They never build a ship: they craft it in Kerala

Sep 9, 2007, 3:02 GMT

Kozhikode, Sep 9 (IANS) Artefacts in wood have a nostalgic charm. They have a quality of antiqueness and symbolise a heritage. For proof one has only to look at one of the largest wooden ships in the world - Al-Hashemi II - that sits in Kuwait, next to the Radisson SAS Hotel.

The perfectly crafted ship is not used for seafaring. It instead serves as a restaurant and a museum. But not many know that the craft behind it today remains the preserve of a few.

If you want to meet the craftsmen and get a first hand feel of the skill, you will have to travel east from Kuwait across the Arabian Sea to Beypore, a small town, in the suburbs of Kozhikode city in northern Kerala.

There you can still find a few old men who chisel and saw wood and nail the planks together to build huge ships, called dhows - once the chief mode of transport across the seas.

Nowadays, building a ship is a specialised science with advanced technologies and tools aiding the construction. But for the old men of Beypore, their shipbuilding theories can be summed up with a few thumb rules that have been perfected over long years.

Just listen to O.P. Andikutty as he unrolls a paper with the drawing for a dhow. 'The width of a dhow should be one-third of its length and the height should be half its width,' he speaks with confidence about the scales that govern the dimension of a dhow. He runs a shop, Asha Steel & Wooden Furniture, in Beypore.

The shop hardly gives away anything about the skill of this 78-year-old diminutive man, except for a few miniature dhows with masts and sails displayed for sale as showpieces for drawing rooms.

Andikutty is one of the senior 'maestiris' or craftsmen in Beypore. 'My father Unni was also a ship builder. We are carpenters. In the last 50 years, I may have worked on more than 1,000 small and big dhows. It never occurred to us to keep count of the work we executed,' says this modest man.

His younger brother Narayanan is now working on a dhow, with a keel length of 117 feet, for an Arab in Qatar.

'This dhow will cost around Rs.25 million. The work began this January and it will take about one-and-a-half years to complete the work,' says Andikutty.

The making of dhows on a substantial scale began in the area during World War II - before that Beypore mostly built small boats. It was a time of scarcity. The war made sea lanes inaccessible to trade and the circumstance gave rise to sea trade along the coast. This pushed up demand for the dhows as it was best suited for navigation along the coast and Beypore started getting orders to build these vessels.

The construction of dhows requires large amounts of wood. 'Teak (Tectona grandis) is the most preferred wood. However, Karimaruthu (Terminalia tomentosa) and Vaka (Albizia lebbeck) are also used for the purpose,' Andikutty says. These tree species are endemic to the Malabar Coast and used to be available in abundance.

The keel requires large-sized wood. The size varies according to the size of the dhow. 'The keel of the dhow we are now constructing is 117 feet. Nowadays trees of that size are not available here any more. We are now importing wood from Malaysia,' he says, inviting attention to one of the crises faced by the industry.

Beypore now gets very few orders. It was the labour unrest in the mid-1980s that dealt the most severe blow to this industry. 'The labourers wanted permanent jobs. We could not provide it as the making of dhows depended on the random orders we got,' he says.

The work needed a good number of skilled labourers apart from carpenters. Skilled men were needed even to saw wood, as machines cannot be depended upon in slicing special shapes. The services of khalasis, experts in moving heavy loads, were needed to move huge pieces of wood for precise placement. They were the ones who moved a completed ship from the workshop to the waters.

The labour problems made potential customers shun Beypore. Arabs started building the dhows needed for luxury vessels in their own country itself, hiring master shipwrights from Beypore.

Also, many shipwrights started seeking centres far away, like Mangalore, to avoid the militant labour unions of Beypore. Now, Beypore is sleepy and its shipbuilding industry in a shambles. The orders for dhows are very few and far between.

About the future of this ancient craft, Andikutty is less than optimistic.

'My children are graduates and have opted for other trades. They are not eager to hold the chisel and hammer. But there still are youths who are engaged in dhow making. They may develop the required skills and keep this tradition alive,' he hopes.

© 2007 Indo-Asian News Service