Angol
After a clerical sanction prohibited them from fishing for a week, a group of Catholic fishers from a village on India's southwestern coast decided to take their church to court. In a petition, this community called on the state to recognize them as custodians of the local sea and protect their right to regulate trawling and reject the church's intermediary role. "Shorelines" offers a window onto their struggle, providing insights into contemporary Indian democracy, citizenship, and environmentalism.Rather than see them as non-moderns inhabiting a bounded cultural world, or as moderns wholly captured by a statist logic, Ajantha Subramanian illuminates how these fishers have long represented themselves as subjects of rights in relation to existing hegemonies. Challenging previous regional histories of caste and development, this work moves beyond the romantic myth of self-contained, natural-resource dependent populations to reveal the charged political maneuvers over social inequality and rights that take place between subalterns and sovereigns in South Asia.
