular river reaches for generations. This territorial knowledge was a form of intellectual property. The arrival of mechanised trawlers in Goa from the late 1960s — following liberation and the subsequent Blue Revolution fisheries development programme — transformed Goa's fishing economy dramatically. Mechanised trawlers could fish much deeper and further than traditional boats. They brought in vastly higher volumes. The incomes of mechanised boat owners increased sharply. But the ecosystem effects were severe: intensive trawling depleted fish stocks, destroyed seabed habitats, and disrupted the fish populations that small-scale traditional fishermen depended on. The conflict between mechanised trawler operators — who tend to be better capitalised, often not from traditional fishing families — and small-scale traditional fishermen has been one of the defining social conflicts in coastal Goa since the 1970s. Traditional fishermen's organisations — the Ramponkars, named after the beach seine technique — have been among the most articulate defenders of traditional fishing methods and of the ecological sustainability of the coastal commons. The Ramponkar movement is also a cultural heritage defence movement — it argues that the traditional fishing way of life, with its specific knowledge, tools, community structures, and relationship to the sea, is heritage worth protecting. Now let us turn to agriculture. Goa's agricultural landscape is defined by three systems: the khazan fields, the terrace cultivation of the Ghats, and the upland laterite farms. The khazan — the embanked tidal wetland system — is the most important and most distinctive of these. We have discussed khazan in the flora lectures, but let me elaborate on the agricultural knowledge it embodies. The khazan system requires the manipulation of tidal flow through sluice gates called manos. The mano opens at high tide to flood the field with brackish water for prawn culture, then closes to retain freshwater for rice cultivation. The timing of the mano operation — knowing when to open, when to close, how to judge the salt-freshwater balance for the rice variety being grown — is a specialised knowledge held by the Gaunkari community managers of the khazan lands. The Gaunkari is the traditional village land-holding institution of Goa — a community corporation that collectively owned and managed agricultural land, khazan fields, and common resources. Each Gaunkari had an annual distribution of income from its lands among member families called Gaucars. The Gaunkari system is pre-Portuguese and survived colonial rule in modified form. Today it survives legally but is under severe pressure from real estate development — many Gaunkari lands are targets for conversion to construction. This is an agricultural heritage crisis with deep cultural implications. Rice cultivation in Goa used a range of traditional varieties adapted to different conditions — red rice for upland cultivation, varieties tolerant of brackish khazan conditions, quick-maturing varieties for the short monsoon window of the Ghats terraces. These landraces — local crop varieties developed over centuries — are repositories of genetic heritage and agricultural knowledge. Many have disappeared as farmers switched to high-yielding improved varieties. Goa University's College of Agriculture at Dabolim and various NGOs have been involved in documenting and preserving surviving rice landraces. This seed conservation work is a form of heritage conservation that rarely makes it into cultural heritage discussions, but it should. Cashew cultivation is another critical agricultural heritage practice in Goa. The cashew orchard — typically on laterite hillsides — requires specific management knowledge: pruning technique, grafting for superior varieties, timing of the harvest, the management of the cashew apple for feni production versus fresh juice. The intergenerational transmission of cashew orchard management is a family heritage practice in thousands of Goan homes. Coconut cultivation — as we noted in the flora lecture — has its own elaborate knowledge system: selection of planting material, spacing, intercropping, the management of the toddy tap, the harvest of the nut at different stages of maturity for different uses. The coconut climbing technique — using a loop of coir rope and specific foot and body positions — is itself a skilled physical practice that is increasingly rare as young men move away from agricultural work. [ACTIVITY AND DISCUSSION — 40 to 55 minutes] I want to do a timeline activity. Draw a horizontal line on your notebook page representing the last 75 years — from 1950 to today. Now, based on what you know and what we have discussed, mark on this timeline: when did mechanised trawlers arrive in Goa? When did the Gaunkari system come under pressure? When did traditional rice varieties begin to be replaced? When did the khazan lands begin to be encroached upon? These are rough estimates — I am not looking for precise dates. I want you to see the pace of change. How many of these changes happened in one generation — between 1960 and 1990? [pause] What you see is that almost all the major disruptions happened within thirty years — the generation that saw liberation, the tourism boom, the mining expansion, and the Blue Revolution. That single generation experienced an almost complete transformation of the traditional economic base. And when an economy changes that fast, the knowledge systems, communities, and cultural forms attached to it face a survival crisis. Discussion Question 1: Traditional Goan fishing and agriculture carried enormous ecological knowledge — knowledge of seasonal fish behaviour, tidal management, rice variety adaptation. This knowledge is largely held by elderly practitioners and is disappearing. What practical steps could Goa University — as an academic institution — take to document and preserve this knowledge? Is documentation enough? Discussion Question 2: The Ramponkar movement argues that traditional beach seine fishing is more ecologically sustainable than mechanised trawling, and that the traditional fishing community has a cultural right to the coastal commons. The mechanised trawler operators argue that they have the legal right to fish, have invested heavily in their boats, and that restricting them is economically unjust. How would you mediate this conflict? [SUMMARY AND ASSIGNMENT — 55 to 60 minutes] Today we explored the two foundational trades of Goa — fishing and agriculture. In fishing, we examined the Kharvi community's ecological knowledge, the traditional boat types — Rampon and Machwa — fish traps and beach seine techniques, and the conflict between traditional and mechanised fishing. In agriculture, we looked at the khazan system and its management knowledge, the Gaunkari institution, traditional rice landraces, and the cashew and coconut cultivation knowledge systems. Assignment: Interview someone who has direct experience with either traditional fishing or traditional agriculture in Goa — a grandparent, a family friend, a neighbour from a fishing or farming community. Ask them specifically: what did you know that your children or grandchildren do not know? What knowledge has been lost in your lifetime? Write a 400-word account of the interview. This is living archives work. Next lecture — Lecture 24 — we take up two other important Goan trades: Toddy Tapping and the Mining Legacy. Toddy tapping is one of Goa's oldest and most culturally embedded occupations. Mining — iron ore extraction in Goa's interior — is one of the most contested environmental and cultural heritage issues in contemporary Goa. See you Thursday!