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Modernity from below: local citizenship on the south Indian coast

2003; Wiley; Volume: 55; Issue: 175 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/1468-2451.5501013

1468-2451

Ajantha Subramanian,

Indian Economic and Social Development

In June 1997, Catholic fishermen from a fishing village in the south Indian coastal district of Kanyakumari made the unprecedented move of taking their church to court. The fishermen's decision to wield state law against their religious leadership came in response to a clerical sanction that prevented village inhabitants from fishing for a week. They had provoked the anger of the clergy by initiating an attack on local trawling boats that ruptured a church-brokered peace on the coast. The attack was one in a series of confrontations between the artisanal, or passive-gear, craft and mechanised trawlers of Kanyakumari district and signalled the build-up of artisanal opposition to the trawling of inshore waters and depletion of the marine resource. But unlike other occasions when religious sanctions against violence among coastal Catholics held sway, this time artisanal fishers accused the church of overstepping its authority. Instead of submitting to the clerical order, they sought justice in the courts as local citizens opposing unconstitutional barriers to their livelihood. In this essay, I consider Indian state developmentalism as a process of displacement and Catholic fisher activism as a demand for the reinstatement of full citizenship. On the south Indian coast, the postcolonial state has been an agent both of incorporation and differentiation. As a force of development, the state has identified artisanal fishers as an economic community standing apart from the industrialising nation. And as a secular force, it has identified them as a Catholic community standing apart from the Hindu mainstream. These two overlapping forms of community, each distinguished by its difference from a posited economic or cultural mainstream, have circumscribed the relationship of Catholic fishers to the state and operated as limits to full citizenship. However, as I will illustrate, Catholic artisans have responded, not by rejecting the state and demanding cultural autonomy, but by appropriating and reworking state categories in unexpected ways to demand economic justice and equal citizenship. They have responded to displacement by secular developmentalism by asserting their rightful place as citizens of the Indian state. Located at the southwestern tip of the Indian subcontinent in the state of Tamilnadu, the district of Kanyakumari has a 68 kilometres coastline that is dotted with 44 coastal villages and inhabited by a Catholic fishing population numbering approximately 150,000. With Portuguese 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 fishing community and successive rulers. The social geography of the coast is at once religious and civil: the boundaries of fishing 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 fishery 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 fisheries that would complement India's Green Revolution in agriculture: new mechanised fishing 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 Commission's recommendation of rapid technological change for alleviating coastal poverty, raising the Indian fisher's standard of living, and increasing levels of production was justified by perceptions of the coastal population as socially backward. The Commission characterised the existing fishery sector as "largely of a primitive character, carried on by ignorant, unorganised, and ill-equipped fishermen. Their techniques are rudimentary, their tackle elementary, their capital equipment slight and inefficient" (Shah 1948). There was also a cultural component to this evaluation. The Commission determined that the poor productivity of indigenous fishing 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, self-governing village republic, the Commission identified the need to sustain the organic solidarity of the fishing village as a foundation for development. It finally determined that Community Development, which would retain the fishing 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 Gandhi's vision, it placed the village at the heart of the Community Development agenda and promoted nation-building as a process extending from India's rural communities (Singh 1969). In its final 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 conflicting aims of dissolving the boundaries of "traditional" economies by integrating them into a national developmental framework and producing its beneficiaries as reworked "communities" uniformly benefited 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 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 defined 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 non-incorporation. 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 reflects this dynamic. As I will illustrate, the Indian state has consistently treated coastal Catholics as members, first 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 state's secular imagination. In the context of the Kanyakumari coast with its Catholic fisher population, the Tamilnadu State government sought legitimacy for its fisheries 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 fisher votes and for endorsing fisheries development. By choosing the Catholic Church as the"natural authority" of the coast and disregarding the authority of village fishing councils, the state reduced the complex cultural history of Kanyakumari's fishers 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 fisher 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 Kanyakumari's 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 fishing 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 fisher 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 fisher congregation to take up the new technology without hesitation. The development programme was proof, they claimed, that the state was finally 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 first 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 Minister's marital village, where her husband, A. M. Simon, was village council president. During the first years of mechanisation, over 70% of subsidised craft went to Colachel, making it the centre of mechanised fishing and the Blue Revolution's 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 stifled 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 fisheries development shifted dramatically in the mid-1960s due to the rise in demand for prawn in the international fisheries 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 fishing for monocrop, export-oriented production (Kurien, 1978, 1993, Kurien and Mathew 1982). The Tamilnadu government's prioritising of mechanisation radically transformed the existing code of conduct governing the access and use of the marine resource. The pre-mechanisation fishery was governed by a code of common property with inbuilt barriers to access. Technical barriers, such as the need to have fishery-specific skills and the need to use technologies acceptable to the collective of fishers, and social barriers, such as the caste basis of fishing, prevented free entry of capital and persons from outside fishing communities into the fishery. 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 benefited those equipped with the most efficient technologies of harvest (Kurien 1996). Finally, the pink gold rush undercut the very purpose of mechanisation, which was to equip fishermen 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 fishing 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 fishers over access and use of the coastal waters. These conflicts have increased in intensity from the mid-1970s, after which the overcapitalisation of the fishery and overfishing of the resource began to result in a decline in total fish landings. Artisanal fishers 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 fishing and created a class of non-operating merchant capitalists, most of whom had no previous connection to the sea. In Kanyakumari, however, a different pattern emerged. Here, the class of mechanised fishers arose from within the Catholic fishing population and, as a result, generated a unique cultural politics around access to and use of natural resources. Conflict between mechanised and artisanal fishers in Kanyakumari set in motion a triangular relationship between state, church, and fishers. 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 fishers. 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. Significantly, as the violence on the Kanyakumari coast increased, so too did the Tamilnadu government's reliance upon the Catholic Church's religious authority. More and more, government officials began to look to the clergy to translate class conflict into religious minority uplift and to keep in sight the original promise of Community Development. This privileging of religious authority in mediating the conflict has been a strictly local phenomenon. On other parts of the coastline, the Hindu or multi-faith character of the fishing population, and the entry of non-fisher 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 fisher organisations (Bavinck 1998). By contrast, in Kanyakumari, the fact of the fishing 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 fishing 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 Colachel's trawler owners as the creation of a representative fisher middle class, and to condemn artisanal opposition to trawling as the reactive isolationism of a population resistant to progress. In his analysis of India's first Five Year Plan, Richard Fox offers a harsh critique of Community Development. He opines that the first post-independence government blatantly "hijacked" the Gandhian vision to further policies totally incompatible with the Mahatma's "utopia" (Fox 1989: 182). Referring to the government's first 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 Fox's opinion, the Indian government's 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. 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 Kanyakumari's artisans, denying them access to the state and to economic justice. Artisanal fisher grievances, even when directly addressed to the state, are systematically referred to the church. Significantly, Colachel's 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 Colachel's mechanised fishers cognisant of this fact, they have crafted a politics of modernity that underscores their difference from the artisanal sector and their identification with a national middle class defined by its commitment to development. Many of Colachel's trawler owners have diversified 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 affiliation. Interestingly, they have begun to describe their own set of changing values by using the primitivising language used by state officials to distinguish coastal from national culture. A disposition to save money, to foster an ethic of cleanliness, to resolve conflict through dialogue not force, and to accept change, are some of the ways in which they characterise their cultural transformation from "primitive" to "modern" fishers. 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 significantly, Colachel's mechanised fishers have responded to artisanal opposition by invoking their greater contribution to the nation. In the early 1990s, Colachel's trawl boat association began an information campaign by distributing pamphlets defending its position against the artisanal sector. Some pamphlets highlighted the trawlers' contribution to India's foreign exchange earnings and used "scientific" reasoning to invalidate the artisanal sector's 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 fishers who "only practice violence while the trawlers multiply the fish just as Jesus did". In contrast to these "bad" fishers are the trawler owners who "contribute financially to Catholic festivals and to the upkeep of parish churches" and have "given Kanyakumari's Catholics a national name".4 Through these publications, Colachel's mechanised fishers underscored the greater contribution of trawler than artisanal fishing 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, Kanyakumari's artisanal fishers have turned to a politics that similarly maps identity onto territory. However, in place of the mechanised sector's turn to nation and science, they have mapped their identity onto locality and adopted a discourse of ecology. With these choices, artisanal fishers have challenged the terms of secular developmentalism and crafted a demand for state accountability and full citizenship. In this final section, I argue that Kanyakumari's artisans responded to their displacement from "community" through the privileging of an upwardly mobile fisher middle-class 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 fishers have redefined 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 reflected a spatial shift from village to zone. Previously, fishers asserted their right to shore space and the marine resource through the village. All those who launched their crafts from the village shore or fished 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 fishing. According to the Act, artisanal fishers 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 fisher antagonists into distinct zones to stave off conflict while continuing to promote development through mechanisation. In effect, however, the Act exacerbated tensions between warring fishers. In Kanyakumari, artisanal fishers 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 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 fishers' redefinition 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 state's 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 church's "natural authority" to fill 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 fishers and help undercut the polarisation of artisanal and mechanised fishers. 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 identified 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 fisher" reflected its increased flexibility and specificity. Now, artisanal fishers 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 fishers redefined ecology to reflect a new concern with sustainability. The lives of artisanal fishermen have always been marked by the unpredictability of harvest. While seasonal variation and individual skill do contribute to the outcome of fishing trips, there is also a great deal left to chance. On any given day, two groups of fishermen 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 farmer's mastery over land. Felix, an elderly fisherman and village councillor, explained the integral role played by Kadalamma, the goddess of the sea, in the lives of fishers: "The land can be owned and farmers plant seeds knowing exactly what crop they'll harvest. But the sea isn't anyone's 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 fishers. 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 fisher 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 fishing 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 fishing as the only means to a sustainable future. The Forum's initiative drew Kanyakumari's artisans into a global political arena that linked local struggles against the displacement of fisher artisans by capitalist modernisation. But even as they were incorporated into a global politics of opposition, artisanal fishers 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. Significantly, "nature" also included the god-given skill of artisanal fishing which made the deskilling effect of mechanised trawling an added affront to nature and divinity. The link between artisanal fishing, divine will, and the sustainable future of the resource produced a new sense of religiosity that displaced moral authority from the church to artisanal fishers, making them the custodians of the sea and the moral arbiters of local conflict. Together, territory, technology, and ecology crystallised a new community consciousness that challenged the displacements produced by secular developmentalism. It did so by reconstituting the fisher 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 Dirlik's 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 Kanyakumari's 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 fishers 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 fishers 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 fishers 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 justification for the scale of the attack and the financial loss incurred by the trawlers. The clergy concluded that while the boat fishers had committed a "kuttram" (sin), the artisanal fishers had committed a "maha kuttram" (great sin). After days of negotiations, talks broke down and the artisanal fishers boycotted the Council, incurring clerical sanction against fishing for a week. When the artisanal fishers 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. Significantly, the village councillors who drafted the petition on behalf of thirty artisanal fishing villages made a point of distinguishing between the district state officials 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 fisherman 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 fishers hoped to bypass the developmental calculus of a national framework that placed them at a disadvantage vis-à-vis their mechanised brethren 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 fishers issued several challenges. First, they pointed the way to a rethinking of citizenship in terms other than that 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 finally, they challenged their displacement by capitalist modernisation with a politics that incorporated developmental meanings into the redefinition of locality.