Earlier this month, as Britain seized Iranian oil tanker Grace 1 off Gibraltar and Iran retaliated by seizing British oil tanker Stena Impero, several kilometres away, in Uduma, a village in Kerala’s Kasaragod district, people feverishly checked WhatsApp groups for updates on the crew in the detained ships.
Soon came the bad news: Uduma’s young seafarer Prajith Purushothaman was on board Grace 1. While the Indian High Commission in London has assured that the Indian crew on board the ship is “safe and well”, his family in Uduma says they will be relieved only when Prajith comes home.
“The only solace is that my son is not in the custody of pirates. He had called me a few days ago. We just hope these countries resolve their issues and release the crew soon,’’ says Parajith’s father Poomala Purushothaman, a retired bank employee in Uduma.
READ | Iran grants India consular access to 18 crew of detained British vessel
The village and its two neighbouring panchayats, Uppala and Chemmanad, have around 1,500 sailors — the largest concentration of seafarers in any part of Kerala.
At Merchant Navy Club, a club of retired sailors in Uduma, a group of elderly men sit around leisurely talking about the straits of Malacca and Hormuz, the canals of Suez and Panama, the port towns of Busan and Long Beach, as if these places were mere junctions on the national highway that runs behind their club building. The club, which was set up in 1996, has around 250 members, most of them retired sailors.
“There are around 3,000 sailors from Kasaragod and half of them are from Uduma, Uppala and Chemmanadu. Among us, we have experienced everything there is to life on the sea. There are sailors from here who have gone missing without a trace, those who lost their lives to shipwrecks, those attacked by pirates…,’’ says Palakkunnil Kutty, 60, who quit as a sailor in 2014 after working for 35 years.
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The coastal region’s tryst with sea faring began in the 1950s, when men from here went to Mumbai to work in shops and restaurants near the shipping offices of Mumbai.
A K Abdulla Kunhi, 73, moved to Mumbai in the 1960s to work in a tea stall owned by a relative. “After my Class 10, I boarded a bus to Mumbai to work with my relative. The staff of shipping companies nearby were frequent customers at the stall and I befriended some of them. So when a ship was looking for workers, one of them asked me if I was interested. I then obtained a certificate of pre-sea training and joined as a trainee seaman in 1967,’’ recalls Kunhi.
After working in 36 ships over 40 years, he retired in 2007 as “crew in-charge”. His son Rasak A K has followed in his footsteps and, after 15 years as a sailor, is now Second Officer on a ship.
As the money the sailors sent back home brought prosperity to their families, more men boarded buses and trains to Mumbai to join ships as trainee seamen. They registered with the Seamen Employment Office in Mumbai and waited for their turn.
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“We are lucky to have toured the entire world without paying. In those days, a ship would be anchored in a port town for several weeks, exposing the crew to a world-class life,’’ says P V Kunhikannan, 64, another retired sailor from Uduma.
However, some of the early sailors of Uduma recall that in the 1970s and 80s, there were few means to communicate with family members while they were sailing. “Urgent alerts from the family, say, the death of relatives or similar incidents, would reach the ship as radio messages from the shipping office. Otherwise, the letters we wrote from wherever the ship was anchored were the only means to communicate. Letters used to take a month to reach home. After working in a ship for eight to nine months, we would get off at the nearest port and then fly to Mumbai. On reaching Mumbai, we would catch a bus to Kasaragod,’’ says Jayaprakash V K.
The village is replete with stories of men who went missing in the sea and those held hostage by pirates. In February this year, Amit Kumar, 35, went missing while the ship he was working on was cruising somewhere on the Red Sea.
Speaking of the time he was held hostage by pirates, 26-year-old Sree Unni says, “Last year, the oil tanker I was on was attacked by pirates off Benin in West Africa, and 22 of us were in the custody of pirates for a week. They wanted to pilfer oil, but when their plan failed, they released us.’’
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A cook, Unni who is setting sail next month, his first after the hijacking incident.
The sea has continued to be a draw for the younger generation too, many of them educated and with technical degrees. There are around 80 young sailors from the three village panchayats who work either as engineers or captains on board foreign cargo ships.
Sreeju Chitran, 30, is now a Second Officer with a foreign cargo ship, while his elder bother Shaiju Chitran, 34, is the captain of another ship.
“While earlier, shipping firms used to recruit candidates and train them on the job, now they prefer those with some training or those who have passed courses offered by the Indian Maritime University,’’ says Sreeju, who joined as a junior officer after a degree course in nautical science.
Uduma, along with two other villages, has about 1,500 sailors . (Express photo by Shaju Philip)
