Koli fishermen

The Koli fishermen are presented as Bombay’s first inhabitants and as a community whose livelihood and land are progressively displaced by the making of the city. Their history provides a counterpoint to imperial dates and celebrated urban development: the changing shoreline that creates Bombay also takes space from those who fished its waters, leaving them confined to a small settlement beside the naval base and sea.

Origins and livelihood

Before British rule, forts, and land reclamation, the Koli fishermen lived among the islands that would become Bombay. The narrator places them in a landscape of separate islands—including Mazagaon, Worli, Matunga, Mahim, Salsette, and Colaba—with a narrow strand opening onto a great natural harbor. In this earlier setting, the fishermen sailed Arab dhows under red sails and caught pomfret and crabs. Their work is part of a wider coastal life that also included coconuts and rice, and their fishing helped make fish a familiar food for the city’s inhabitants.

The novel sets this local history against the arrival of outside powers. The Portuguese named the harbor Bom Bahia, and the East India Company later established a Fort and began land reclamation. Bombay’s emergence as a city is thus not treated as an empty landscape being developed: it begins with a inhabited archipelago and the labor and resources of people already there. The fishermen’s connection to the sea is both practical and enduring; even as the city changes around them, Arab dhows continue to spread their sails at sunset.

Urban growth and dispossession

Reclamation transformed the Seven Isles into a long peninsula reaching into the Arabian Sea. In the narrator’s account, this change has a direct human cost: the Fort and the city take the Koli fishermen’s land, while successive construction projects take parts of the sea. The language of progress and expansion therefore carries an opposing history of enclosure and loss. What becomes the city’s ground is also ground removed from its first inhabitants.

The fishermen survive in a small village at the peninsula’s thumb, in the district of Colaba, whose name preserves their presence even as their access to the coast contracts. Following Colaba Causeway to its tip, the narrator finds them caught between the naval base and the sea. The location makes their marginalization concrete: the community remains beside the waters on which its livelihood depended, but the expanding city and its institutions occupy the space around it. Their name endures in the map, while their territory has been reduced.

Survival and visible memory

The fishermen’s presence persists in both daily life and urban memory. Koli women still appear in Colaba’s public spaces, including the bus queue, carrying signs of their connection to fishing. The narrator reads their assertive presence as bearing the memory of earlier defeats and dispossessions. They are not simply remnants of a vanished past: they remain part of the living city, even as the conditions around them register how thoroughly its development has narrowed their place.

Their story also enters the novel through an image of pointing. A finger associated with the fisherman’s painting leads the narrator’s attention beyond the framed letter and the privileged household, across Warden Road and the swimming pools, toward the sea where Koli dhows sail. The gesture turns the fishermen into more than background to the narrator’s family history: it redirects attention toward the people and places that urban narratives can leave out. The movement of the finger makes the city’s dispossessed part of what must be seen.

Narrative significance

The Koli fishermen connect Bombay’s earliest human history to its later colonial and urban transformations. Their account is set beside the transfer of power in 1947: as the British are about to depart, the novel observes that no dominion lasts forever. That reflection places imperial rule and the older dominion of fishing nets, coconuts, rice, and Mumbadevi within a shared history of changing power, without suggesting that these transformations affect every community equally.

The fishermen’s recurring presence also complicates the novel’s account of national history. Dates, rulers, and public announcements mark one version of change; the contraction of a fishing community’s land and access to the sea marks another, slower process. By making the city’s growth inseparable from the Koli fishermen’s dispossession, the narrative asks readers to see Bombay not only as a modern metropolis, but as a place built over older lives that remain visible at its edges.