Munambam harbour

The story of Munambam harbour

Come at the right hour and the sequence reads itself. A boat that has been out for ten days to three weeks comes in with something in the order of fifteen tonnes in insulated compartments. The catch is landed, sorted into trays, and auctioned in lots — at the mini-harbour towards Pallipuram the auction starts around four in the morning, and the money is settled in cash at the office by early afternoon. The first boat back with fresh fish gets the best price of the day, which is why the run home is a race.

The crews are not what most visitors expect. A boat carries roughly fifteen to eighteen people — the syrang, who is the captain, an assistant, an engine driver, a net specialist, a cook and general crew — and very few of them are Malayali any more. As education and other work opened up locally, the trawler crews came increasingly from Tamil Nadu, particularly Colachel, and from West Bengal, Odisha and Andhra Pradesh, brought in by daily van. The harbour runs on migrant labour, and that is one of the more honest things you can learn standing here.

Munambam does not only send boats out; it builds them. Trawlers made here go to Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Goa, and the yards are worth as much of your attention as the quay. The scale of the change is easy to state: the first trawlers of the Indo-Norwegian Project, built at Kollam in 1954, were about twenty-two feet long and went out for one to three days. Seventy years on, boats built at Munambam run to a hundred and twenty feet, tow nets around two hundred and forty feet long, and stay out for ten to twenty-five days on six-hundred-horsepower engines.

The supporting machinery is half the interest. Ice plants crush and funnel ice into the holds; hulls are insulated with foam and fibreglass; navigation is GPS, echo sounders, wireless and satellite phones, with crews passing each other coordinates and a standing Munambam meeting point known as 'ten-ten'. Steel frames and hulls replaced timber about twenty-five years ago. Master builders — mesthris — run the yards, and the knowledge passes by apprenticeship rather than down families.

Read the boats and you can read the coast. Hulls are painted by home state — Kerala blue, Karnataka red, Tamil Nadu green — with licence numbers painted up and renewed annually. Once you know that, a row of moored trawlers stops being a wall of colour and becomes a map of where the south-west coast's fleet actually comes from.

And then the part the brochures leave out. Trawling is why this harbour is big, and it is also why Kerala's inshore fishery is in trouble: an estimated eighty per cent decline in some varieties along this coast, nets that take juveniles, eggs and migratory shoals, and damage across a couple of hundred non-target species. The state's answer is the monsoon trawl ban, roughly fifty-two days across June and July, when the fleet ties up. Local fishermen will tell you the ban has helped. Munambam is genuinely impressive and genuinely contested, and you should stand on the quay knowing both.

Legend & myth

Look north-east across the river mouth from the harbour wall. That low green shore on the far bank is Kodungallur, and standing a short way inland on it is a building that claims to be the first mosque ever raised in India — and, by one reading, the first outside the Arabian peninsula. The legend attached to it is the strangest and most consequential story on this coast, and Munambam is the closest working place to where it is supposed to have begun.

The tale is told of a Cheraman Perumal, one of the last Chera kings of Kerala. Standing on his palace balcony one night, he watched the moon split in two and rejoin. He called his astrologers, who could not explain it. Then Arab travellers passing through his port told him that a prophet in Mecca had cleft the moon as a sign. The king, so the story goes, divided his kingdom among his chieftains, abdicated in secret, took ship for Arabia, met the Prophet, accepted Islam — and died on the voyage home, having sent his companions ahead with instructions to build mosques along the Malabar coast. The first of them, tradition says, went up at Kodungallur in 629 CE, in the Prophet's own lifetime.

Historians are not persuaded by the date. The Cheraman Juma Masjid is commonly attributed by scholarship to the eleventh century, four hundred years later than the legend claims, and some accounts place the episode itself a full two centuries after the Prophet. The moon-splitting, the abdication and the voyage belong to a genre of conversion narrative rather than to a chronicle. What is not in dispute is the thing underneath: Arab traders were on this coast in the seventh century, Islam arrived here by sea and by commerce rather than by conquest, and it arrived early — centuries before it reached northern India by land. Kerala's Muslim history begins with merchants stepping off a boat at a river mouth, and this is the river mouth.

That is worth carrying while you watch the fleet come in, because it is the same trade. The boats crossing the bar at Munambam at six in the morning are the last working end of a sea route that carried pepper north and brought a religion south, and did so long before any European reached India. The harbour is not a monument to that. It is simply what is left of it, still running.

One much smaller claim comes with the harbour and is worth getting right, because the sources blur it. Munambam is regularly called the largest fishing harbour in Kerala. What the record supports is that it is the largest in Kochi. Kerala has a long coast and a good many harbours, and the state-wide superlative is not one we can stand behind — the Kochi one is impressive enough and has the advantage of being true.

The other thing worth correcting is on this page and it is ours. We wrote that the trawler crews come from Tamil Nadu, West Bengal, Odisha and Andhra Pradesh. The survey figures say Assam, not Andhra — and they say a great deal more than that. Munambam has the highest concentration of migrant labour of any mechanised fishing harbour in Kerala: about 78 per cent, against roughly 58 per cent across the state's fisheries sector as a whole. The present composition of that migrant workforce is about 43 per cent from Tamil Nadu, 31 per cent from West Bengal, 13 per cent from Odisha and 10 per cent from Assam. The Bengal, Odisha and Assam share is recent, arriving largely after the pandemic, while workers from Colachel in Tamil Nadu — who dominated these boats until about 2020 — increasingly prefer harbours closer to home.

So the honest description of what you are watching at four in the morning is not a Kerala fishery. It is a fleet owned and built in Kerala and crewed, four times out of five, by men from somewhere else — and that has happened within about two decades, as education and other work drew local men off the boats. It is the single most consequential fact about this harbour and it appears on no board at the gate.