Contested Coastlines:
Fisherfolk, nations and borders in South Asia
by Charu Gupta & Mukul Sharma
Routledge India, 2008
Many have explored the dual function of seas as both bridges and barriers. Some notable examples include the Australian National University historian Paul D'Arcy, who has explored this issue in the waters of Oceania, and the Harvard historian Sugata Bose, who has looked at how the spiritual journeys of the Hajj exist beyond state boundaries and have connected pilgrims. Contested Coastlines is likewise an original contribution to the study of maritime politics and the connections among the communities of this region, going one step further by discussing these relationships in terms of local struggles, regional challenges and global tensions. Authors Charu Gupta and Mukul Sharma – Delhi-based historian and journalist, respectively – demonstrate a strain between national interests and a state-centric conceptualisation of the seas, peoples' interest and more mainstream understandings of communities. 'Securitisation' of the region's maritime borders and boundaries regularly crops up as a key issue, and powerful elites often neglect people who belong to these areas in the name of national interest.
Contested Coastlines shows how the longstanding invisibility of fishing communities in the literature of the Indian Ocean has not only been a result of their existence at the fringes of society, but also the cause of this marginalised existence. Some of them live and work along the Balochistan coast, on the coast of Gujarat, and in the Palk Bay area, among many other places. Indeed, the narratives of the fisherfolk that have been kept out of academic literature, combined with the top-down state projects controlling their livelihoods in the name of national interest, is certainly a reminder that silence is a language of pain that is ubiquitous in this region for a broad spectrum of communities – religious and ethnic minorities, women, children and the poor.
Gupta and Sharma's poignant reportage is about communities whose lives are intertwined with water, whose lived experiences force us to imagine different kinds of borders, those that are as fluid and changing as the currents of the ocean. For example, some of the fishermen in Kakdwip, in West Bengal, tell how the Bangladeshi authorities mistreat them; at the same time, though, we come across stories of fishermen who have married their daughters to Bangladeshi fishermen. The authors suggest that beyond the dominant India-Bangladesh and Hindu-Muslim identities, these communities are bonded through their livelihood, through their connection to the sea.