Chinese nets

The story of Chinese nets

The mechanics are worth watching properly rather than photographing and moving on. The net hangs from cantilevered arms over the water; at the landward end a set of large stones is roped to the frame as a counterweight. The crew walks the beam down, dropping the net flat into the creek, leave it a few minutes, and then haul — running along the platform, hand over hand, using their own weight and the stones together to lift the whole spread clear of the surface. It takes several men and a few minutes, and it cannot be done alone.

Then comes the part the photographs never show, which is that most of the time there is almost nothing in it. A dip might bring up a few small fish. The economics of a shore-operated lift net are the economics of patience and repetition: the net is cheap to run and catches what happens to be passing, so it is dipped again and again through a working tide. If you stay for one lift you will probably see it come up nearly empty, and that is not a bad day — that is the job.

Kumbalangi's nets are spread out rather than lined up. Fort Kochi's are a row on a seafront with a promenade behind them and a crowd at sunset; these stand where the fish are, along creeks and channels around the island, which is why you see a few from any one bank and why the best way to see more is from a canoe. From the water you also get the thing you cannot get from the shore: the full geometry of the cantilever, and how improbable it looks.

They are also getting harder to keep. A net needs a crew, and crews need the catch to be worth the morning. As younger people in the village move into other work and as catches thin, some platforms stand idle. The nets that are still worked here are worked by people for whom this is income, not heritage — and that is precisely the thing that will decide whether they are still standing in twenty years.

The other pressure is the structure itself, and it is the part visitors never think about. A cheena vala is a large timber machine standing permanently in brackish water: the netting perishes and has to be replaced, the ropes chafe through, and the main beams and the uprights rot from the waterline down and eventually have to be cut out and renewed. Good hardwood for that is expensive and increasingly hard to source, which is why you will see repairs made in whatever is available — coconut trunk, salvaged timber, steel pipe — and why an owner who has had a poor season may simply let a platform stand and go quietly derelict rather than spend on it. Almost every idle net you pass here is idle for that reason rather than because the fish left.

Legend & myth

Almost everything you will be told about where these nets came from is contested. The popular account — repeated on signboards, in guidebooks and by most guides — is that they were brought to the Malabar coast by traders from the court of Kublai Khan, which is where the name cheena vala, 'Chinese net', is said to come from.

The competing account is that they arrived far later, with the Portuguese, carried from Macau rather than directly from China. It is argued at least as strongly, and the honest position is that the origin is not settled. We have flagged the same disagreement on the Fort Kochi nets, and nothing about the Kumbalangi ones resolves it either way.

One detail settles part of the argument on its own, and almost nobody notices it. Kublai Khan died in 1294. The nets are generally placed on this coast between about 1350 and 1450 — fifty to a hundred and fifty years after him. Whatever brought them, it was not a gift from his court, because his court no longer existed. What does line up is the era of Zheng He, the Ming admiral whose enormous treasure fleets worked these waters in the early fifteenth century, and whose chronicler Ma Huan produced what is thought to be the earliest written reference to Kochi anywhere.

There is a third account, less often repeated and more specific than either, and it is the one that best explains the shape of the thing. On this version the Portuguese did not carry the nets from China at all; they picked up a much smaller shore-operated lift net further east, on the Mekong, where variants of it are still worked, and the enormous cantilevered version is a local enlargement built to suit a wide, shallow, tidal backwater. The detail that keeps the question open is that these nets are found nowhere else in India. A device supposedly introduced by a seafaring trading empire with ports the length of the coast somehow took root in one estuary and nowhere beyond it, which is a strange thing for an import and a very ordinary thing for a local invention with a borrowed name.

What is not in dispute is the name. Malayalam has called them cheena vala — Chinese nets — for a very long time, whatever route they actually took to get here.

It is worth knowing what has happened to the famous row, because it complicates the assumption that the watched nets are the safe ones. Fort Kochi had around 22 net structures three decades ago and is down to roughly a dozen; AFP reporting in 2014 found the surviving crews hauling about a hundred times a day where they once hauled two hundred and fifty, and quoted one of the oldest operators, V R Simon, then 75, saying plainly, "We live like beggars." Kerala Tourism answered with money — ₹1.5 crore initially, and eventually a ₹2.40 crore scheme through the consultancy KITCO to renovate eleven nets and build viewing platforms. Nine years on it was still unfinished: roughly ₹1.20 crore of teak and kalasanti wood had been bought and left stacked since 2017, operators' bills of a few lakh sat uncleared over a GST registration problem, and in the meantime most crews had propped their nets up on lengths of steel pipe because the timber never arrived. The postcard row is now partly a steel structure waiting for its own restoration budget to be spent.

And there is a claim about Kumbalangi's nets specifically that is worth stating, because it inverts what most visitors assume. Fort Kochi has the famous row: a handful of nets on a promenade, photographed several thousand times a day, kept working in significant part because being watched is now part of the business. Kumbalangi has more than a hundred, spread along creeks with nobody looking at them, worked because a household needs the fish. The postcard is at Fort Kochi. The living tradition is here — and the honest corollary is that it is the one more likely to disappear, because nothing about it is being subsidised by an audience.