The series shows fishermen from coastal villages in Andhra Pradesh who leave their homes in search of better fishing prospects.
The plot is lost when a small-town story is hijacked into a nation-building patriotic drama.
If the makers left India and Pakistan alone, the story would've been an interesting watch.
In Intertidal: A Coast and Marsh Diary (2023), the writer Yuvan Aves mentions a conversation he has with Palayam Anna, an artisanal fisherman who teaches him names of each of the nine winds. When Aves tries to recall some of these names, he gets them mixed up. Palayam Anna, irked, tells him he should listen more carefully and adds that when he was young, the elders would thwack young boys on their heads for mixing up wind names.
In full honesty, Aves—a young man writing all this down in his pocket notebook—wonders if “it is possible to teach without harming the learner” and whether fear is at all helpful to learning. Palayam Anna isn’t buying any of this city-fragility and uses the term ‘land teacher’ to separate what he calls ‘sea teacher’—which is a simple way of saying, “Get lost, man!”
Aves, who grew up on the coast, probably needs to hear this less than we do. Even so, “One must attach one’s fears to the right things,” Aves says, which helps us understand the vast differences between what begins and stops mattering while you are at sea. On land, that firm, solidly unmoving terrain, learning, unlearning, self-care, self-love—all become talismans of assured living. On the sea, which is unpredictable, and neither firm nor solid, life is the only thing that matters—life, and returning to it. It’s here that mixing one wind name with another can cost you your life.
Watching Arabia Kadali, V.V. Surya Kumar’s new series on Amazon Prime brought back some of these lessons. Indeed, the story of Telugu fishermen at sea, speaking the language of the sea, learning to value whatever the sea gives—whether treasure, fish, or even anger—is the equivalent of receiving several thwacks on the head; and that would have been pleasantly enough. Arabia Kadali could have become, like Aves’s book, a delightful study into the minds and lives of artisanal fishermen. But it loses sight of the ambition it sets out to dream in no sooner than two episodes in.
The series starts out as a moving depiction of fishermen from Chepalawada and Matsyawada—fictitious coastal villages in Andhra Pradesh—who leave their homes to go to Sangrol, Gujarat in search of better fishing prospects in the Arabian Sea. However, it loses itself when a small-town story is hijacked into a nation-building nationalist drama.
The fishermen land in Tiwachi, Pakistan on the offence of having crossed the border. Come to think of it, although based on real events which happened in real places, the only places to have real-life identities in the series are India and Pakistan. And it’s a bit of a stretch to call it real.
Everything in the world of Arabia Kadali is interesting to watch and fun to learn from, until we enter its AI-designed relationship with Pakistan, which for all practical and official purposes apparently forgets that other colors except green also exist.
Up until that point, Arabia Kadali makes a decent effort to give us interesting moments: like when men bashfully boast about tuna fish, lovers who keep waiting for each other on land but dream collectively only of the sea, and the best—when one of the fishermen tries to convince a Punjabi truck driver not to give lift to the rival group of fishermen saying, “Woh dongana kodaka hai” (They are sons of thieves!).
There’s a particularly arresting moment when the fishermen on boat haul the nets up to see what they’ve caught and a luscious heap of beautiful fish falls and they all celebrate uproariously. At some point, the boat slows down and our male lead, Badiri (Satyadev Kancharana), retrieves a tool from somewhere, pokes around the hull and learns that the boat is running on low fuel. Watching people perform knowledge of the sea and boats and fish are all fascinating to watch.
There is a similarly narrated, poignant moment from Sarpatta Parambarai (2021), where Pa Ranjith gives us the memorable Beedi Rayappa, a boxer-turned-fisherman known for smoking his famous double-beedis. When a friend requests him to train a hefty looking Arya for boxing, he takes one look at him and asks the friend, "Have you come to dump more trash from the land to sea”? It is offered to us like light comedy, but its implication is cutting. Land people do treat the sea like it’s their personal dustbin.
Some bits of Arabia Kadali are narrated with a similar regard for the sea. At one point when the fishermen are frustrated with the sea for giving them nothing, one of them consoles the other, “Fish aren’t our ancestors to fall into our nets whenever we wish.”
When the sea gives, it gives. What it takes, it takes.
If only the makers had left India and Pakistan alone, it would’ve been interesting to watch where the story could have gone. The stories and beliefs of fisherfolk while at sea and at land are thoughtfully shown with care and some kind of sensible restraint. One can only wonder why a similar restraint was not observed in their representations of Pakistan and Pakistani men.
The fishermen are put in Mandhi Jail in Pakistan and here the show loses some ambition. India’s imagination of Pakistani men is interesting only insofar as they seem to cast extremely good-looking gentlemen. But their depictions of Pakistani villainy need a lot of work since the inspiration for this seems to be directly borrowed from Alif Laila. And even Alif Laila was more colorful to watch because it wasn’t just one block green everywhere. We also seriously need to get rid of that stock middle eastern music of a guitar playing every time we enter Pakistan.
There’s blunder after careless blunder here. At some point, there’s an unexplained bomb blast just to drive the plot further, as if unexplained bomb blasts in Pakistan might be as common as chilling cows on Bengaluru roads. Despite the affluent setting and rich carpets as shown in the series, I doubt Pakistani officials, even within official capacity, use each other’s full names when they are angry. (What is it now, Shabaz Alam? Go take a walk, Umar Sharief!)
The fishermen from the coastal villages of Andhra Pradesh cannot fish in the harsh waters of the Bay of Bengal. So, they keep waiting for a jetty that could help them tame the ocean, sustaining their livelihood. A jetty would mean well-functioning, modern and equipped boats, reliable machinery, and tools that would take away some burden from the fisherfolk. The government promises them a jetty during every election and then conveniently forgets. This land, its problems, and how their own country forgets them should have been at the core of Arabia Kadali. The jetty does magically arrive towards the end, solving all their problems. But by now, the spirit of the show has been hijacked by Indo-Pak relations and a sense of forced nationalism. So, we are no longer celebrating the fishermen’s victory, we are celebrating India’s victory. And we might as well be back to thinking about the thwacks on the head.
Vijetha teaches Communicative English at St Joseph’s University, Bengaluru and writes at rumlolarum.com .
