Fish, auction, sell: Surviving pollution by routine

Abstract

The fishers of Ennore are familiar with the ways of researchers and journalists. Their work, life and livelihood at the northern edge of the city of Chennai in south India; hugging the estuary of the Kosasthalai river polluted beyond recognition by steady postcolonial industrial development in the area, has been of growing popular interest. This is thanks to repeated flooding in Chennai precipitated by blockages in its waterways, such as in the Kosasthalai estuary, and the tireless work of environmental activists bringing this to wider attention. So, when I turned up at their fish landing & auction stations, hung around in the fish market to observe and talk to the women, requested that I accompany them on nearshore fishing and fish ‘marketing’ trips, they were unfazed except a brief raised eyebrow that appraised if I might be up to the task.

For these tasks were performed very much in spaces that might bring forth descriptions such as ‘corroded hollows of landscape’ (Stoler 2008) and analyses of ‘slow violence’ (Nixon 2011) and ‘slow death’ (Berlant 2007). But, as Max Liboiron (2021) reminds us, pollution is also ‘colonialism’ that exceeds material contamination and spreads through the exercise of power and domination. Entrenched power thus requires that we rethink survival in an already, permanently polluted world as active agency (Liboiron et al. 2018).

Does survival in a manner not valued by dominant society under conditions of material pollution, then mount resistance? Fishing in this way is stigmatised both in material and social terms (Govindan 2021, Niranjana 2020), but the numerous species of fish that others can never hope to know well enough are the fishers’ strongest allies in their refusal to produce value. They instead reproduce coastal urbanism as an inefficient network of social relations.

This paper draws on my ethnography by ‘tagging along’ – in particular, a trip accompanying elder women who commuted and worked through the night to procure fish from the trawler harbour for sale in Ennore – to discuss such a politics of coastal survival. I ‘tag’ on to Thangam amma, who introduces me to poovali – “an ugly looking fish that tastes beautiful,” in her words – and many others as she navigates seeming chaos participating in several fish auctions.

Survival as a fisher on Chennai’s seashore often involves setting out to sea before dawn, working through the night on a small boat risking life and limb for admittedly small and diminishing rewards. Yet, it is Thangam amma’s exhausting routine – perhaps because I participated physically in it – that inspires a rethink of survival under toxic conditions.