Modernity from below: local citizenship on the south Indian coast

Ajantha Subramanian
In June 1997, Catholic shermen from a shing As a force of development, the state has village in the south Indian coastal district of identied artisanal shers as an economic Kanyakumari made the unprecedented move of community standing apart from the industrialistaking their church to court. The shermens ing nation. And as a secular force, it has decision to wield state law against their religious identied them as a Catholic community standleadership came in response to a clerical sanction ing apart from the Hindu mainstream. These that prevented village inhabitants from shing two overlapping forms of community, each for a week. They had provoked the anger of the distinguished by its difference from a posited clergy by initiating an attack on local trawling economic or cultural mainstream, have circumboats that ruptured a church-brokered peace on scribed the relationship of Catholic shers to the the coast. The attack was state and operated as limits one in a series of confrontato full citizenship. However, Ajantha Subramanian is Assistant Protions between the artisanal, as I will illustrate, Catholic fessor of Social Anthropology and Social or passive-gear, craft and artisans have responded, Studies at Harvard. She received her PhD mechanised trawlers of Kanot by rejecting the state in Cultural Anthropology from Duke University in 2000. Since then, she has nyakumari district and sigand demanding cultural been a postdoctoral fellow with the Uninalled the build-up of autonomy, but by approversity of North Carolina, Chapel Hills artisanal opposition to the priating and reworking state Programme in Creating the Transnational trawling of inshore waters categories in unexpected South (200001); a visiting professor with and depletion of the marine ways to demand economic Cornell Universitys Department of Anthropology (200102); and a fellow at resource. But unlike other justice and equal citizenYale Universitys Programme in Agrarian occasions when religious ship. They have responded Studies (2002). sanctions against violence to displacement by secular Email: ajanthas@hotmail.com among coastal Catholics developmentalism by assertheld sway, this time artisaing their rightful place as nal shers accused the citizens of the Indian state. church of overstepping its authority. Instead of submitting to the clerical order, they sought justice in the courts as local citizens Kanyakumaris blue opposing unconstitutional barriers to their revolution livelihood. In this essay, I consider Indian state Located at the southwestern tip of the Indian developmentalism as a process of displacement subcontinent in the state of Tamilnadu, the and Catholic sher activism as a demand for the district of Kanyakumari has a 68 kilometres reinstatement of full citizenship. On the south coastline that is dotted with 44 coastal villages Indian coast, the postcolonial state has been an and inhabited by a Catholic shing population agent both of incorporation and differentiation. numbering approximately 150,000. With Portu-

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guese expansion in the sixteenth century, Catholicism spread along the west coast of India, when a sizeable section of the western coastal population from Bombay to Kanyakumari were converted through a series of pacts between the Portuguese Crown and different native kingdoms (Narchison et al. 1983, Schurhammer 1977). From that point on, the church on the southwestern coast has been landlord, tax collector and religious authority an imposing trinity that has served as the primary intermediary between the shing community and successive rulers. The social geography of the coast is at once religious and civil: the boundaries of shing villages overlap with parish boundaries, and the parish priest is the moral authority of the village council. However, this mutual implication of the religious and civil is not without its tensions. Fisher struggles for greater caste rights within the church, or for greater lay authority on the coast, have occurred with frequency over the course of three centuries (Ballhatchet 1998, Kooiman 1989). It was into this cultural context that the secular developmental state entered in the 1950s. Mechanisation of the Indian shery was one strand of the national drive towards industrialisation that took off during the decade after independence. The National Planning Commission proposed a radical transformation of capture sheries that would complement Indias Green Revolution in agriculture: new mechanised shing technologies would boost catches to levels commensurate with the postulated wealth of the oceans, contribute to the economic development of the country, and help feed its burgeoning population. This Blue Revolution was to be an all-India affair, promoted by the central government and adopted with variation in every coastal state (Somasundaram 1981, Tamilnadu State Planning Commission 1972). The Commissions recommendation of rapid technological change for alleviating coastal poverty, raising the Indian shers standard of living, and increasing levels of production was justied by perceptions of the coastal population as socially backward. The Commission characterised the existing shery sector as largely of a primitive character, carried on by ignorant, unorganised, and illequipped shermen. Their techniques are rudi-

mentary, their tackle elementary, their capital equipment slight and inefcient (Shah 1948). There was also a cultural component to this evaluation. The Commission determined that the poor productivity of indigenous shing technologies was largely attributable to coastal culture, characterised by indolence, lack of thrift, resistance to change, and violence, and itself a product of social isolation. The incorporation of the coast into a national framework of development would help undermine those aspects of coastal culture that were inimical to social progress. At the same time, and in accordance with Gandhian notions of the decentralised, selfgoverning village republic, the Commission identied the need to sustain the organic solidarity of the shing village as a foundation for development. It nally determined that Community Development, which would retain the shing village as the basic unit of the development process, would be the ideal approach to ensuring the smooth transformation of the coast. By making community the basic social unit of development, the Commission hoped to mitigate the turbulence of change. In keeping with Gandhis vision, it placed the village at the heart of the Community Development agenda and promoted nation-building as a process extending from Indias rural communities (Singh 1969). In its nal incarnation, Community Development was a peculiar blend of goals: it invoked the village community as an organic space of moral economy that would provide a foundation for the nation and it sought to restructure the village to suit the needs of nation-building. The programme thus had conicting aims of dissolving the boundaries of traditional economies by integrating them into a national developmental framework and producing its beneciaries as reworked communities uniformly beneted by the development process. How did Community Development intersect with secularism? Before addressing this question, let me offer a brief synopsis of Indian state secularism. State secularism in India has been founded on two overlapping dichotomies, namely those between majority and minority and between citizen and community. While I maintain that secularism is vital for ensuring

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equal citizenship for religious minorities within a multicultural nation, in India the practice of state secularism has actually had the contrary effect of ghettoising minority communities and denying them the right to self-determination. While its stated purpose has been to protect minority identities and cultures, the secular state has operated on the assumption that the Hindu majority is more secular and therefore more equipped for citizenship than the Muslim or Christian minority. This has partly been an outcome of state policies of religious reform implemented in the immediate aftermath of independence. In the name of protecting minorities, the state limited its reform agenda to Hindus. While the actual success of Hindu reform is debatable, the discourse of reform created a perceived difference within the nation between a secularised Hindu majority and communitarian minorities dened by religion. For the secular state, then, the Hindu has come to stand for the secular citizen, while the minority Muslim or Christian is by contrast primarily a member of a particular, religious community. However, non-intervention in minority religious affairs has not meant nonincorporation. Operating on the assumption that minorities identify primarily along religious lines, the state has incorporated them into a national framework of secularism by selecting religious authorities as their natural leaders, a pattern that has further reinforced the perception that minority communities are bounded entities outside the secular nation (Shaikh 1989; Chatterjee 1997). State practice on the Kanyakumari coast also reects this dynamic. As I will illustrate, the Indian state has consistently treated coastal Catholics as members, rst of a faith community, and only secondarily of a national one. To produce consent for its development agenda, the state appealed to the communities that constituted the Indian electorate. These were not the village communities envisioned in the Community Development framework but the caste and religious entities that were the basic units of representative democracy and of the states secular imagination. In the context of the Kanyakumari coast with its Catholic sher population, the Tamilnadu State government sought legitimacy for its sheries development programme by soliciting the support of the

Catholic Church and framing Community Development as religious minority uplift. The Tamilnadu Chief Minister at the time, K. Kamaraj, courted the Catholic Church as the natural leader of the coast, both for winning sher votes and for endorsing sheries development. By choosing the Catholic Church as the natural authority of the coast and disregarding the authority of village shing councils, the state reduced the complex cultural history of Kanyakumaris shers to a single referent of identity easily accommodated to secular developmental priorities. Through the political process, then, developmental and secular understandings of community came together, creating an overlap between the sher collective of the development agenda and the religious collective of the secular agenda. As a part of his commitment to Catholic participation in the development process, Chief Minister Kamaraj hand-picked Lourdammal Simon, a prominent member of Kanyakumaris Catholic diocese, as State Fisheries Minister.1 While this choice certainly appealed to the church, local clergy were already inclined to support the programme. For many who were themselves from elite coastal families, modern technology signalled an end to coastal penury. Many of these priests had left shing for the clerical life, and their theological training in centres far from the Kanyakumari coast had given them a new perspective on their home, one that starkly contrasted Catholic coastal life with those of upwardly mobile groups. Returning to the coast as religious leaders, they were an educated middle class who were from, and no longer simply of, the coast. When the state introduced the development programme, these priests were quick to identify it as a much-needed catalyst for sher integration into the national economic and cultural mainstream. The development programme promised to level older hierarchies and provide an avenue of economic and social mobility for the Catholic minority as a whole. The clergy therefore embraced the programme, spoke of its necessity from the pulpit, and urged their sher congregation to take up the new technology without hesitation. The development programme was proof, they claimed, that the state

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was nally recognising the needs of poor Catholics and their rightful place in a modernising nation.2 Minister Simon set about implementing the mechanisation programme across Tamilnadu with particular attention to her home district of Kanyakumari. But even during its rst years, the priorities of the programme shifted. With the food crisis of the late 1950s, the original goal of extensive development through building cooperatives and advancing mechanisation shifted to the intensive development of a few test villages. In Kanyakumari district, Colachel village, a natural harbour in an otherwise turbulent coastline, was the chosen test-case for the new technology. Coincidentally, it was also the Ministers marital village, where her husband, A. M. Simon, was village council president. During the rst years of mechanisation, over 70% of subsidised craft went to Colachel, making it the centre of mechanised shing and the Blue Revolutions local success story.3 The concentration of craft in one village called into question the meaning of Community Development. It now appeared to be more a process of class differentiation and displacement of the poor than one of community uplift. However, early challenges to the development programme were stied by the continued promise of social progress through technological change. It was not until the prawn rush of the 1960s that the polarisation of the coast was sealed and more effective challenges to the development project emerged. The direction and pace of sheries development shifted dramatically in the mid-1960s due to the rise in demand for prawn in the international sheries market. In Tamilnadu, the pink gold rush signalled the displacement of cooperative development for domestic consumption by the export trade in prawn. The earlier goals of crafting new but traditional designs and of building cooperative institutions were rapidly superseded by a new focus on trawlerisation by a government hungry for foreign exchange. Accordingly, the Tamilnadu Fisheries Department shifted emphasis to the rapid distribution of subsidised trawling boats for prawn harvest. The pink gold rush restructured domestic shing for monocrop, exportoriented production (Kurien, 1978, 1993, Kurien and Mathew 1982).

The Tamilnadu governments prioritising of mechanisation radically transformed the existing code of conduct governing the access and use of the marine resource. The premechanisation shery was governed by a code of common property with inbuilt barriers to access. Technical barriers, such as the need to have shery-specic skills and the need to use technologies acceptable to the collective of shers, and social barriers, such as the caste basis of shing, prevented free entry of capital and persons from outside shing communities into the shery. With the prawn rush, and in the name of introducing laws and institutions, the state subsidised the transformation of a common property system into an open-access system that beneted those equipped with the most efcient technologies of harvest (Kurien 1996). Finally, the pink gold rush undercut the very purpose of mechanisation, which was to equip shermen to travel further out to sea and alleviate the pressure on the inshore resource. Since prawn are most abundant in shallow waters, trawler owners equipped with the capital-intensive technology to take them to offshore shing grounds now preferred to remain in the area closest to shore to avail themselves of this valuable commodity. The crowding of the inshore sea has led to violent confrontations between trawler and artisanal shers over access and use of the coastal waters. These conicts have increased in intensity from the mid-1970s, after which the overcapitalisation of the shery and overshing of the resource began to result in a decline in total sh landings. Artisanal shers now found themselves competing on unequal technical terms for a depleting resource (Bavinck 1997, 1998, Kurien 1993). On other parts of the Indian and Tamilnadu coast, the prawn rush attracted outside entrepreneurs to shing and created a class of nonoperating merchant capitalists, most of whom had no previous connection to the sea. In Kanyakumari, however, a different pattern emerged. Here, the class of mechanised shers arose from within the Catholic shing population and, as a result, generated a unique cultural politics around access to and use of natural resources. Conict between mechanised and artisanal shers in Kanyakumari set in motion a triangular relationship between state, church, and

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shers. The disparity in earnings between the two groups generated considerable tension. The operations of trawling boats in the inshore area often caused damage to artisanal craft and gear, as the ploughing motion of the trawl net would accidentally rip the nets cast by artisanal shers. With the pink gold rush, competition in the area of sea closest to the shore where prawn grounds were found in abundance only heightened the tensions. Clashes broke out frequently between artisanal and mechanised crafts at sea, leading to loss of life and livelihood. Signicantly, as the violence on the Kanyakumari coast increased, so too did the Tamilnadu governments reliance upon the Catholic Churchs religious authority. More and more, government ofcials began to look to the clergy to translate class conict into religious minority uplift and to keep in sight the original promise of Community Development. This privileging of religious authority in mediating the conict has been a strictly local phenomenon. On other parts of the coastline, the Hindu or multi-faith character of the shing population, and the entry of non-sher capitalists into the industry has facilitated the formation of class-based coalitions that negotiate terms directly with the state. These negotiations have included local agreements on when and where mechanised trawlers can operate, agreements that are then policed jointly by the state and by artisanal sher organisations (Bavinck 1998). By contrast, in Kanyakumari, the fact of the shing population being exclusively Catholic has generated different dynamics. The state has consistently collaborated with the church to defuse the power of village councils to determine access and use of the marine resource. Both state and church have deployed the rhetoric of community to present the upward mobility of one section of the Catholic shing population as the advance of the minority community as a whole, and to link minority community uplift in turn with national progress. Both church and state have deployed secularist notions of religious minority solidarity and participation in the nation to present the material advance of Colachels trawler owners as the creation of a representative sher middle class, and to condemn artisanal opposition to trawling as the reactive isolationism of a population resistant to progress.

In his analysis of Indias rst Five Year Plan, Richard Fox offers a harsh critique of Community Development. He opines that the rst post-independence government blatantly hijacked the Gandhian vision to further policies totally incompatible with the Mahatmas utopia (Fox 1989: 182). Referring to the governments rst Five Year Plan, Fox states that it envisions not the Gandhian oceanic circles of village democracy but the pyramid of centralised state power. The government would be so commanding, in fact, that it could even afford to subsidise its Gandhian alternative (ibid.: 182). In Foxs opinion, the Indian governments approach to rural development emptied the Gandhian vision of all that was revolutionary so that it became nothing more than an ideological weapon of the ruling Congress party. Fox sees Community Development as a redenition of the village in terms derived from the state. According to him, the village of the Five Year Plans could never be Gandhis decentralised village republic because its primary purpose was to full a national mission. However, Community Development was not only a means of incorporating rural villages into a national developmental framework; it was also a way of differentiating them from a national mainstream. Community Development consisted of two steps: (1) restructuring traditional economies through the modern development process; and (2) undercutting the tensions generated by the distribution of modern capitalist technology by soliciting the support of traditional authorities for the development process and by equating development with community uplift. Community Development thus had conicting goals of dissolving the boundaries of traditional economies by integrating them into a national framework of development, while producing the beneciaries of development as distinct communities uniformly beneting from the development process. Rather than arising from the complexities of local social and economic life, community in the Community Development framework was a strategic distillation of those aspects of local cultural reality that were most easily accommodated to the project of national development. This dual emphasis on incorporation and differentiation emptied community

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Christian shermen at Vizhinjam, Kerala, India. Brigitte Cavanagh/CIRIC

of its materiality, leaving in its place a cultural shell.

Fisher politics of citizenship

I maintain that this dual process of incorporation and differentiation is a form of displacement. The two forms of community identity Catholic and artisanal produced through secular developmentalism have operated in tandem to circumscribe the practices and rights of Kanyakumaris artisans, denying them access to the state and to economic justice. Artisanal sher grievances, even when directly addressed to the state, are systematically referred to the church. Signicantly, Colachels trawler owners have been far more successful in getting the attention of the state. Although they too are Catholics, their class status and mode of harvest have granted them a representative autonomy

that is denied to their artisanal brethren. Not only are Colachels mechanised shers cognisant of this fact, they have crafted a politics of modernity that underscores their difference from the artisanal sector and their identication with a national middle class dened by its commitment to development. Many of Colachels trawler owners have diversied their investments, buying land as well as more trawling boats. The ownership of property away from the coast has brought them into greater contact with agrarian and urban caste groups and produced a new middle class afliation. Interestingly, they have begun to describe their own set of changing values by using the primitivising language used by state ofcials to distinguish coastal from national culture. A disposition to save money, to foster an ethic of cleanliness, to resolve conict through dialogue not force, and to accept change, are some of the ways in which they characterise their cultural transformation from primitive to modern

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shers. Their consumption practices have also changed dramatically. Big concrete homes, motorcycles, and cars are now a more common sight in Colachel as are increasing rates of dowry. These markers of civilisation have further insulated Colachel from other artisanal villages. Most signicantly, Colachels mechanised shers have responded to artisanal opposition by invoking their greater contribution to the nation. In the early 1990s, Colachels trawl boat association began an information campaign by distributing pamphlets defending its position against the artisanal sector. Some pamphlets highlighted the trawlers contribution to Indias foreign exchange earnings and used scientic reasoning to invalidate the artisanal sectors position on the unsustainability of trawling. Other pamphlets defended their position on the basis of more traditional identities. These denounced the un-Christian values of the artisanal shers who only practice violence while the trawlers multiply the sh just as Jesus did. In contrast to these bad shers are the trawler owners who contribute nancially to Catholic festivals and to the upkeep of parish churches and have given Kanyakumaris Catholics a national name.4 Through these publications, Colachels mechanised shers underscored the greater contribution of trawler than artisanal shing to the building of both church and nation. By rhetorically fusing sector, community, and nation, they presented their own interest as the national interest and their success as the success of the Catholic community. For their part, Kanyakumaris artisanal shers have turned to a politics that similarly maps identity onto territory. However, in place of the mechanised sectors turn to nation and science, they have mapped their identity onto locality and adopted a discourse of ecology. With these choices, artisanal shers have challenged the terms of secular developmentalism and crafted a demand for state accountability and full citizenship. In this nal section, I argue that Kanyakumaris artisans responded to their displacement from community through the privileging of an upwardly mobile sher middleclass by articulating both new forms of locality and new understandings of citizenship. In response to the coastal crisis, local artisans have tapped recent developmental and political initiatives to constitute themselves as a

collective of traditional practitioners. This new community consciousness has three key elements: territory, technology, and ecology. As I detail below, each of these elements has a longer history. However, over the last two decades, artisanal shers have redened these elements and combined them to create a sense of local belonging, or as I call it ecological citizenship. In this last section, I take up each element individually and narrate the change in meaning that contributed to the construction of an artisanal community consciousness. Finally, I turn back to the anecdote at the beginning of this paper to look at how this new conception of community challenged the subordination of the local to the national, and in doing so, recast the terms of citizenship. The reworked understanding of territory that grounded artisanal community consciousness reected a spatial shift from village to zone. Previously, shers asserted their right to shore space and the marine resource through the village. All those who launched their crafts from the village shore or shed in the waters adjacent to a village had to obey the use-rules, or code of common property, imposed by that village. By the late 1980s, however, the village was supplanted by the zone as the primary basis for territorial identity. Interestingly, this shift was catalysed by a state initiative. In response to widespread artisanal attacks on trawlers, which swept the Tamilnadu coast in the late 1970s, the Tamilnadu government instituted the 1983 Marine Fisheries Regulation Act, which created a protected inshore zone for artisanal shing. According to the Act, artisanal shers would work the sea up to three nautical miles from shore while trawlers would carry out operations only beyond this limit. The Act was mainly compelled by law and order concerns: its primary purpose was to separate sher antagonists into distinct zones to stave off conict while continuing to promote development through mechanisation. In effect, however, the Act exacerbated tensions between warring shers. In Kanyakumari, artisanal shers took full advantage of the new Act. The line in the sea substituted a horizontal boundary for the vertical ones separating villages and became a territorial marker for the divisive hostility between Colachel and its surrounding villages. Now, trawlers were attacked not only when they damaged artisanal craft and gear, or harvested

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large catches, but also if they transgressed the three-mile inshore boundary. With every clash, the three-mile zone became an even more potent symbol of artisanal identity. Artisanal shers redenition of technology was similarly compelled by another development initiative, this time by the church. With the expansion of the development arena in the 1970s to include non-state actors, the Catholic Church too entered the fray. A decade after the onset of the prawn rush and frequent clashes, a section of the Kanyakumari clergy began to question the emancipatory potential of the states development agenda and rethink their own role as moral custodians of the coast. Drawing inspiration from Latin American liberation theology and the Indian communist movement, they began talking about the economic and cultural rights of the poor and about how to extend the churchs natural authority to ll a development gap left by the state. The ensuing option for the poor was manifest in a church project to motorise artisanal crafts. The aim of the project was to create an intermediate technology that would in turn create an intermediate category of motorised shers and help undercut the polarisation of artisanal and mechanised shers. After much trial and error, a motorised canoe with a speed equal to the trawler became operational in 1985 and by 1990 such canoes were used with increasing regularity across the district. Instead of undercutting sectoral tensions, however, the spread of canoes increased the militancy of artisanal politics. With trawling identied as the only real enemy, the new motorised technology was assimilated into the original antagonism between sectors. The inclusion of motors into the category of artisanal sher reected its increased exibility and specicity. Now, artisanal shers could include new forms of technology as long as they were not trawlers. Not only were they assimilated, the motorised canoes also became the policing arm of the artisanal sector. The speed of the canoes enabled head-on confrontation with trawlers at sea and the frequency of clashes increased sharply. In addition, artisanal village councils whose legislative authority had been undermined by their inability to restrict trawling were now revitalised through the deployment of vigilante canoes. Finally, artisanal shers redened ecology to reect a new concern with sustainability. The

lives of artisanal shermen have always been marked by the unpredictability of harvest. While seasonal variation and individual skill do contribute to the outcome of shing trips, there is also a great deal left to chance. On any given day, two groups of shermen operating in the same area using the same craft and gear may be either blessed with a full net or cursed with an empty one. Artisans often contrast the unfathomable nature of the sea with the farmers mastery over land. Felix, an elderly sherman and village councillor, explained the integral role played by Kadalamma, the goddess of the sea, in the lives of shers: The land can be owned and farmers plant seeds knowing exactly what crop theyll harvest. But the sea isnt anyones property. We never know what our Kadalamma will give us. Although it causes bitterness, divine providence as a reason for empty nets is accommodated within the moral universe of artisanal shers. This makes it all the more unacceptable that mere human beings should usurp this divine right by virtue of technological capability. Artisanal outrage at such hubris on the part of the trawlers has found new expression through the language of sustainability. Sustainability as a concept entered the political lexicon of local artisans through the mobilisation work of the National Fishworkers Forum, an umbrella body of artisanal sher organisations. In tune with ongoing processes of economic liberalisation, the Indian government deregulated its 200-mile Exclusive Economic Zone in 1991, permitting the operations of foreign industrial shing vessels. In response, the NFF began a mobilisation campaign that stood state developmentalism on its head by equating trawling with destruction not production, and by identifying artisanal shing as the only means to a sustainable future. The Forums initiative drew Kanyakumaris artisans into a global political arena that linked local struggles against the displacement of sher artisans by capitalist modernisation. But even as they were incorporated into a global politics of opposition, artisanal shers increasingly used the language of fate and faith to counter trawler aggression. They began to speak of trawling not simply as an expression of greed and unequal distribution, but as hubris against divinity. Resource depletion was a warning from above not to disrespect the gift of nature. Signicantly, nature also

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included the god-given skill of artisanal shing which made the deskilling effect of mechanised trawling an added affront to nature and divinity. The link between artisanal shing, divine will, and the sustainable future of the resource produced a new sense of religiosity that displaced moral authority from the church to artisanal shers, making them the custodians of the sea and the moral arbiters of local conict. Together, territory, technology, and ecology crystallised a new community consciousness that challenged the displacements produced by secular developmentalism. It did so by reconstituting the sher collective to exclude trawlers and by redrawing the boundaries of locality to exclude the church. These reworked forms of community and place have anchored a sense of local belonging that stands in marked contrast to the trawler owners claim to national citizenship. Arif Dirlik has pointed to the centrality of the local in contemporary political discourse. It would seem by the early nineties, he notes, that local movements, or movements to save and reconstruct local societies, have emerged as primary expressions of resistance to domination (Dirlik 1996: 22). While I agree with Dirliks emphasis on the emergence of the local as a territorial and an ethical category, I would underscore the continued importance of the state to local resistance. For Kanyakumaris artisans, the claim to local identity and rights was intimately tied to citizenship and the exercise of state power. This was a citizenship based not on national but on local belonging. It was an endorsement of so-called local identities and priorities and a rejection of their displacement by national concerns. But it was not a call for local autonomy. Rather, artisanal shers demanded greater state intervention and more effective incorporation into the framework of the state to protect their mode of harvest. It was this insistence on the critical role of state power in ensuring local rights that made artisanal politics one of citizenship. And it was through the demand for state recognition on their terms that artisanal shers sought to combat their displacement by secular developmentalism. To illustrate this point further, let me take you back to the anecdote that began this paper. The attack on the trawlers was orchestrated within the three-mile zone by shers using motorised canoes. Following the attack, the

Peace and Development Council called an emergency session. Council directors began the session by distinguishing the actions of the two groups. Although they acknowledged that blame must be placed on both sides, they asserted that there was no justication for the scale of the attack and the nancial loss incurred by the trawlers. The clergy concluded that while the boat shers had committed a kuttram (sin), the artisanal shers had committed a maha kuttram (great sin). After days of negotiations, talks broke down and the artisanal shers boycotted the Council, incurring clerical sanction against shing for a week. When the artisanal shers took their church to court against the sanction, they deliberately chose a space of state power to stage their protest. In their petition, they called upon the state to recognise and protect their rights as local custodians of the sea and to reject the intermediary role of the church. Signicantly, the village councillors who drafted the petition on behalf of thirty artisanal shing villages made a point of distinguishing between the district state ofcials whom they encountered in their negotiations with trawlers, and the state as a moral umbrella that was autonomous from the vicissitudes of local politics. One of them, a sherman in his sixties who had served as a village councillor for 10 years, stated this distinction most clearly and vehemently: Shame on the Collector and Fisheries Director! Instead of protecting us, they have established a rule of corruption. They have betrayed the state with their immoral neglect of poor citizens. This sense of the state as benefactor of the poor and patron of the artisan placed it above its incarnate institutions and lent it higher moral authority. Most importantly, by claiming a privileged link to this moral state as locals, artisanal shers hoped to bypass the developmental calculus of a national framework that placed them at a ` -vis their mechanised brethdisadvantage vis-a ren and displaced them from the full rights of citizenship. In doing so, they in effect unlinked the state from the middle class nation, articulated a sense of local belonging, and claimed their rightful place as citizens. In articulating what I call ecological citizenship, artisanal shers issued several challenges. First, they pointed the way to a rethinking of citizenship in terms other than that

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of national belonging. Second, they contested statist oppositions dichotomies between citizen and community and between nation and minority, which ground secular developmentalism, without rejecting the framework of rights

altogether. And nally, they challenged their displacement by capitalist modernisation with a politics that incorporated developmental meanings into the redenition of locality.

Notes
1. Interviews with N. Dennis, Indian National Congress Member of Parliament; M. C. Balan, ex-Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam Member of Legislative Assembly; Lourdammal Simon, Minister of Fisheries, Tamilnadu Government, 1958-1962. 2. Interviews with Fathers Jacob Lopez, parish priest, Colachel, Kanyakumari, 1957-1962; A. Dionysius, parish priest, Colachel, 1996; M. J. Edwin, Director, Nala Oli Iyakkam; and A. J. Joseph, parish priest, Kanyakumari, 19481955. 3. Mechanisation scheme records, District Fisheries Department ofce, Nagercoil, Kanyakumari. 4. Excerpts from pamphlets distributed by the Kanyakumari District Mechanised Boat Owners Association.

References
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