Shalini Iyengar

SHALINI IYENGAR, then a graduate student at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, was approved from funding in April 2023 to aid research on “Making the Coastal Zone: Law, Livelihoods, and Conservation in the Bay of Bengal,” supervised by Dr. Kalyanakrishnan Sivaramakrishnan. Over the course of the past century, the Indian littoral has increasingly come to be seen as a vulnerable frontier, besieged by natural disasters, the vicissitudes of a changing climate, and declensionist narratives around fisher lifeways. Equally, the littoral has been imagined as a frontier of opportunity for a “blue economy” and as a space for capital and industry. In both these competing imaginaries, the legal framework plays a critical role whether in re-imagining different coastal futures or in giving space for actors to assert their own understandings of place and ecological justice. This historically informed ethnographic project studies the making of a proposed coastal rights bill and traces its movement from shore-spaces in coastal Bengal to courts and offices in Kolkata and Delhi. Using the analytic of legitimate rights, the project examines how fishers, bureaucrats, lawyers and other actors imagine and shape coastal futures in India. At a time when debates around tenurial rights for small-scale fishers is increasingly seen as critical for food and livelihood security globally, this project contributes to anthropological literature by seeing fishers as creative actors, active in authoring and shaping coastal lives and laws.