An ode to fish and fisherfolk of Mumbai

Illustration/Devdutt Pattanaik

This year, on the morning after Sarvapitri Amavasya, the fish of Banganga floated up. Belly first. Silver turned grey. Municipal workers fished them out with nets and stuffed them into buckets. The smell will hang over Walkeshwar for days.

It is not new. It has happened before. Year after year. The cause is dull and chemical. Rice balls, flour, flowers and ghee go into the water. They rot. The rot eats the oxygen. The fish suffocate.

No one meant to kill them. That is the usual defence, and it is a weak one. Who bears the karma of their murder? Those who fed their ancestors? Those who performed "pure" vegetarian Vedic rituals that are 3000 years old?

Ask any monk about intention and he will tell you about pramada, carelessness. In spiritual thought, harm done through heedlessness still binds karma. You do not need to want the death. You only need to not care enough to prevent it. By that standard, every family that tipped its pinda into the tank this year shares the debt, and so does the priest who told them to, and so does the civic body that has known about this every autumn since at least 2007 and still has not set up a separate pond. Activists have asked for one, like the artificial ponds built for Ganesh visarjan.
Simple fix. Nobody bothers.

The irony is thick. Many of the people at Banganga call themselves vegetarian and look down on those who eat fish. Yet Manusmriti (3.268) says the ancestors stay satisfied for two months when offered fish at a shraddha. Yajnavalkya Smriti (1.260) names rohu and other large-scaled fish as fit for the ancestral meal. The old texts fed the pitrs fish openly. The modern devotee feeds them rice and kills the fish anyway, then calls himself pure.

And this happens in Bombay. A city built on Koli land. Devis of Mumbai belong to Koli community. Gauri of Mumbai is fed fish during her puja. The Kolis still haul nets at Worli and Versova, while vegetarian housing societies refuse to let them rent flats and pressure campaigns try to push fish markets out of neighbourhoods. The fisherman is treated as dirty. His fish dies in the temple tank and nobody counts it. This is not new. The famous "non-violent" king Ashoka also banned fisherfolk in the name of ahimsa and vegetarian spirituality. They were deemed killers - by a king who committed genocide in Kalinga.

So remember the fish and fisherfolk who are very much part of Hindu lore. Vishnu took a fish avatar to save Manu from the flood. Remember, Shiva himself, who took the form of a fisherman at Madurai to marry Parvati born in a fishing village. Remember, Guha, the fisherfolk chief whose boat ferried Rama across the Ganga. Remember, Jhulelal of Sindhis who rides up the Sindu river on Palla fish, the same fish whose name gave rise to Apollo Bandar of Mumbai. Remember, the mother of Vyasa, a fisherwoman, found by her father inside the belly of a fish. And remember, Jesus is the fisher amongst men. He fed his followers fish. And remember the fish of the Prophet Yunus (Jonas) who survived undewater in the belly of a fish. Remember them all the next time you remember your ancestors and offer them rice balls.

The author writes and lectures on the relevance of mythology in modern times. Reach him at devdutt.pattanaik@mid-day.com