Abstract
Place-making strategies in the neoliberal era center on exploiting the relative advantages of particular sites in terms of investment, production of value, consumption, and accumulation. In the aftermath of disaster events, this can take the form of “disaster capitalism” as states and powerful assemblages of domestic and global capitalist interests seek to transform space in the name of reconstruction and recovery, taking advantage of the fact that constraints that may have tempered such goals before the disaster are temporarily put on hold due to the urgency of demands imposed by the disaster event. In this paper, I critically examine the development of heritage tourism as an economic development strategy designed to help a place “recover” while enforcing the relocation of most of its residents. In the aftermath of the devastating tsunami of 2004 in India’s Tamil Nadu state, the fisher village of Tharangambadi became the site of a reconstruction project involving on the one hand the relocation of artisanal fishers to new houses built inland by NGOs, and on the other, the rapid promotion of heritage tourism in parts that had been previously occupied by fisher households. Called Tranquebar by Europeans, Tharangambadi was once the key colonial outpost of the Danish East India Company, and in recent years began drawing the attention of Danish heritage enthusiasts. The tsunami and the reconstruction projects that emerged in its aftermath provided a powerful impetus to the goal of transforming portions of the village into a site for heritage tourism. I focus on two facets of this rebuilding process, one devoted to producing a specific set of spatial arrangements designed for what scholars of tourism refer to as the regulated consumption of difference, and two, the more complex and less visible though vital set of aligned processes involved in the production of this difference. If the former manifested in the remaking of physical space, the latter informed the rationale behind how that remaking was an unequal and elitist project linking the exclusion of fishers from the present to their systemic erasure from the past.
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Notes
Dalits are members of various communities across India that fall outside the Hindu caste structure, but have been rigidly locked into its oppressive demands, forced for centuries by dominant Hindu society, to do the most unpleasant and degrading forms of menial labor. In the twentieth century, Dalits began mobilizing politically under the leadership of B.R, Ambedkar, a leading figure of India’s independence movement and framer of the country’s constitution. Under the present Hindu supremacist government in India, many prominent Dalit intellectuals and activists have been jailed or targeted on spurious grounds, most notably, one of India’s leading public intellectuals Anand Teltumbde. His recent book Republic of Caste (2018) is an incisive study of how Hindutva and neoliberalism mobilize and intensify caste-based oppression.
Government Order 25, January 13th, 2005. Revenue Department, Government of Tamil Nadu; Government Order 172, March 30th, 2005. Revenue Department, Government of Tamil Nadu.
Coastal Regulation Zone refers to a set of laws adopted in the 1990s at the behest of ecologists opposed to rampant industrial activities and construction spurred by India’s adoption of neoliberal reforms in the early 1990s. The laws exempted customary uses of the coast by fisher communities, a fact blatantly ignored by G.O.172.
Heritage Walk Map—Tranquebar, a brochure produced by INTACH and Bestseller, 2008.
Ziegenbalg also notes that fish was a key part of the daily diet of both Indians and Europeans, which begs the question as to how this came to be the case, were it not for the labor of fishers (Jeyaraj 2006, p. 128).
Built in the thirteenth century by Maravarman Kulasekara Pandyan, a minor Pandyan monarch who claimed sovereignty over small but bustling coastal entrepot with its growing population of Tamil and Muslim merchants.
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Swamy, R. Tranquebar—the tsunami, heritage tourism, power, and memory in a South Indian fisher village. Dialect Anthropol 46, 247–265 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-021-09641-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-021-09641-6