Wooden boats have been used in the Arabian Sea for centuries. But today, they are built bigger, in greater numbers and at higher costs than ever before. Words by Richard Orange. Photos by Michael Rubenstein

Just a few hours after leaving the shelter of the Iranian coast, Haroon Sanghar, captain, or tindal, of the Faize Makdumi, gives the order to hoist the sail. ‘Fare ha kar,’ he yells and squints forward, watching the triangle of white cotton unfurl until he feels some of the strain come off the boat’s engine.

After ten gruelling and isolated months shipping livestock on the lawless Somalia coast, Haroon and his 15 crew are now only days from home. A clean-shaven man in his mid-20s, Haroon is the youngest tindal from the Sanghar family – one of the most prominent of the clans who build and operate Gujarat’s traditional wooden dhows, known as vahans.

For centuries, these boats have plied the Arabian Sea from the island of Zanzibar to the coasts of Arabia, Iraq, Iran and Pakistan. ‘We think we are the lucky people,’ says Haroon’s older brother Hussain. ‘We go everywhere: we go to Dubai; we go to Iraq. We are free.’

But Faize Makdumi and the Sanghar family’s way of life are no relics from the past, soon to be swept away in India’s tide of modernisation. In Salaya, the capital of Gujarat’s traditional boat-building industry, vahans are currently being built bigger and in greater numbers than at any time in living memory.

Big business
Propped up on his scooter on the muddy shoreline, Haroon is enjoying a well-earned month of shore leave. ‘It’s great,’ he says. ‘After a long time, we come back to play with our families, joking with them and sitting with them.’

But behind him rises the hulking wooden hull of the largest boat the village has ever built – a giant vahan capable of carrying more than 1,000 tonnes of cargo, and twice as large as was standard a few years ago. It stands improbably high against the lush coastal wetlands behind, its deck swarming with carpenters, labourers and errand boys making the finishing touches.

This is a cargo vessel on the same scale as the East Indiamen – the ships that the European merchants used to transport cotton, opium and spices from this same coast almost 300 years ago. ‘It’s like competition,’ says Hussain, explaining the growth of vahans. ‘When I came into this business, there were only 300- and 500-tonne boats – not more than that. But then in Pakistan, they started making 600 and 700 tonnes. If we didn’t start making them, we would have lost business.’

Hussain’s friend Adam Bhaiya, who heads the Salaya Sailing Vessel Owners Association, says that today, the village has 25 boats under construction, whereas just a few years ago, there would have been only two or three – and few of them are smaller than 700 tonnes.

The ship’s an impressive sight and I’m keen to meet the man behind it – Salemamad, the gaider or ship’s architect. ‘He is a very busy man,’ Hussain says apologetically after we’ve waited the best part of a day for him to arrive. ‘He is the most talented gaider. He has four boats under construction.’

But just as we are leaving, Hussain pulls his van to an abrupt halt. ‘There,’ he says, pointing. ‘That is Salemamad.’ It would be difficult to conceive of a less likely naval engineer. Salemamad’s mouth bulges with tobacco and betel nut, the red juice from which stains both his teeth and his sun-cracked lips. A dirty tunic covers his swollen gut.

For Salemamad, the launch fulfilled an ambition. ‘I was glad to make this launch,’ he says. ‘I was wishing to make a very big launch for some time, but there was no owner who wanted to go to 1,000 tonnes.’ That they did shows tremendous faith. Salemamad had no written plan to show them before he laid down the first plank, and yet the family, distant relatives of Hussain, invested more than 15 million rupees (£350,000) in the project – a huge sum for rural India.

When you ask him where the measurements were, Salemamad just smiles and taps his head. ‘He is not having any kind of degree or studies,’ says Hussain. ‘He is not knowing even how to sign his name – just a fingerprint. But he can make this launch.’

Salemamad’s lack of education makes him the norm rather than the exception. Only a quarter of Salaya’s people can read and write, next to an Indian average of 60 per cent. Shipbulding here is a practical rather than a theoretical lesson. ‘We learn it from our forefathers,’ says Hussain. ‘First of all, our old people are knowing it and we are learning about it step by step – that this kind of wood is used, that we build it here like that.’

Hussain estimates that Salaya’s people have been building boats for ‘maybe 150 years’. But the reality is certainly longer. Shipwrights from Gujarat even built frigates for the British Navy that went on to fight in the battle of Trafalgar. Just in case British naval seamen were in any doubt, Nusserwanji Wadia, a shipbuilder from Surat, carved the words ‘This ship was built by a d----d Black Fellow AD 1800’ into the central beam of one of them.

Working with wood
In a dock in front of one of Salaya’s three Sufi shrines, Kasim, another Sanghar, is overseeing the construction of a 700-tonne boat. Nine months into its construction, its skeletal form is slowly beginning to take shape.

Kasim, as smart as Salemamad is scruffy, is dressed in the crisp white tunic and skull cap of a haji, a man who has visited Mecca; almost all of Salaya’s boat builders are Muslims. He stands confidently on a beam high above the boat’s wooden floor as he instructs carpenters heaving on chains to pull the latest plank into place at the top of the boat’s hull. He stops to take measurements, using string and weights, and marks the hull with charcoal where the new wood should be slotted.

‘If you want to learn this job, first you must learn carpentry,’ he says, sitting to drink a cup of sweet tea on a log beside the boat. ‘But the most useful thing is your mind: if you have a sharp mind, you can get it. If you don’t have such a mind, then it is impossible to be a gaider.’

Hussain says gaiders don’t need written plans because they build to a formula, beginning with the single beam, called a pathar, that becomes the entire base of the hull. The pathars are each cut from a single huge trunk known as a malaysia, after the country from whose forests they frequently come. Then come beams for the aft and bow, which form the anchors from which planks are bent around to form the hull. As boats are always built to the same set proportions, the length of the pathar determines the dimensions of everything else.

Kasim says building a 1,000-tonne boat would be no particular challenge – it simply means choosing a longer pathar to start with. He is considering a 1,200-tonne boat for his next project. But Adam, the gaider of the boat next to Kasim’s, disagrees. ‘It is more difficult to make 1,000 tonnes,’ he explains. ‘We use bigger pieces, so it is more difficult to bend the wood and turn it, and if it doesn’t bend, it may break.’

Adam says the number of boats being built has also brought problems. ‘We are making 25 boats and each boat needs ten carpenters. There aren’t 250 carpenters in Salaya,’ he says. That explains the darker South Indian faces of some of the workers. Today’s boom is drawing in artisans from Andhra Pradesh in the south, and Bihar and Uttar Pradesh in the north. Carpenters’ rates have nearly doubled to
200 rupees a day.

Salaya clearly has more than enough work for every male of its 27,000-strong population, even boys who have yet to reach their teens. But not all want to work as boat builders. As we tour Salemamad’s boat, Hussain calls over 14-year-old Nasir, who is working as a helper.

Nasir has been working on boats for three years, starting as one of the boys that provide the carpenters with their tooth-achingly sweet cups of tea. He has no interest in becoming a gaider. ‘I don’t have that kind of mind,’ he says. ‘I am in trouble even right now for forgetting something.’ What Nasir wants is to reach his 18th birthday, collect his seaman’s card and go to sea.



Life on the ocean wave
Today, Salaya’s business is all about boat building. But during the four-month monsoon, when the town’s fleet returns, its waters are crammed with wooden boats under repair and its streets are abuzz with 3,000 returned sailors.

Salaya owns 180 of India’s 700-plus traditional cargo sailing vessels. In the past decade, they have sailed as far as South Africa and even to Singapore (although that was to deliver a vessel for a Japanese maritime museum).

But the centre of the universe is Dubai. ‘Dubai for us is like a local port,’ says Hussain. ‘We think we are in India.’ The Emirates boom town’s ever-growing appetite for food has triggered today’s surge in vahan construction as the smaller boats are better suited to handling small cargos of produce from villages across India, Pakistan and Iran.

The life of the sailors is risky but adventurous. Shipwreck, piracy and even smuggling still occur. Salaya’s boats regularly come up against pirates in Somalia, and a crew member was kidnapped only a few months ago. During the 1980s, smuggling was rife. Haji Ismail Sumbhania, the king of India’s modern-day smugglers, was born here and ran a vast operation, smuggling cargos of gold, silver, guns and drugs before he was gunned down in a 2005 firefight with the Mumbai police.

Fire and shipwreck strike often. Next to Salemamad’s hulk sits the charred hull of the 700-tonne MSV Alibag, which Hussain and his brothers had worked on for three and a half years when it was destroyed in a blaze in March, just days ahead of its first voyage. ‘We lose four to five vessels a year,’ says Adam, who doubles as an insurance agent. ‘Every family has its tragedy.’ At the start of February, one of Salaya’s vessels sank near the coast of Iran, and the crew were left clinging to a water tank for five hours before they were rescued.

Hussain remembers his days as a tindal, when, during a trip to Mumbai, he was caught in a storm so brutal that the crew gave up even trying to control the boat. ‘Down was water, and up was God,’ he says, shaking his head. ‘No-one had any idea where we were. No-one thought we were safe. We could only pray.’

It’s a lot safer today, however, than in the days before engines, when vahan sailors were entirely at the mercy of the wind. Ishmael, an old man with leathery skin and crinkled eyes, travelled between Salaya, East Africa and the Gulf using only sails during the early 1960s. ‘In those days it was very hard,’ he says. ‘We had only sextant and compass, and we had to have very much knowledge of the sun and stars.’

Sail away
Sails remain crucial to vahans’ survival even today, because they qualify the ships as ‘country class’ vessels. Tindals of these boats don’t even need to be able to write, let alone pass merchant seaman exams.

In January, the cargo ship MS Beluga SkySails used a giant computer-controlled kite to catch wind on a voyage from Germany to Venezuela, cutting fuel use by 15 per cent. Haroon estimates that putting the sail up on the Faize Makdumi can do even better – saving as much as a quarter of the fuel used.

‘It will maybe happen that we return to the sail if the price of fuel keeps coming up,’ Hussain muses. ‘We have not forgotten how to sail.’

July 2008