Shorelines

Space and Rights in South India

Ajantha Subramanian

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780804786850
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Antropologia culturale e sociale

After a clerical sanction prohibited them from fishing for a week, a group of Catholic fishers from a village on India's southwestern coast took their church to court. They called on the state to recognize them as custodians of the local sea, protect their right to regulate trawling, and reject the church's intermediary role.In Shorelines, Ajantha Subramanian argues that their struggle requires a rethinking of Indian democracy, citizenship, and environmentalism. Rather than see these fishers as non-moderns inhabiting a bounded cultural world, or as moderns wholly captured by the logic of state power, she illustrates how they constitute themselves as political subjects. In particular, she shows how they produced new geographies—of regionalism, common property, alternative technology, and fisher citizenship—that underpinned claims to rights, thus using space as an instrument of justice. Moving beyond the romantic myth of self-contained, natural-resource dependent populations, this work reveals the charged political maneuvers that bound subalterns and sovereigns in South Asia.In rich historical and ethnographic detail, Shorelines illuminates postcolonial rights politics as the product of particular histories of caste, religion, and development, allowing us to see how democracy is always "provincial."

II

Postcolonial Challenges

Figure 4. Women fish vendors on the shore. Photo by Ajantha Subramanian.

4

Community Development to the Blue Revolution

New Technologies, New Shorelines

THE CREATION OF KANYAKUMARI DISTRICT as a separate administrative unit coincided with the beginnings of postcolonial fisheries development. In 1949, the princely states of Travancore and Cochin were merged into one, only to be remapped and renamed in 1956 as part of the Linguistic Reorganization of States. With the reorganization, most of Travancore-Cochin became the Ma-layali-majority state of Kerala, and the four southernmost Tamil-speaking taluks (revenue districts) were merged with neighboring Madras; the merged area was renamed Tamilnadu (Land of Tamils). These four taluks formed the newly created district of Kanyakumari (see Map 1 on page xvi). With these shifting jurisdictions, the coastal belt of Kanyakumari inherited three spatial legacies: the centuries-long consolidation of church patronage; the making of an inland sphere of caste modernity through the rights struggles of Travancore’s agrarian low castes; and the to-and-fro of colonial fisheries development and its competing senses of the coast as locality and translocality.

In this chapter I return to Kanyakumari and the local interplay of these legacies. I look at how the spatial imaginaries of postindependence fisheries development impinged on a landscape of caste difference and church patronage. How did Catholic fishers, rendered increasingly marginal to the consolidation of inland caste power, experience postindependence developmentalism? What did the transition to postcolonial rule mean socially and spatially in Kanyakumari? How did it elicit new articulations of rights?

On the one hand, the postcolonial transition catalyzed a process of incorporation that, in its reach and force, surpassed the scale of princely or colonial power. Although preindependence development brought the state to the coast in the new institutional forms of the cooperative, the fish processing plant, and the temperance officer, the marginality of fishing kept princely and colonial state revenue collection and associated projects of social control to a minimum. Indeed, to hear fishers tell it, one would think that the state was nonexistent on the coast before the 1950s. When I asked older fishermen and fisherwomen about the presence of the state on the coast, I heard little mention of Travancorean rule or of colonial Madras’s developmental tutelage, either in positive or negative terms. This lack of intimacy with or even recognition of state officials and practices was in sharp contrast to fisher depictions of the postindependence state, the mention of which always elicited heated discussion. This difference gave me the impression that postcoloniality on the coast had been experienced as the sudden encroachment of the state into a social world previously outside its immediate sphere of influence.

As we saw in Chapter 3, postindependence fisheries development abandoned an oceanic perspective on the coast, preferring instead an image of bounded stasis that justified far more intrusive forms of state intervention. Even so, the first decade after independence witnessed a continuation of the more gradualist approach that characterized colonial fisheries policy. Although new technologies were disseminated, the preference for social over technological solutions to rural poverty ensured some continuity in development practice. It was only with the onset of trawlerization and the escalating value of prawn in the late 1960s that the spatial divide between coast and inland was joined by another shoreline dividing the modern from the traditional sector. As we will see, the state’s own status as a developmental actor also hinged on this shift from the Community Development Program to the Blue Revolution in trawling technology.

In some ways, the processes that generated this new shoreline mirror those that made caste moderns out of inland low castes in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Now as then, the entry of new authorities and capitalist transformation of the economy produced shifts in status and forms of social differentiation. However, one distinction between the two periods of change is crucial. In the 1960s, southwestern fishers became subjects of development and postcolonial citizens at the same time. The institution of universal franchise in 1947 dramatically expanded the electorate. In South India, enfranchisement had an electrifying effect on the public, with voting percentages reaching 60 percent as early as 1967. The raw data of electoral statistics cannot be taken at face value as an index of political transformation, but the numbers beg interpretive work. What did the franchise mean to people? How did the pairing of development and democracy play out on the coast? How did it alter the makeup of coastal space, in particular, the operations of caste difference and church patronage?

Within the disciplines of anthropology and South Asian studies it has been commonplace to interpret development as an alibi for the excess of state or corporate power or as the elaboration of a global disciplinary regime. A chorus of scholars charge development as imperialism by other means, as the extension of state power, or as the rule of technocrats (Alvares 1992; Apffel-Marglin and Marglin 1990, 1996; Chatterjee 1993; Cowen and Shenton 1996; Crush 1995; Escobar 1995; Esteva 1992; Ferguson 1994 [1990]; Nandy 1988; Parajuli 2001; Sachs 1992; Shiva 1989). Many of these radical critics of development are themselves South Asianists. For instance, Partha Chatterjee has argued that postcolonial state planning “emerged as a crucial institutional modality by which the state would determine the material allocation of productive resources within the nation: a modality of political power constituted outside the immediate political process itself ” (Chatterjee 1993: 202). This notion of development as a form of technocratic power that is fundamentally antidemocratic—even antipolitical—obscures the intense political wrangling that goes into both the making of development policy and the elaboration of development practice. As we saw in Chapter 3, developmentalism throughout the twentieth century involved fierce debate over the role of technology in development, the distinction between revenue and social uplift in the definition of development, and the place of the artisan within a global capitalist economy. The course of development was anything but predetermined. Certainly losers and victors emerged in the debates that shaped development policy, but to equate postcolonial development with a derivative form of technocratic governance would surely be to write the victors’ history.

Similarly, when we look at development practice, we see a highly charged, politically fractious process that, in the postcolonial period, was intimately tied up with the proliferation of new democratic institutions. Development and democracy—the intertwined key words of postcolonial state formation—were more than simply a cynical mantra for the consolidation of state power. As processes elaborated in tandem, they have an intimacy that far exceeds the ideological intentions of states and institutions of global governance (Rangan 1996; Sinha 2003; Sivaramakrishnan 2000). In Part 2 of this book I address this intimate relationship between postcolonial fisheries development, the expansion of institutions of representative democracy, and understandings of political participation.¹ The postcolonial Indian state certainly fused development and democracy rhetorically. But what did these terms mean locally? And to what extent did the two become conjoined for southwestern fishers and other coastal inhabitants?

More specifically, and in continuity with themes explored thus far, I consider the spatial dimensions of the interaction between development and democracy as it unfolded on a preexisting landscape of caste difference and church patronage. As we have already seen, regional histories of caste rendered locally meaningful emerging distinctions between inland moderns and coastal primitives in the preindependence period. Missionary, state, and popular deployments of caste strengthened the political charge of caste as a mode of social and spatial distinction. Catholic church patronage only reinforced notions of Mukkuvar primitivism and of fishers as a population at a spatiotemporal remove from inland society. As we will see, caste and church were equally significant in postindependence developmentalism. Jim Ferguson, paraphrasing James Scott, notes that developmental states try to establish “national grids of legibility” within which to contain their subjects (Ferguson 2005: 379). These grids, however, are rarely rationalized to the point of total individuation. Mediating structures of authority, sociality, and even preexisting forms of sovereignty can persist within a developmental grid. In the southwest, caste and church were two such structuring principles through which developmental and democratic institutions were established. Indeed, it would be impossible to comprehend emergent meanings of technology, space, or rights without factoring in their mediations.

New Machines, Machineries, and Machinations

Whenever I asked fishers in Kanyakumari about how mechanized craft were introduced into the district, they would tell me the story of Lourdammal Simon and K. Kamaraj. A fairly typical rendition of the story, with a slight village-level twist, came to me from Antony Raj, an elderly fisherman of Manakkudy village.

At that time, we used only kattumarams and vallams. Kamaraj Nadar was the Congress Chief Minister of Tamilnadu, and he knew the plight of Mukkuvars and wanted to help in changing their lives. So he spoke with Lourdammal Simon, who was the Fisheries Minister in his government. Lourdammal Simon was from Manakkudy village so she first came here to ask whether we wanted trawlers. But we said no. Our parish priest also urged us to accept the government boats, but I think there was fear of what trawlers would bring. So then she went to Colachel, her marital village, and they said yes. That is how most of the trawlers went to Colachel, and it is now the richest village in the district. Maybe we should have agreed to the trawlers and gotten rich ourselves, but look at all the trouble now between Colachel and us. I don’t know, I think we did the right thing.

Aside from the clear ambivalence over the pros and cons of trawling and the retroactive construction of a missed opportunity, one striking aspect of this oft-repeated story is its intimacy. Development, by this account, is anything but the impersonal dissemination of new technologies, institutions, or ideas by a distant state. Rather, it works through kinship and patronage, caste and religion—in short, the most localized forms of sociality. Furthermore, the state in these narratives is highly personalized in the figures of Kamaraj and Lourdammal and is held morally accountable to the lives and livelihoods of its constituents. That these two figures most clearly personified the state for Mukkuvars in the 1950s is especially significant and requires some elaboration.

Fishery mechanization was launched in Tamilnadu as part of the Second Five Year Plan (1956–1961) under the Congress Party–led government of K. Kamaraj. Kamaraj was emblematic of the Nadar caste’s meteoric rise to social and political prominence in the south. Indeed, he was not only regionally prominent but also regarded as a kingmaker within the Indian National Congress. Narendra Subramanian (1999) observes that Kamaraj exemplified the Congress Party’s style of “bureaucratic clientelism.” He was an avid modernizer who distributed contracts and industrial licenses associated with Second Five Year Plan projects to habitual supporters and to win over other industrialists. When it came to rural community development programs, such as fisheries development in Kanyakumari, Kamaraj adopted a different tactic. He solicited the support of so-called traditional authorities who could sell the promise of the postindependence state and its programs of rural uplift. Rural India, deemed not quite ready for total transformation, was to engage with the new state through its old authorities. What resulted was a kind of embedded patronage—one could even call it a continuation of indirect rule—with the state overseeing the activities of intermediary patrons.

The general elections had been held just the previous year, and Kamaraj, in true clientelist style, had chosen Lourdammal Simon, a Catholic woman from an elite Mukkuvar family and a prominent member of the Catholic diocese of Kottar, as the Tamilnadu state fisheries minister. Local politicians explained Kamaraj’s choice of Lourdammal as a keen electoral calculation. One politician from a rival party summed up sardonically that with this choice, Kamaraj “hit three birds with one stone: gender, caste, and religion.”² After the 1956 Linguistic Reorganization of States, the Mukkuvars emerged as the second-largest caste group in Kanyakumari after the Nadars. Kamaraj’s rivalry with Nesamony Nadar, a leader of the movement to merge Tamil Travancore with Madras State, had split the Nadar vote in the district, making it imperative that Kamaraj win over the coastal population. He therefore overrode Nesamony’s own nominee and handpicked Lourdammal Simon for a ministerial post.³

Kamaraj’s efforts won him the support of both the local and the regional Catholic clergy. Regionally, the Congress Party’s promise of support for religious minorities helped assuage the fears of a church that was watching the rise of the “atheistic ideologies” of communism and Dravidianism with alarm. In both the 1957 and 1962 national elections, Catholics were asked by the Tamilnadu Catholic Bishops Conference to vote for the Congress Party—“the party of God” (Narchison et al. 1983: 95). This state-level clerical consensus was also reflected in Kanyakumari. Even before Kanyakumari’s merger with Tamilnadu, the groundswell of support for the Communist Party of India in Travancore had set off warning bells in southwestern churches and had consolidated clerical support for the Congress Party. Kamaraj’s selection of a Catholic minister only strengthened the Kanyakumari clergy’s political allegiance to the party. On the eve of the 1957 elections, the bishop of Kanyakumari’s Kottar diocese sent out a circular requesting the faithful to exercise their franchise by electing candidates who would fight for freedom of religion, for the rights of private schools and colleges run by minority religious institutions, and against birth control—in short, for the Congress Party (Narchison et al. 1983: 97).

The landscape of religious patronage into which the Congress Party entered in 1956 was also a caste landscape. On the Kanyakumari coast, Catholicism was inseparable from Mukkuvar caste affiliation, and the Congress Party’s insertion into regional dynamics meant much more than the state’s avowed protection for Indian religious minorities. For local elites, both lay and clergy, Lourdammal Simon’s selection signaled Kamaraj’s acknowledgment of Mukkuvars as a politically significant caste (Then Oli, 1956, cited in Narchison et al. 1983: 97). They interpreted the Congress Party’s rhetoric of developmental patronage as the long-awaited integration of Mukkuvars into inland caste dynamics.

However, the development technologies that came to underpin notions of Mukkuvar caste uplift were far from even in their spread. Within the caste, family played a key role in spatializing development. Minister Simon set about implementing the mechanization program across Tamilnadu with particular attention to her home district of Kanyakumari. The original intention of fisheries community development was to ensure an even spread of subsidized craft. As Antony Raj noted, however, they were channeled mainly to the minister’s marital village of Colachel, coincidentally also a natural harbor in an otherwise turbulent coastline that made it a good test case for the technology. At the time, Simon’s husband, A. M. Simon, was president of the State Fishermen Cooperative Society. The year that Lourdammal Simon was elected fisheries minister, the Tamilnadu government decided to constitute the state fisheries advisory board. Of its four nonofficial members, A. M. Simon was one. He was succeeded as Colachel State Fishermen Cooperative Society president by a series of three Congress Party loyalists, which secured Colachel’s reputation as the local darling of state fisheries developers.

The choice of Colachel as the district’s test case for fisheries development was justified by the shift from extensive to intensive development in the Second Five Year Plan. The village’s privileged place within the district and its unique relationship to the state gradually became evident. Kanyakumari District’s Fisheries Training Center was opened in Colachel, in a part of the village that was newly named Simon Colony (after Minister Simon’s husband). Soon after the opening of the center, the Tamilnadu Department of Fisheries also began planning for harbor construction in the village. Out of the twenty-one Illugason gillnetters allocated for intensive fishing operations in Tamilnadu as a whole, Colachel’s coo...