Paper short abstract:

this paper traces the social, cultural and economic landscape of the Khalasis, the indigenous ship building community. It highlights the need to safeguard their knowledge system.

Paper long abstract:

Beypore, a port town in South India, has putative legacies of maritime activities. Beypore had maritime relations with Mesopotamia and was an important link on the maritime silk route. Undoubtedly, this region domesticated world cultures—including Arab and Portuguese—via sea routes and produced cosmopolitanism in its maritime cultural heritage. Meanwhile, this port town was also known for its superior indigenous ship building technology and craftsmanship.

Drawing from social history and ethnographic research on Beypore, this paper traces the social, cultural and economic landscape of the Khalasis, the indigenous ship building community. As a community, the life of Khalasis was centered around the activity of shipbuilding. With the dominance of modern technology in shipbuilding the community began to lose its stronghold on the activity. By 1960s shipbuilding at Beypore was almost a lost art. With the rise of globalization and commercialization, this art shipbuilding got a revival in the tourism industry. In this context, this study delineates how Khalasis evolved through historically-situated changes, and still maintained the organic relationship with the ocean and its ecology. Foregrounding the concerns of intangible maritime cultural heritage, the study also explores the various ways through which this highly specialized knowledge circulated within the community, especially in the absence of any written text. This study thus highlights the need to safeguard this knowledge system that is circulated in the form of verses and memorized by the craftsman.