At What Scale Shall We Pause?
by Ishita Sharma and Khyati Saraf
When Kandla port was conceived in the 1950s, the community of small-scale traditional fish workers that lived on the coast between Kandla creek and the Arabian Sea on the west coast of India, suddenly found themselves in the middle of a port. As the jurisdictional bounds of the port grew over the decades, the Wagher fishing community was continuously displaced within the expanding territory of the port. Over the last sixty years, the social and built architecture of the fishing community and the logistical architecture of the port have become entangled with one another. This work attempts to understand this entanglement across spatial and temporal scales by triggering new imaginations of what it means to live within infrastructural zones that are in constant flux.
Things and the relationships between things
“Infrastructures are matter that enables the movement of other matters. Their peculiar ontology lies in the facts that they are things and also the relation between things,” — Brian Larkin.
Constructed on the tidal flats of Kandla creek in the Gulf of Kutch in India, Kandla Port is a composite of many infrastructures spread across 900 square kilometers of the coastal zone (Bhawan et al. 2016). Since 2016, Kandla Port has undergone a symbolic, material, and financial resurgence as part of a new development plan; the Sagarmala, a project to build a ring of ports across the country and shift industrial development to the coastal zones (“SagarMala — Ministry of Shipping, GOI, Government of India”). Within the imaginary of the Sagarmala program, a port is an exceptional zone of manufacturing and production. The only government port equipped with a handling capacity of one million tonnes, Kandla is a response to the imperatives of economic growth — represented in mainstream narratives as a cohesive logistical machine, propelling India towards a pivotal role in Indian Ocean trade and geopolitics (E-Media Solutions 2017).
Contrary to what promotional videos and literature present, infrastructure, both as an imaginary and in its physical manifestation, is not stable or fully formed at any given point in time. Over the past 60 years, Kandla has seen ebbs and flows of finance that are most visibly articulated in the port’s expanding and contracting physical infrastructure. Stretches of the coast are densely built, with the landward area petering off into emptiness. Vast swathes of land are peppered with used and unused liquid storage containers, warehouses, partially constructed residential areas and ruins of older buildings including a cinema. Old staff quarters stand dilapidated even as new residential buildings spring up elsewhere. The unfinished and imminent nature of the infrastructure perpetuates a myth of unrealized potential, while also enabling different worlds to live within it.
At what scale shall we pause?
Like a radio that can tune into different frequencies, the scale is one register through which different views become visible. Expanding both the spatial and temporal scales at Kandla reveals multiple realities. As Gabrielle Hecht explains, “scales, then, are emergent rather than eternal. But their situatedness and historicity do not detract from their reality. They do work in the world. They are performative. Scale is messy because it is both a category of analysis and a category of practice” (Hecht 2018).
One scale through which we access Kandla is through satellite imagery, geospatial data and nautical charts based on hydrographic surveys that reveal static shorelines and identify physical infrastructure on land and water. These projections also reveal intangible infrastructures and boundaries such as port limits, shipping channels and dredged corridors — operations that delimit and parcel the coastal commons of the Gulf of Kutch.
On zooming into the fishing villages within Kandla port, the same satellite imagery makes obvious the difference in scale between the village and the port. Fishing villages occupy a couple of acres of the 2.2 million (2,175 acres is categorized as “dry land”) under the port limits (Bhawan et al. 2016). The village of “New Kandla Thermal colony”, situated in close proximity to the port’s jetties and storage zones, is squeezed in-between of a now-defunct ship-breaking yard and a container jetty. The second village further north, “Pattha Banna”, is surrounded by extensive industrial salt pans. Zooming in, the villages appear bound and enclosed, but with no obvious and visible relation to the surrounding port. On zooming out, the fishing villages are unrecognizable from the large-scale infrastructure that envelops them. So then, at what scale shall we pause?
Presence as provocation
Standing in the flat expanse of the salt and mudflats of Kutch at Kandla Port, for a moment, even the mega-infrastructure looks small compared to the skies and unobstructed horizon. It is only once the eye focuses on the moving bodies of people, birds, cycles, trucks, and the ear to their sounds that a steadying reference be found.
Constructed environments merge into the older landscape of the gulf; A patch of tidal flats and mangroves extend a few kilometers between industrialized salt pans and a jetty where fisher people catch crabs. Boats lie amongst the gentle folds and slopes of the mudflats crashing abruptly into concrete roads. Slivers of mangroves grow stubbornly amidst railway tracks and dry creek beds persist between freight corridors. Flamingoes, heron, and other migratory birds squawk from abandoned buildings, and a kingfisher perched on a wooden pole strikes a pose against the backdrop of a revolving lighthouse in the distance. It is here, in the everyday lives of the human and non-human creatures that life beyond and within the port is experienced.
Through the barbed wire, as miles of pipelines and walls cut through, it becomes apparent that the needs and movements of the port proceed indifferent to the lifeworld of the fishing community. The operations of the port are changing the material properties of the water, soil, topography and thereby the hydrodynamics, ecology, species diversity, salinity, nutrient composition and even toxicity and pollution of the intertidal zone (Kunte, Wagle, and Sugimori 2003; Srinivasan 2010; Saravanakumar et al. 2009). These are acts of “slow violence” on humans, non-human creatures and landscapes — “a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is not viewed as violence at all” (Nixon 2013).
The Deendayal Port Trust, the governing agency of this territory, does not legally recognize the presence of the fishing community. The port draws invisible jurisdictional lines — products of bureaucratic orders — transforming the community’s living patterns, severing access to roads on land and fishing routes at sea (Integrated Environment Impact Assessment Report, 2015). Under the jurisdiction of the Port Trust and the Ministry of Shipping, the Government of India dictates, mediates and controls access to food, water, sanitation, education, and hygiene.
Kandla Port exhibits the power that infrastructures can exert, but the fishing community’s enduring presence within the growing territorial bounds of the port’s authority is a constant provocation to that assumed power. Their insistence on persisting with their traditional livelihoods (instead of channeling their labour to the needs of the port) is a challenge to the state-perpetuated narratives of modernization and “development” and an indication of other scales, temporalities and administrative regimes that exist simultaneously. The presence of the community and their insistence on staying, mark a moment of uncomfortable pause.
Listening to the pause
The relationship between the port and the fishing communities is complex — it includes moments of negotiation, contestation, appeasement, coercion and legal battles. The fishing community makes claims by asserting their right to stay. But the provocation that the community embodies is deeper than the question of their survival. Through petitions and legal proceedings that challenge the Port’s expansion and the resulting environmental destruction (acknowledged in the mandatory environmental assessment reports commissioned by the port authority), the fishing community has positioned itself as an oppositional force to Kandla port and its expansionary impulse.
Hecht invokes Judith Irvine (2016) to remind us that large scales do not necessarily encompass small ones. In geospatial software and in the maps used by the state for planning and development, scale becomes a tool through which these villages and their inhabitants are subsumed into the massive infrastructural space of the port. Within such representations, scale actively reconstitutes the ground, creating new territories and values while erasing others. The production of space in present-day Kandla is not linked to its materiality, not to its there and then, nor to its here- and -now, but rather to a future-oriented logistical enterprise that presumes the fishing village to be an obsolete socio-spatial unit whose disappearance in imminent and inevitable. As global logistics networks become entangled with the fishing communities of Kandla, new imaginations, situated knowledges, and spatial practices become tools to make sense-able, the lived and living places. As the scalar imaginaries and teleological narratives of the infrastructural machinery attempt to rewrite Kandla; Kasab, a fish worker from the New Kandla Village, shows us new pathways they take towards the open sea.
With special thanks to Anwar Bhai, Kasab, Haseena, Shabnam, Sheikh Bhai, Usman Bhai and PSA for conversing and letting us be in Kandla. To Prateek, Varun for working with us. To Nishant and Digital Earth for guiding and facilitating.
References:
Appadurai, Arjun. 2010. “How Histories Make Geographies: Circulation and Context in a Global Perspective.”
Ashok, Sowmiya. 2018. “What the New Coastal Regulation Zone Draft Says, How It Differs from the Earlier Version | The Indian Express.” April 23, 2018. https://indianexpress.com/article/explained/what-the-new-coastal-regulation-zone-draft-says-how-it-differs-from-the-earlier-version-5147723/.
Bhawan, Transport, Sansad Marg, B P Marg, and Lodi Road. 2016. “Ministry of Shipping / Indian Ports Association.” Final Report, 107.
E-Media Solutions. 2017. Kandla Port. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKd7Tqj_Uao.
Hecht, Gabrielle. 2018. “Interscalar Vehicles for an African Anthropocene: On Waste, Temporality, and Violence.” Cultural Anthropology 33 (1): 109–41. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca33.1.05.
“India Together: At Kandla, No Room for Marine Ecosystem — 01 January 2014.” Accessed October 14, 2018. http://indiatogether.org/kandla-environment.
Kunte, P. D., B. G. Wagle, and Yasuhiro Sugimori. 2003. “Sediment Transport and Depth Variation Study of the Gulf of Kutch Using Remote Sensing.” International Journal of Remote Sensing 24 (11): 2253–63. https://doi.org/10.1080/01431160210164316.
Nixon, Rob. 2013. “Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor.” 2013.
S., Bhattji, Raychaudhury N., Dharmendra Shah, and Desai D. 2011. “Sedimentation Pattern in Pirotan Reef, Gulf of Kachchh.” Journal of Marine Biology Association of India 53 (January): 1–7.
Saravanakumar, Ayyappan, Mayalagu Rajkumar, Jun Sun, Jebaraj Sesh Serebiah, and Gobi Alagiri Thivakaran. 2009. “Forest Structure of Arid Zone Mangroves in Relation to Their Physical and Chemical Environment in the Western Gulf of Kachchh, Gujarat, Northwest Coast of India.” Journal of Coastal Conservation 13 (4): 217–34.
Srinivasan, R. 2010. “Development and Displacement: Resentment in the Kutch” 45 (February): 15–18.
“The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure | Annual Review of Anthropology.” n.d. Accessed December 24, 2019. https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/10.1146/annurev-anthro-092412-155522.
About the authors
Khyati Saraf is a landscape architect from New Delhi, currently based in Boston. Her work focuses on spatial activism in contested territories through landscape, ecology, cartography, and film. She received her Master of Landscape Architecture from Harvard University Graduate School of Design.
Ishita Sharma, from Delhi, India, received her Master of Arts in Human Rights Studies from Columbia University, New York, in 2013. Her research focuses on anthropology, ecology, coastal regions, and social movements.
