Ajantha Subramanian is Associate Professor of Anthropology and of Social Studies at Harvard University.

Shorelines

Space and Rights in South IndiaBy Ajantha Subramanian

Stanford University Press

Copyright © 2009 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-6146-8

Contents

List of Illustrations…………………………………………………………………………viiAcknowledgments………………………………………………………………………………ixNote on Terminology…………………………………………………………………………..xiiiIntroduction…………………………………………………………………………………11 The Coastal World: Spatial Jurisdictions and Meanings…………………………………………..352 From the Inland Out: Caste Purity to Caste Modernity……………………………………………663 Changing Developmentalisms: Spatializing the Artisan……………………………………………1034 Community Development to the Blue Revolution: New Technologies, New Shorelines…………………….1435 Projects of Intermediacy: Regionalism, Artisanal Territory, Appropriate Technology…………………1716 Locality and Nation: Respatializing Rights Under Neoliberalism…………………………………..206Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………..245Notes 25…………………………………………………………………………………….7Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………………271Index……………………………………………………………………………………….293

Chapter One

The Coastal World

Spatial Jurisdictions and Meanings

IT IS SOMETHING OF A TRUISM to say that the lives of Mukkuvars are oriented around the sea. Kanyakumari’s shoreline is crowded with fisher huts and cement homes that open out to the Indian Ocean. India’s southwestern fishermen spend their days casting craft into the roughest waters of the subcontinent’s coastal belt. After spending their day at sea using an array of nets, hooks, and lines suited to specific species of fish, fishermen return to shore to sell the day’s catch to waiting small fish vendors and bigger traders. Many of the smaller vendors are fisherwomen who load the fish into containers, which they then carry on their heads to nearby markets. These fish provide cheap protein to inland consumers and income for the fisherwomen’s own household staples. Much has changed in the last fifty years with the introduction of mechanized trawlers, the entry of numerous long-distance fish merchants into the trade, and the expansion of a coastal proletariat who work as labor on artisanal and mechanized craft, but fishing is still the primary occupation on the coast. Even though some Mukkuvars have branched out into other occupations—the clergy, teaching, civil service, secretarial work, and social work—most coastal dwellers continue in the trade of their ancestors.

Fishers’ lives, then, have long been oriented around the sea both socially and economically. When one considers this orientation in the context of the territorialized dynamics of the modern nation-state, this seemingly facile statement acquires deeper meaning. In the southwestern region, two histories unfolded in tandem, one oriented outward around the Indian Ocean and the other oriented inward around land, agriculture, and state. The southwestern coast was fully integrated into transoceanic circuits of trade and religion even as it became increasingly marginal to the state-making politics of the agrarian inland. While Mukkuvar fishers were looking out to sea, the agrarian world was closing ranks around new understandings of status and belonging. In Chapter 4, we will see the meeting of these two worlds through the initiative of the postindependence developmental state. State interventions in fishing in the mid-twentieth century subjected southwestern fishers to the turbulence of capitalist restructuring that had transformed agrarian lives a century earlier. With the introduction of new technologies came new institutions and political currents that knitted coastal and inland lives together in unprecedented ways.

In this chapter I explore the world of the coast inhabited by Catholic fishers before the onset of postcolonial state developmentalism. I highlight the political dynamism of coastal Catholicism, a world both local and translocal in makeup. Beginning in the mid-sixteenth century, the southwestern coast of India became part of a network of Catholic places, people, and politics that spanned the globe. Although southwestern fishers were not maritime traders and transoceanic travelers like the seafarers of Calicut or the merchants of Gujarat, faith and trade linked them to places beyond their immediate social world. At the time, Catholicism was a world unto itself, one both hierarchical and heterogeneous, uniting its members in faith and dividing them across lines of social difference. These fishers were also part of a wider world of fishing whose interconnections reached further into the past. Their craft and gear suggest transoceanic borrowings: The kattumaram is thought to be of Polynesian origin, and the vallam bears the impression of Arab influence. Similarly, Mukkuvar fishing techniques encode histories of conquest and trade: The boat seine, or thattumadi, is of Spanish origin, and the Portuguese brought the shore seine, or karamadi, to the southwestern coastal belt (J. Kurien and Mathew 1982).

Today’s landlocked centers of state power and capital accumulation make it difficult to comprehend the vibrant dynamics of the Indian Ocean world and the place of fishers within it. The enduring historiographic focus on the inland public arenas of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Travancore, the princely state that included the southwestern region, only compounds the problem. Taking their cues from the states of the subcontinent, historians have focused their research on the agrarian worlds prized by modern states for their sedentarism and revenue (Arunima 2003; Daniel 1985, 1992; Jeffrey 1976, 1978; Kawashima 1998; Kooiman 1989, 1995; Menon 2004; Ouwerkerk 1994; Saradamoni 1999; Yesudas 1975). In the historical literature, the agrarian inland is the space of prosperity, penury, and politics, and land, lord, peasant, and state are the key ingredients of historical formation and transformation. By contrast, fishing and fishers are conspicuously absent, marking with their absence their insignificance to the coffers of the powerful. Even in the literature on the Indian Ocean trade, spice merchants, military entrepreneurs, and imperial powers take precedence as historical actors over fishers.

That these fishers are Catholic only compounds the problem of historical invisibility. With a few exceptions (Ballhatchet 1998; S. Bayly 1989, 1981; Boxer 1978; Houtart and Lemercinier 1981; Houtart and Nayak 1988; Nayak et al. 2002; Ram 1991; Stirrat 1981, 1982), discussion of the Roman Catholic coast as a dynamic space in its own right is almost exclusively limited to hagiographic church histories with their own obvious blinders. This historical black-boxing of the church and its congregants has obscured from view the social and political turbulence within the church over caste rights, the organization of fishing, and territorial jurisdiction. When we pull away the curtains, we are witness to a remarkable set of dynamics bringing fishers of the western coast into contact with a variety of institutional authorities from the parish priest to the regional bishop, the Portuguese archdiocese of Goa, Rome’s Propaganda Fide, and the English East India Company.

The forms of negotiation that fishers engaged in reflect a keen sense of the overlapping circles of power and authority in which they were embedded; this was a population that had a decidedly nonlocal political imagination. When fishers appealed to the East India Company for a change of jurisdiction from Rome’s Propaganda Fide to Portugal’s Padroado, when they wrote to the Vatican urging an end to caste prejudices within seminaries, or when they demanded from their diocesan bishop a new parish priest who would not extract so much from their daily catch for the church fund, fishers expressed an understanding of hierarchies and scales of authority and demonstrated the wherewithal to maneuver within and across them.

Although these other political arenas of the parish, the diocese, and the imperial church fall outside the conventional parameters of Travancore historiography, they are no by means subject to a completely different set of dynamics. Indeed, the sources and patterns of conflict have striking overlaps— opposition to taxation, demands for low caste representation within the clergy, lay threats of conversion, and resistance to institutional norms of social morality—that mark both inland and coastal politics. In both spaces, low castes were issuing challenges to structural inequalities of caste, class, and religion and in the process transforming the institutions that governed their lives.

Perspectives of the coast as a space of premodern patronage mask the dynamism of the coastal world, in particular, the ongoing negotiation over the sovereignty of coastal space and the caste status of its fisher inhabitants. The church has been an awesome force in fishers’ lives since the early days of its establishment on the coast in the sixteenth century. It was patron and intimate, an everyday influential presence. It is equally clear, however, that church authority was not accepted without question. In small and bigger acts of political maneuver, fishers negotiated the terms of coastal sovereignty. At times, they wove village and parish seamlessly together; at other times, fishers’ claims to coastal space privileged village over parish; at still other times, fishers would proclaim their sovereignty over the village church, refusing the overarching authority of higher echelons of the Catholic hierarchy. In their negotiations of material and spiritual circumstances, we witness both allegiance to institutional patrons and claims to self-determination that belie a sharp distinction between patronage and rights. To put it differently, the intimacy of fisher relations to their church requires an understanding of institutional authority not as an exteriority to community but as woven into its very definition. When fishers defined themselves as a community, they often included the church as a collective symbol.

Modernist histories of social transformation that assume a linear progression from patronage to rights—as many of the inland-based histories do—fail to recognize the nuances of patronage that allowed southwestern fishers to, for instance, both invoke the church as lord and master and evict parish priests who did not subscribe to village standards of justice. The rigid distinction between patronage and rights, arguably the basis of much modern theorizing on democracy, does not hold up when one considers coastal dynamics. Mukkuvar claim making since the eighteenth century reflects an understanding of collective justice and patronage, of community and authority, as inextricably linked. As I show in this chapter, Mukkuvar claim making typically opposed the injustice of one authority by turning to another for protection, exhibiting a politics of affiliation and allegiance that sits uneasily with modernist notions of rights as individual self-determination.

The dominance of either an inland, agrarian orientation or an oceanic orientation around long-distance trade and militarism has meant a dearth of historical information on the Catholic fishers of the southwestern coast. In my quest for Mukkuvar cultural histories, I found glimpses of coastal dynamics in Catholic Church histories, European travelogues, Travancore state manuals, diocesan records, and a smattering of secondary historical literature. More recently, debate between development economists and fishery activists on the ecological and social fallout of the postcolonial state’s fisheries development effort has generated a considerable amount of writing. Although this literature illuminates the particularities of coastal life since the 1950s, especially the socioeconomic context for the introduction of new capital-intensive technologies, it offers little on the preindependence period. What follows in this chapter, then, are several snapshots of the coast over a 500-year stretch culled from a variety of sources. I show the entrenchment of the coastal church as landlord, tax collector, and religious authority and illuminate how patronage as a mode of power and sociality became the basis not simply for the exercise of power but also for challenging it.

The Coastal Church

What emerges most clearly from the available patchwork of historical information is the social subordination of Mukkuvars first to royal and then to clerical patrons. Writings by early travelers to the Fishery Coast speak of the “lowly fishers” who formed the lowest rung of the region’s social hierarchy. The Ming dynasty traveler and chronicler Mahuan, who visited the west coast trading center of Cochin in A.D. 1409, wrote, “There are five classes of men. The Nayars rank with the king. In the first class are those who shave their beards and have a thread or string over their shoulders. These are looked upon as belonging to the noblest families. In the second are Mahomedans, the third the Chetties who are the capitalists; in the fourth Kolings who act as commission agents, the fifth the Mukuvas, the lowest and poorest of all” (Nagam Aiya 1906: 65). In the early nineteenth century, English botanist and statistician Francis Buchanan referred to the Mukkuvars as a “tribe,” a pejorative term indicating a place outside the caste order: “The Mucua or in plural Mucuar, are a tribe who lived near the sea-coast of Malayala, to the inland parts of which they seldom go, and beyond its limits, anyway, they rarely venture” (Buchanan 1807: 527). In the Travancore State Manual of 1906, Nagam Aiya reproduced a common, although unverified, story about women of rebel high caste families being sold as slaves to the Mukkuvars by Travancore ruler Marthanda Varma (Nagam Aiya 1906: 338). Whether or not this tale has any basis in fact, the ignominy of slavery is clearly enhanced in the account by bondage to a caste as lowly as the Mukkuvars.

However, there is no neat continuity between Mukkuvar social subordination of the past and their geographical marginality today. In the prenineteenth-century world, Mukkuvars were not spatially segregated outside a societal mainstream. Unlike today, when they are typecast as primitives inhabiting a wilderness outside the agrarian heartland, fishers were very much part of a society whose accumulation of wealth and state making were oriented around coastal trade. A long history of material, political, and cultural exchange linked the western coast of India to the continents of Africa and Europe (cf. Boxer 1969; Das Gupta and Pearson 1999; Subrahmanyam 1993). Trade routes were also pathways for the transmission of new faith traditions to the subcontinent, and conversions marked new military alliances as much as they did change of religious affiliation. Scholars date the Christian presence in India back to the visit in the first century of Thomas the Apostle, who established the Syrian Orthodox Church on the western coast. The establishment of the Roman Catholic Church followed in the sixteenth century, when the seafaring Portuguese traveled east in search of fabled lands of prosperity and lost Christians.

The Portuguese quickly insinuated themselves into regional dynamics, becoming one among many warring kingdoms and social groups seeking to further trade, military, and state-making agendas. To them, religion and trade were intertwined activities, and the Jesuits who traveled with the Portuguese navy were military contractors as much as missionaries. Patrick Roche puts it succinctly: “Portuguese officialdom was characterized not only by captains and factors but also by the padres. Both captains and clerics acted as partners in Christianization and colonization as servants of the king. Indigenous groups found that the clerics were powerful negotiators in winning the protection and support of the Portuguese officials” (Roche 1984: 41–42).

Among those who sought Portuguese naval support were the Paravar fishers of the southeastern coast. Paravars were a caste that enjoyed a virtual monopoly over the Coromandel Coast’s pearl fishing industry. Unlike the Mukkuvars, this fishing caste enjoyed a renown chronicled in a rich body of historical evidence. Social histories of this population make clear the initiative of the Paravar caste elite in sending deputations to the Portuguese seeking protection from Muslim pirates and neighboring kings and offering conversion in exchange. The Paravar jaati thalaivar (caste headman) is said to have himself converted and commanded his subordinates to convert with him. By 1537, some 20,000 Paravars had been baptized and brought under the Portuguese military wing.

The second mass conversion of coastal fishers to Catholicism followed in 1544 with the entry of the Mukkuvars of the southwestern kingdom of Venad into the church. In the scholarship on Christian conversion in South Asia, conversion has increasingly been interpreted through the agency of the convert (cf. Kent 2004; Kooiman 1989; Oddie 1997, 1998; Viswanathan 1996, 1998). Placing converts at the center of conversion provides a crucial corrective to earlier interpretations of conversion as the manifest will of the missionary, with the converts moving from ignorance to enlightenment largely in spite of themselves. Anthropologist Kalpana Ram, who has written one of the few ethnographies of Kanyakumari’s Mukkuvar Catholics, offers a speculative interpretation of their conversion that dovetails with this “second wave” of literature on conversion.

To be untouchable, to be able to worship Hindu gods only from the outer wall and to be confined to the sea shore to protect caste Hindus from one’s polluting qualities would seem reason enough to seek to escape Hinduism. In addition, we have seen that fisherpeople are quasi-independent of upper caste power and patronage, with all relations with the wider society mediated by trade. When an opportunity presented itself for the Mukkuvars to resolve the anomalies of their position in caste society, they took it…. Among the Mukkuvars, conversion was the result of a (probably explosive) combination of factors: the humiliations of untouchability being sharpened by the aspiration to autonomy and economic independence. This interpretation finds support in the literature on mass conversions to Christianity in the nineteenth century. (Ram 1991: 31–32)

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