Through a detailed analysis of two centuries of political claim-making by Catholic fishers on the southernmost coast of India, Ajantha Subramanian argues that one should look for the roots of contemporary rights-based politics in histories of social struggles rather than in genealogies of Western philosophy. Her account of the continuity between the maneuvers of fishers under the colonial hegemony of the Church and their postcolonial appropriation of the rights of national citizenship and the rhetoric of development demonstrates how claims to rights, and the subjects who assert them, emerge from political contestation. Her argument for a processual analysis of rights politics seeks to dissolve the distinction between modern and non-modern politics, contending that in Europe as elsewhere rights claims and their associated ideologies of democratic citizenship have emerged at the historical conjuncture of regional struggles and transnational currents of political discourse.
Although her project is theoretically ambitious, Subramanian spends little time in the abstract, preferring instead to use careful historiography to show how rights emerge from political struggle. Her analysis unfolds chronologically, beginning with the early establishment of Church hegemony by the Portuguese and following the fisher population through the influences of Protestant and Hindu reform programs, British and post-colonial development schemes, and contemporary divisions between trawling-boat owners and artisanal fishers. This historical framework allows Subramanian to focus on the politics of space, in particular on how the claims of fishers have both shaped and been shaped by the definition and use of space. For example, she uses the term intermediacy to characterize fishers' position at the edge of the nation and in the midst of transoceanic commerce as well as regional political strategies arising from this position that, in turn, have exacerbated their marginality within India.
Subramanian's treatment of the politics of development is notable for both its cogency and its optimism. Against now-standard accounts of development as a crushing “antipolitics,” she argues that the projects and language of development have produced an uncertain political terrain characterized by economic opportunity and oppression, rapidly shifting alliances and divisions, and heightened political maneuvering among fishers. Her intriguing account of the introduction of “intermediate” technology during the last several decades offers insight into the diverse logics of development, and the impossibility of foretelling their effects. This picture of development is one aspect of a broader argument she puts forward about the relationship between hegemony and subaltern agency. Although writing in the historiographic tradition of the Subaltern Studies collective, she challenges their conceptualization of the subaltern as outside hegemonic political discourse, speaking a language that is unintelligible to the state. In Subramanian's account, fishers move back and forth between discourses of patronage and rights in order make claims on the state. When they invoke their particularity, they contribute to the production of hegemonic tropes of tradition and modernity, and when they claim universal rights, such rights are always generated within particular histories of struggle.
Subramanian's arguments will interest scholars of development, social movements, and political anthropology. Her study also presents a fine example of how to use historical detail to bring substance to theoretical claims. Its empirical richness makes Shorelines a valuable addition to the library of any student of contemporary South India.
