Abstract
‘Abounds with fine oysters’:
The (post)colonial political ecology of an estuary in southwestern India
by
Adam Franklin Jadhav
Doctor of Philosophy in Geography
University of California, Berkeley
Professor Michael Watts, Chair
The persistence of fishing, farming and forestry by peasant households still provokes “agrarian questions” today, especially in the colonial and postcolonial Global South. What is to become of such small rural producers? How are they reorganized, subjugated or remade? What is their role in the development of industry and non-agrarian economies? Can an agrarian surplus — all the produce of peasant households, only some of which ever enters markets — become the basis for broad development of capitalism? In India, these questions were asked repeatedly by European colonial administrators invested in the project of “improvement” of the rural world for the extraction of profits. In postcolonial India, they have remained trenchant concerns for the environment-making, biopolitical state interested in governing and potentially transforming agriculture for national development and the accumulation of capital. Asking after the fate of India’s peasantry — at a time of widespread agrarian crisis and increasing climate change — remains both analytically and politically fruitful.
This doctoral dissertation explores these topics of agrarian development and transformation along the coast of southwestern India. After an introduction, Chapter 2 introduces and historicizes the Aghanashini River estuary (and its dynamic and robust peasant ecology and economy) and discusses the intellectual, political, ethical and methodological concerns of this research. Chapter 3 starts by examining contemporary discursive imaginaries of the estuary, including dominant elite conceptions of the backwardness of rural coastal places, before turning to results of nearly 20 months of field research, highlighting robust, more-than-market production of agrarian abundance that supports a form of defensive politics. Chapter 4 reviews discourse and practice of India’s engagement with the U.N.-sponsored Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and specifically the oceanic Goal 14: Life Below Water. This analysis finds India’s “performance” of sustainable development assessment at once reifies the development industry’s fetish of quantification while also creating a mutable, ambiguous “standard” of sustainability that occludes actually existing unsustainabilities. Chapter 5 presents a collaboration with remote sensing scholars that performs an “ecosystem service valuation” of the Aghanashini estuary, estimating a dollar worth far above regional GDP, before considering critically the usefulness and “value” of such valuations, particularly for environmental politics. A final chapter-length coda and conclusion considers the near-term future of the peasantry confronting waves of coastal capitalism.
