Boxing Day marked the fifth anniversary of the 2004 Asian tsunami that caused extensive destruction to the southeastern coast of India. Five years on, the tsunami and the external interventions that followed it have helped the subaltern groups in coastal fishing communities to resist ‘top-down' oppressive traditional rural governance systems known as uur panchayats in the state of Tamil Nadu.

Kalpana Ram in her landmark ethnographic study on coastal fishing communities of Tamil Nadu describes how these communities lived on the margins both physically and socially along the sea-shore for many centuries, occupying a low position in the caste hierarchy. John Kurien argued that these fishermen had long been constructed as ‘drunk and violent' by members of other communities and that the 2004 tsunami could provide a ‘good occasion for change' in their status as social and political outliers.

Traditional governance

For centuries, fishing groups in Tamil Nadu had been managed through their steely internal governance systems called the traditional katta or the uur (village) panchayat. Systems of traditional governance seemed to have worked well for these communities through centuries, wherein elderly ‘elite' men from the village were in charge of socio-economic and legal decision-making in the village, independent of the state's judicial systems. A massive disaster like the tsunami however led to the questioning of these power structures by the NGOs and the subaltern groups within these communities. While the state and NGOs did rely heavily upon the information provided by these panchayats regarding housing and asset losses since it was difficult to surpass traditional authority systems, some NGOs also viewed post-tsunami reconstruction as an opportunity for ‘social engineering'.

They thus used tsunami rehabilitation as a means to empower the subaltern groups by resorting to measures like distribution of more boats than before. This led to erstwhile fish-workers becoming boat owners thereby influencing class relations in the villages. While some villages saw openly organised revolts by fish workers against the boat owners with regard to boat distribution, in others there were increased jealousies related to housing completed by different NGOs, as some villagers felt that they received ‘bad housing deals' as compared to others.

In the worst affected district of Nagapattinam alone there were over 500 NGOs working in the immediate post-tsunami period. While some ‘experts' believe that such massive civil society interventions served to ‘spoil' the fishing communities by creating a ‘dependency syndrome', there were also increased instances of subtle everyday resistance practices of the subaltern groups against the village elite in the post-tsunami period.

When this writer visited Nagapattinam, many men and women openly criticised the rural elite for manipulating relief, rehabilitation and recovery interventions of the state and the NGOs. New housing and boats have also led to a re-articulation of power and privilege in the fishing villages along this coast as everyone received a concrete house after the tsunami. The uniformisation of housing in the post-tsunami period has served to disturb older social hierarchies that were reflected in the different house types in existence before the tsunami. Similarly in the view of the traditional elite, over-distribution of boats and the receipt of concrete houses and ex-gratia money have led to an increased arrogance among fishing workers.

Subaltern groups in general — be it the fishing workers or women in these communities — have found new ways to establish stakes in their own development and that of their communities after the tsunami. There has been a massive increase in micro-credit programmes run by the state and civil society organisations that have enabled women to capture the public space for themselves — by increasing their access to banks, NGO offices, self-help group meetings and public protests against the state. Some women in these villages have emerged as community leaders for various NGO programmes, thus earning a new respect and stature in the eyes of other community members. These women have also appropriated some of the dispute-resolution roles from the traditional panchayats, thus affecting their power in the community.

Dispersal of power

All these changes have led to an overall weakening of systems of traditional elitism in the fishing communities as new popular leaders have emerged after the tsunami. The 2004 tsunami interventions have thus led to a dispersal of power to different men and women in the fishing villages as compared to the earlier system of one dominant pole of power— the patriarchal uur panchayat.

Traditional power systems have been affected among the coastal fishing communities and this is viewed as a positive change by most onlookers — the state, the NGOs and the communities themselves. External interventions in the wake of the 2004 tsunami have thus contributed to the democratisation of decision-making processes in the erstwhile closed communities. A massive disaster has hence served as an opportunity for the empowerment of subaltern groups in these communities by fast forwarding development processes in coastal Tamil Nadu.

— Opinion Asia, 2009

 

Kanchan Gandhi is a Phd candidate at the Department of Geography, National University of Singapore.