All night it had rained: a furious, unseasonal rain from a wavering sky. God had lost all sense of proportion, the locals said, like a bus driver who crawls on a highway and flies over a speedbump riddled road. But the morning was clear, and the water in the river, swollen with run-off from the bordering mountains, swirled under the bridge and toward the silt ejector.
Here stood the fishermen, a dozen or so of them. Their shalwars, rolled up to their knees, ballooned on the surface of the water; their steel matkas gleamed in the sun. Nets emerged endlessly, like handkerchiefs from a magician’s breast pocket. Sloshing through the water, the fishermen stretched them taut across the channel. Then they waited. Hunting fish near the silt ejector, which flushes sediment back into the river, is against the law. But so are many other things.
From atop the bridge, a man watched the fishermen. Minutes passed. The men in the water stirred back to life. Men is a misnomer, really: many were little boys, helping their fathers and uncles and grandfathers. It was late April, nearly the end of the fishing season, and the river was mostly full of jhalli, a slender, inconsequential fish—small fry. Jhalli doesn’t fetch much in the market. The fish has too many bones: spiky ones that scratch the throat and feathery ones that tickle. Once dead, though, the creature is obliging. Its flesh flakes away easily from its spine and can be eaten with a smattering of salt. Upstream, in another language, jhalli means happy-go-lucky girl—unacquainted with the ways of the world, or perhaps just unbothered by them.
Most of the residents of Basti Allahwali were fishermen, among the oldest inhabitants of the region, but they could seldom eat fish themselves or offer it to guests. What they caught was the property of contractors, local businessmen who held exclusive rights to the river and who paid the fishermen puny wages. Still, Sonaar smuggled home the occasional jhalli: he would slip it beneath his clothes or stuff it under his cap, dangling it triumphantly before his family before dinner. The risk was absurdly high. The fishermen were supervised at all times by the contractor’s henchmen; if caught in the act at work, they would be fined an amount worth months of wages.
This was the best-case scenario. The worst-case scenario involved being pinned to the ground and lashed. Or perhaps it was the other way round. A beating was brief, after all. A fine dragged you deeper into the quicksand of debt, setting you back months, if not years.
How had it come to this, that men and women fishing all their lives could barely eat fish themselves? The fishermen of Taunsa were unanimous: they blamed the contract system, promulgated into law in 1961. Though colonial legislation of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century did not tightly regulate access to the region’s rivers—they were more concerned with banning explosives, poison, and other harmful fishing techniques—unofficially, the colonial logic of revenue extraction was more or less in practice. In post-independence Pakistan, the contract system has been formalized—ostensibly to raise revenue for a cash-strapped young nation. Every summer, the government divides the rivers into distinct parcels of waters, selling fishing rights to the highest bidder. All fish became de facto property of the winning contractors, so local communities—who had been fishing in these waters for centuries—are left with no choice but to work for middlemen, instead of directly selling their catch in the market.
The contractor dictates the terms of this relationship. He decides how much to pay the fisherman for each kilo of fish caught—and it is nowhere near a livable amount, swiftly ensnaring fishing families in a vortex of debt. Consequently, the contractor governs every aspect of a fisherman’s life. He floats loans and directs fishermen to handpicked local stores, where they are provided rations at inflated prices, which they agree to pay off through their labor; he even arbitrates family disputes and arranges marriages. Debt doesn’t end at death; it passes on to the next of kin. An estimated six hundred thousand fishermen live on or along the fiver rivers that flow through Punjab. Today, the majority of them labor under this form of debt bondage.
Closer to home, the fisherwoman is at the at heart of the founding myth of Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city, now home to over fourteen million. A long time ago, one leapt into the sea to yank her son from the clutches of a fish and gave the city her name. Of the seven folk heroines of the land, one is a fisherwoman: Noori, who married a king but remained wedded to her old way of life. (Her tomb lies in the center of a lake.) But when the nineteenth-century explorer Sir Richard Francis Burton, fluent in twenty-nine languages yet a racist extraordinaire, chanced upon the fisherwomen of the region, all he could see was their sun-seared skin. “Macbeth never saw such hags,” he wrote, “as you see in the old Mohání.”
There are more than eighteen million bonded laborers in the world, according to the researcher Siddharth Kara—over four out of every five in South Asia. There is no consensus on why this form of entrapment is most prevalent here. The most common explanation, invoking the caste system, feels unsatisfying—after all, an economic and social underclass exists everywhere, at risk of being sucked into a spiral of debt and control. Debt bondage has historically occurred throughout the world: sharecropping in the post-Civil War South, manorialism in medieval Europe, similar set-ups in the Japanese shogunate, in ancient Egypt and in Rome. More recent examples of forced labor from outside South Asia include the continuing use of convict labor in the United States; Canada’s seasonal guest worker program, involving seasonal migrant labor from Mexico and the Caribbean; and the resurgence of the gangmaster system in the UK, which provides seasonal labor to the agriculture, shellfish, and processing and packing sectors. Contrary to the assumption that a “fully functioning” capitalist enterprise needs free workers, these cases prove that modern markets can coexist, and even thrive on unfree labor. Today, profits of more than fifty billion dollars per year are made off the back of bonded labor.
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