In this photo feature, Sharvin Jangle and Sarthak Chand accompany fisherman Rakesh Koli as he walks them through his daily rhythms, shares sea stories and childhood memories, and speaks of what it means to work with the tide.
It is not yet dawn when we take a ferry from Versova towards Madh Koliwada one morning in late November. By the time we reach Lochargaon, Madh, where we are to meet Rakesh Koli, the sun has almost risen. He spots us first, waving from the concrete, stepped floors used for fish-drying, called khallas.
Rakesh has inherited his community’s rich, longstanding knowledge system—a way to harvest the sea by following the moon and the tides. Even as times have changed and technology has evolved, he has retained his faith in traditional fishing methods. He remembers being four or five years old when he first went out to sea with his father, Vasudev Koli. Too young to help then, he simply observed, but by the age of ten, he had begun assisting his father on their rented boat.
Before Rakesh’s household began their own fishing business, his mother, Baanu Vasudev Koli, would gather kalavs (oysters) along the rocky shore at low tides, while his father practised garva (hook fishing), hoping to bring home at least the final meal of the day.
Over time, they saved enough to buy their own boat. Today, Rakesh owns two boats. A bigger fibre boat, which is sent out into the deeper sea for multiple days, and a smaller one for everyday use in nearby waters. As their business grew, they began hiring bhaagis—informal workers who go out to sea for two to three days.
This morning, one of Rakesh’s crew is about to return. Rakesh and his wife Devyani wait eagerly to see what they’ve brought in.
While the bhaagis make their way back to the shore from a two-day shift, Rakesh spends some time walking us along the coast. “I can catch fish anytime of night or day,” he says with certainty. “Since I was a child, I’ve always loved catching fish.”
Rakesh’s eyes shine as he scrolls through this phone, showing us photographs of the jitadas (barramundi) he recently caught near Ambu Bet using hook fishing, a method of fishing that uses a fishing rod with a bait attached to one end with a hook.
We follow him as he walks steadily to where his second boat is anchored. Climbing aboard, we set off with him toward his saj, his catchment zone.
The ancestral claims and boundaries that Koli households hold in the water are called saj. These mark each family’s catchment zones in the sea. Once, these boundaries were fluid—agreed upon, negotiated, and respected within the community. While some saj can be inherited, in Lochargaon, most fall under the local fishing society and are auctioned annually among fishers.
Rakesh’s saj lies just behind the Kashya Bet. He tells us with quiet pride that he has inherited more saj from his father than anyone else in the village. At one time, his claim stretched from Bhati to Versova to Khar Danda. Today, without a boat large enough to travel farther, he fishes in the zones closest to his village.
Among the Kolis, there was always an understanding. They respected these invisible lines at sea, keeping a generous distance—four to five feet—to avoid encroaching on another family’s catchment zone.
Rakesh mentions that a typical fishing day has three working times: during sunrise (patala), the evenings during sunset (avshila), and at night. These shifts follow the rhythms of the tide—today is bhang, the last day of the low tide, Rakesh says, and from tomorrow, for the next 15 days, the tides will run high—udhan.
It takes Rakesh five to six minutes to set the dol, a fishing net with two padors (edges). Rakesh pins one pador to the boyas (buoys or floating devices) on both ends, and the other edge is anchored on the seabed using thick ropes. This makes a vertical surface perpendicular to the vahn (tidal force). As the vahn pushes against it, the dol forms a tapering cone. At the narrow end, a simple mechanism lets him pull a thread to open the net completely, releasing the entire catch.
The technique, he says, doesn’t demand heavy labour. Even the equipment can be improvised—buoys can easily be replaced with cheaper floating devices, like clusters of khujs (plastic drums).
After setting the nets, Rakesh leaves them for three hours and returns to the jetty. There, he runs other errands like fetching ice and helping the bhaagis as they return from the sea.
The boat has returned after two days, carrying not only Rakesh’s own catch but also that of his friends. Rakesh is irritated—the workers have ignored his advice to tie the nets in the evening, and he points out that the boats that did tie their nets at the right time returned with plenty of kolambis (shrimp).
Most of the bhaagis in the village are migrants from Bihar. They are paid anywhere between ₹ 95,000 to ₹2 lakh a year, depending on their experience and skill.
The men who work with Rakesh, including Uday and Dattaram, live near the jetty, and often eat at Rakesh’s house when they are on shore. Rakesh trains every bhaagi under him. A new bhaagi has recently joined the team; Rakesh keeps him on shore for now, asking him to fetch ice and move stock.
In winter, you get kaletya, tenglya, and kolambi (shrimp). During the monsoon, the nets yield ambar (small prawns), kolambi, bombil (Bombay duck), mandeli (anchovies), jitada (barramundi), and paplet (pomfret). This year’s monsoon brought only a modest catch, “just enough to fill our stomachs.”
“Earlier, a single jaali (net) would bring fresh, shiny kolambi, big and plentiful. Now we get them, but they’re much smaller. The bigger ones are gone. A net that once filled 10–15 toplis now barely fills two. How can we run a business like this,” asks Rakesh.
Most of the fish is sold wholesale, arranged according to paatis (size of bamboo baskets). By noon, Rakesh begins negotiating the day’s rates with the dealers. Once the price is agreed upon, the dealer returns in the evening with a truck, collects the sorted catch, and takes it to a warehouse near Madh Island.
After shooting the documentary film Against the Tide, in which Rakesh was one of the protagonists, Sarvnik Kaur, the director, has become a family friend. She recently asked Devyani if she could cook traditional Koli dishes—bombil fry, kolambi cha ambat, and more, for lunch every day. Today’s menu is bombil fry. Rakesh picks a few bombil from his catch and heads out to drop Devyani off.
Before Rakesh leaves, he points between the large boats wrapped in tarpaulin. Shaking his head, he says, “Asa dhanda takavcha bola kai lara yete.” (It’s sad to see so many leaving the business.)
The boats are parked here to be sold, as their owners struggle to find workers, and pay off their debt. Rakesh recalls the day his old boat struck a rock near Kashya Bet. He had to spend nearly ₹40–50,000 on repairs; the boat was eventually sold because its maintenance had become too costly. Last year, he helped sell more than 20 boats from the village.
After lunch, Rakesh takes the new bhaagi with him to check the net he had set earlier in the day. He is teaching him everything from scratch—how to tie knots, how to hold the nets, how to pull them in. The worker tries hard to match Rakesh’s swiftness.
The sea has its own distinct colours. As the dol moves with the tides, Rakesh names these hues: kaala pani (black water), lal pani (red water), saaf pani (clear water).
When the water turns red, it signals abundance; those are the days the nets brim with fish. When the water grows clear, the fish sink deeper to hide, and the nets fill instead with jellyfish. The rising number of jellyfish in the nets signals a warming sea. Small-scale fishers like Rakesh are among the first to feel the effects of the climate crisis, growing pollution, and declining fish stocks.
“Atha maan nahi rahilela hai, dhyamadhun maan udat chalelya hai,” Rakesh admits. (I’m losing interest in this business.”) All of this at a time when he must still pay for repairs, maintain the dols and the boat, negotiate the growing demands of workers and dealers, while unable to save anything for the future.
“I’ve been doing this for 24 years,” he says quietly, “but I have nothing.”
Sharvin Jangle is an architect and researcher. A resident of Mumbai’s Versova fishing village, his work interrogates identity, history, and memory through drawing and spatial practice. Sharvin’s current inquiry is on how fishing communities imagine and inhabit an amphibious landscape, using the Koli language as an epistemological tool to understand space-time.
Sarthak Chand is a documentary photographer and filmmaker whose work lies at the intersection of migration, identity, gender, culture, history, and architecture. He is the founder of The Gonzo Studio, dedicated to producing and publishing stories that reflect India’s evolving social fabric.
The Mumbai Koli Project is the official impact campaign of the documentary film ‘Against the Tide’, led by The Locavore in close collaboration with Sarvnik Kaur, Ganesh Nakhawa, and Sonia Parekh. It is supported by the Doc Society’s Climate Story Fund which enables independent media storytelling and impact strategies from around the world.
“Come at four,” he had said, the hour when the day’s work reaches its busiest rhythm of filling and dispatching the tiffins.
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