Provincialising Alappad’s Nationalistic Gaze: A Spatial Complexity Siting the ‘South’ Beyond the Metro

Introduction: Alappad’s Agency Beyond Nationalistic Gaze

Why are sites such as Alappad in Kerala important to consider when India’s urban policy is increasingly framed in nationalistic terms? What should a critique address to reject narrower framings of sites such as Alappad when treated as an ‘emerging urban market’, a tourist opportunity or a place threatened by climate change? We argue that these questions underlie the futures of non-metro small towns and large villages via an onslaught of ‘dangerous developmentalism’ inherent in a nationalistic gaze: a liberal aspirational frame where climate, among other managements, can facilitate ‘organised’ transparent markets unblocking economic opportunities at the bottom of the pyramid; and in the other, if somehow disparate and marginalised groups are brought back into ‘organised politics’ to tap their substantive consciousness in mobilising against global capitalism. Across both ideological positions, sites such as Kerala’s Alappad remain ‘a subject to’ site, devoid of its own agency, history, meaning and life.

As we shall discuss, such positioning is a political space extending deep into academia’s complicity in global and other powerful capital-shaped techno-managerial materialities. Liberal academics, for instance, mobilise techno-scientific studies well-funded under the rhetoric of climate change to justify mega infrastructure investment zones. For instance, sea-level rise, which is of course real and important, in being posed as a general ‘crisis’ that then constructs ‘marginalised’ zones. ¹ For instance, Chennai’s east coast road, as placed under the conceptually problematic term peri-urban, allows data points of ‘productivity’ defined by potential real estate value ² (Byravan et al., 2010). In the media, when the researchers justify their exaggerated data as ways to attract the attention of policy makers, of the risk to all, this is in effect, justifying an amplified financialisation of mega infrastructure billed under ‘climate resilience’. ³

In this form of developmentalism that includes a recently constructed bridge to connect with the coastal highway, Alappad remains a passive site primarily to be incorporated within the nationalistic developmentalism of course, with a longer genealogy of rare earth mining. To soften the developmental blow, aspirational desires are fuelled with emphasis on the ‘local culture’ vision built around heritage and tourism. Within this larger framing, donors would survey untapped and unknown ‘secondary’ level urbanisation. And as in the case of Chennai’s east coast road, these mega loans would task academics, NGOs and hi-tech start-ups empowered with GPS and GIS to undertake public consultations, data gathering and ‘participatory co-mapping’, involving the locals as ways to build ‘local consensuses and ground truthing’. ⁴ Such data knowledge is premised on the idea of marginality of youth, ‘slums’ dwellers or fishing communities if not mobilised correctly on productive lines, informed and led by experts—academics, and activists, and where the lack of planning remains a harbinger of potential chaos. A key issue is how popular groups develop their own agency or, more accurately, influence administrations to contextualise funds towards more locally relevant development priorities.

Political Spatiality to Move Beyond Constructs of Marginality and Vulnerability

The efforts of the government of Kerala (GoK), NGOs and international research projects, reflected in critical studies as well, first pose young fishers as marginal and vulnerable and then seek to empower them. In this case, Alappad’s complexities and history as spaces contingent on larger capitalism reduce its spatial power configurations to be a rural backwater. A re-politicisation and problematisation of such issues need to include contradictions and complexity of political agency that remain necessarily mediated on different grounds: some young fishers use the narrative of marginalisation to politicise their agency, whereas other groups focus on political representation to get to key positions in political parties without using marginality. The analytic of political spatiality involves several interconnected arguments:

Constructivist grounded theory (Charmaz, 2000) helps centre everyday local practices valued for formative political processes in connection with larger histories. This allows for ontological and epistemological equivalence breaking the hierarchy of theory to practice.

Locating Alappad Within a Non-Metro Gaze

Over the past decade, non-metro-urban sites have become a prominent gaze for different reasons across ideologies. Here too, data gathering, for instance, of census towns emerging to dominate India’s urban population remains viewed mainly to enhance their market potential (Mukhopadhyay et al., 2016). In such frames, the political project is reduced to an a-spatial rhetoric of citizens versus contractors around the ideas of public participation and debate (Maringanti & Mukhopadhyay, 2015). If such liberal view of the non-metro emerging urban locates participation, public debate and citizenship to facilitate unified markets as above, tropes in critical studies, emphasising meta capital, miss the complexity of places. To explore Alappad as an urban, the important spatial political question is if non-metro towns evolve following their own autonomous histories and logics, and what would their particular ontological and epistemological terrains look like.

Historically, Alappad has been produced as a contested space via various national and international engagements. Alappad, a sandwiched land between the T. S. Canal (national water highway) and the Arabian Sea, has been connected with a specific and ‘global’ history of extraction since 1909. It started with a German scientist C. W. Schomberg finding traces of rare earth minerals on the coconut coir-rope shipped from here to England. Schomberg, later accused of espionage, heralded mining that was initiated in 1911, turning this space into a contested territory shaped by the colonial capital of declining empires. Just a year into independence, prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, determined to pursue the possibilities of rare earth minerals, appointed Homi Bhabha as the chairman of the Indian Atomic Energy Commission to stop the export of monazite. In 1950, D. N Wadia headed the newly created rare minerals survey unit set to re-discover Alappad’s mineral wealth and declare this site one of the fertile locations of rare earth minerals. By 9 February 1954, Nehru personally visited Alappad by crossing the lake on an unsteady wooden raft. The ‘national gaze’ continued on 22 September 1962, when Vikram Sarabhai surveyed Alappad to develop UN-sponsored India’s equatorial rocket launch station. That was eventually moved south to Thumba but, in effect, had also reinforced the claim of the atomic energy lobby to Thorium. Recently, this part of Kerala features in several overlapping projects, some highly visible like the strategically important mineral sand mining, tourism and the massive residence-ashram blocks heralding sea view and nature cure spirituality, but others far subtler. Post-2014, in particular, India’s ‘the urban turn’ (Prakash, 2002, p. 6) has morphed into several image-ready and controversial project sites of nationalistic urban modernity overlaid with the revival of traditional cultural values. What is less obvious are the complex overlaid institutional entanglements that this promotion involves and how these get played out in a spatial–territorial dialectic. Alappad is one such space which allows us to think about current debates in critical theory in a more material way. The next section, despite being selective, provides a sense of the materiality and how this can form the basis for a spatialised understanding of its politics.

Material Practices Underpin Substantive Politics

Rakshapedal or escape—the engagement with the everyday practices and conversations with the fishers disclosed various rationalities of urban. Rakshapedal is a usage that discusses the politics of Alappad. Rakshapedal is a common word in circulation across various constellations. It has two manifestations—narrative and scheme. A fisher child gets exposed to this term from childhood; parents would say education is the only way to escape hardship and vulnerability. This is further legitimised by teachers who advise students to think about stable alternatives to fishing. For instance, if someone in Alappad gets a good job or an admission to an excellent institute, the immediate response of the fishers will be rakshapettu or escaped. State, mining companies, NGOs and, in certain ways, Mata Amritanandamayi Math (MAM) are resorting to escape as a scheme. Escape from marginality, climate change, escape to inland, spirituality, stability and a mythical urban. Rakshapedal is a scheme premised on the framework of marginality. The mining companies, mainly the workers, propagate the narrative that the minerals in the sand are highly radioactive. Later popular media also propagated this narrative. Some fishers feel that this narrative is to acquire land for mining. In the context of climate change, certain activists and GoK feel that the coast is a hazardous space; therefore, fishers have to move inland. A well-known activist Nityananda Jayaraman (2019) addressed the shore as a ‘meagre strip of vulnerable land’. He feels that fishers need to be relocated to safer inland grounds. He further says,

It is a fact that marginalised communities in coastal cities already occupy the ocean’s margins. Relocating them to affordable housing within the city would improve their lives and distance them from sea-based hazards. Of India’s land mass of 3.28 million square kilometres, a meagre 13,750 sq km—or 0.11 per cent, including 10,000 sq km of tidal wetlands and 3,750 sq km of coastal land—falls within the CRZ. It is not clear why the government thinks this meagre strip of vulnerable land is crucial for affordable housing and the rest of the mainland is not suitable. (Jayaraman, 2019)

GoK has an exclusive programme for this relocation, Punargeham, a derivative of Rakshapedal. Offering four lakhs for a house and six lakhs for purchasing new land contradicts the varying land values across Kerala. In Trivandrum and Kochi, it is impossible to relocate with this. The other option is to hand over land ownership to the state and relocate to a tiny apartment constructed by GoK. These narratives and actions obliquely make the fishers believe that they live in a dangerous space; hence, they naturally arrive at the decision to escape to a better place.

Another aspect of escape is associated with the materiality of bridges in Alappad. This village’s 13 km-long narrow strip has six significant bridges. The first bridge of Alappad opened in 1974, and the other four after the 2004 tsunami as part of the relief project. One is Asia’s longest bowstring bridge, part of the coastal highway connecting Kochi and Trivandrum. GoK is promoting these new infrastructure projects for tourism and connectivity. Out of the four tsunami relief bridges, one of the bridges, Amrita Setu, was constructed by MAM as part of their tsunami relief work. The total casualties in the 2004 tsunami in Kerala were 170, and 143 were from Alappad. One explanation for the high death tolls in the area was the lack of bridges. Until 2004, connection with the inland was through wooden crafts. In an interview, a fisher narrated that after the tsunami, when a bridge was inaugurated near his home, he and his family discussed the easiest way to reach the bridge if another tsunami hit. During the immediate post-tsunami period, the materiality of bridges was to escape to the inland. Now, it is development, connectivity, tourism and everyday opportunity, that is, an escape from rural to a mythical urban. These narratives have created an aspiration towards ‘the urban’. Most fishers believe tsunami relief work transformed housing, connectivity and livelihood sectors. The relocation programmes are now known as tsunami colonies, further reinforcing marginality by moving them away from the coast and setting them in conflict with other pre-existing settlers and communities. The other central material practice to be highlighted is around the space of fishing and finance.

Marketisation Without Agency

Organising the ‘unruly’ market and placing them into the regularities of developmentalism is another key aspect of the nationalistic gaze. In the context of Alappad, the regularisation happened via GoK’s ordinance, the Kerala Fish Auctioning, Marketing and Maintenance of Quality Bill (2021), starting with creating various committees such as the harbour management society, fish market management committee and fish-quality maintenance committee. Here, one of the most significant shifts is the new restrictions that aim to control the auction or lelam; pricing of the fish is the new guideline to control the auction and the practices of trade inside the harbour. The ordinance provides sole power to the bureaucracy; they will decide the landing station and the punishments and control the harbour management. It proclaims that the fishers should give the state 5 per cent of their daily cash. The guidelines also state, ‘no suit or other legal proceeding shall lie against any officer or authority for any damage caused or likely to be caused by any action which is done in good faith or intended to be done in pursuance of this ordinance or any rule made thereunder’ (Government of Kerala, 2021, p. 23). Even though the fishers welcomed the weight-based pricing of the fish, unlike the earlier bulk auction, they do not support the move to dilute the traditional lelam. They also believe that GoK used COVID as a space to try out these regulations. One fisher opined, ‘Without investing money in our crafts, why does the GoK want to take money from us? We are ready to give five per cent to the government once they provide interest-free loans for crafts and their maintenance. As a unit, we know how to co-exist with the commission system [local term for auction practice]’.

Auctioneers and fishers feel that social practices that retain the fishing cannot be easily destroyed. This offers a context to understand the politics of capital infusion into this space and the resulting complexity. In the past, one person did not handle the ownership of a thangu vallam (former version of ring seine boats) or the traditional seine crafts. Earlier, the coastal economy was not dominated by single-owner vallams. Family members or a group owned them. During the socio-technical transition in the fisheries sector, thangu vallams and thangu valas (net) changed into ring seine gears that are now very common on the Alleppey–Cochin coasts.

Most vallams have multiple owners for many interrelated reasons other than the significant investment required. The number of rings, the size of boats and ring seines have increased, which has resulted in huge investments. In the present context, the cost of a vallam with ring seine net is around 8 million, whereas, for trawlers, it is around 12 million. Since most fishers cannot afford this, they seek financial help from others. Fishers traditionally manage to get a considerable amount from auctioneers, revealing the lelam as a complex interconnected space. In return, the auctioneers get the right to auction. Auctioneers presently contribute about 50 per cent of the total funds and, in return, get 10 per cent of the daily catch. It is common for auctioneers to join hands with others, including investors, to pool the amount. This group includes gulf-based migrants, ex-army men, government employees and even newlyweds. Usually, three to five people join the principal auctioneer for one boat/craft, and the 10 per cent return will be divided equally or in proportion at the end of the month. Thus, there is not a single capital source but a constellation of people from varied backgrounds who draw their investing amounts from various sources. As explained further below, the lelam intersects with other spaces, that of the vallam itself, and this constitutes a complex multi-layered practice when seen from the spatial perspective.

There is a similarly complex spatiality as the carrier boat reaches the harbour with the fish; the auctioneers will auction off the fish to the traders who come to buy the fish. Later they calculate the amount and give it to the carrier boats. Note that there is no legal agreement between the owners and the auctioneers about the investments. Any issues related to the mishandling of money by the vallam owners or auctioneers are solved by their respective Karayogams. One auctioneer opined, ‘We give large sums to the owners without papers, it is a practice we follow, and we have a long tradition of these transactions. We trust each other. Usually, no one will break the trust. Any issue will be discussed and solved with our Karayogams’. The auctioneers provide capital for the fishers, and they mediate the sales. Whenever the fishers are in crisis or for net maintenance, the auctioneers help financially. One of the vallam owners said, ‘We know some auctioneers are exploiting us with the help of the merchants, but as a practice, it has good aspects too. Through this system, we are able to avoid the complex bureaucratic process that comes with government schemes or bank loans’.

While at sea, and when the fishers are about to finish collecting fish from the nets, one of the owners will call the auctioneer (lelakkaran), who will enquire about the price trends and decide which harbour they should land at. This may not be applicable in some coastal villages. Since Alappad fishers can access Neendakara harbour (Kollam district), they compare the price with the auctioneers. Once the carrier boat reaches the harbour, then the auction process happens. The auctioneer starts with a price influenced by the harbour’s present trends and ends with the maximum bid. People who support this system feel that it is transparent that is anybody can take part in the auction to buy fish.

Moreover, they say that since auctioneers have invested in the vallams, they will also try to get higher bids so that their commission percentage will be good. There is a popular narrative that the actual beneficiary of fishing is not the fishers but rather the people who auction. Generally, auctioneers do not limit themselves to investing in single boats but invest in at least three to five vallams to maximise returns. Other auctioneers have tie-ups with wholesale merchants with a more extensive network. Fishers feel that this group earns more than anyone else in the harbour.

Karayogams: The Local Deity Temple Committees

These institutions constitute multiple spatialities. These are issues concerning fishers, representing fishers when it comes to negotiation with traders and financiers, mining companies whose extractive practices of thorium reterritorialise the beach and MAM’s promotion of global spiritualism. Karayogams are customary institutions that control the daily businesses of the fisherfolk. They remain influential local organisations in the village and act as the administrative body of temples. Karayogams are funded using vattakash, the 1 per cent contributed by fishers from their daily catch. It is also essential to view Karayogams and the parishes as politico-spiritual organisations with definite territories focusing on fishers’ sociocultural and economic aspects. More importantly, they cover fishers’ lives, including property rights, claims, marine resource management, marriage, death and divorce. Members of the fishing community usually register their weddings in the Karayogams. Set in such deep practices, fishers do not usually act against the decisions of the Karayogams. The election for Karayogam members is generally held after the annual festival in the local temple. As a two-way connection between people and the temple, Karayogams always try to maintain reciprocity among the community. Interestingly, among the fishers, Karayogams maintain the political consciousness deeply embedded in the society and help uphold the unity of fishers, irrespective of class and political affiliations. Here, practices such as Ulsavam (temple festival), special gatherings and various poojas reinstate political awareness of the society (against forces or pressures that may fracture them).

Karayogams can be thought of as using spirituality to politicise the community on issues of mining, caste, coastal development and politics. These Karayogams are affiliated with Akhila Kerala Dheevara Sabha, a Hindu fishers’ caste forum. The regional and national state, or more accurately, one part of it, interfaces with such customary organisations. When institutional practices of Karayogams are linked with their religiosity—which is co-produced via the practices on land and sea, spaces such as the Akhila Kerala Dheevara Sabha engage with the state spaces on regulation, licences, subsidised fuel, fishing infrastructures, port development, mining, and so on. In effect, these institutional framings of GoK, in the form of various committees devoid of representation from the Karayogams, will financialise the fishing sector further. Once the everyday practices of fishing and trade are disrupted or organised, the agency of fishers is at stake. Such disempowerment will lead to depoliticisation and force them into debt.

Critical Studies Misplace Materialities

Dominant theoretical frames in recent critical studies try to address these issues on the ground. Among scholars of critical studies, two main strands have emerged over the past decade; the idea of planetary urbanisation promoted by Brenner (2018) and Schmid (2015) has dominated and reshaped earlier concerns of Harvey’s Accumulation by Dispossession expanded in the South Asian context (Banerjee-Guha, 2010). Simply put, planetary urbanisation seeks to provide an expansive, almost totalising theory of capital that drawing on Lefebvre (2014), states that the entire earth, to its most extreme parts of the arctic, and oceanic, is capitalised and hence urbanised. This position has come under criticism of other southern scholars who argue that portraying this more expansive capitalism paves way to a minor tertiary role, all real material spaces in the South and one of great diversity in how it shapes local and distinctive political economies. Thus, the importance of the ‘ordinary city’ (Robinson, 2006, p. 10) is to recover a political project: to look at the actual terrains of unequal power and its constructions that get glossed over in the planetary frame. These include particularities of histories, gender, crises of planning and, very centrally, mobilising ‘informality’ as a strategy of capitalist governance (Roy, 2005, pp. 148–151). This is important, but these debates could move beyond the notion of posing terrains such as Alappad as examples of southern diversity set to a meta-capital.

In another related strand of the literature, the idea of agency is usually posed only if it features as an element of social movement or resistance—ideas and assumptions understood by academicians and NGOs. Note that such universal framing of the South usually posits that it’s reactive to capital from the North. Halvorsen (2019) usefully adds to this to emphasise the decolonising of territory, drawing on De Sousa Santos cited later. One of the key issues here is the assumption that, with capitalism, the land is being commodified (Christophers, 2016). Such framing poses its agents on the ground, brokers, liaison agents and local politicians as all being complicit with state-led dispossession and/or international capital restructuring various southern political economies. Such planetary frames return to the older ideas of the third-world city as a site of local deviance that today allows for global speculation (Goldman, 2011, 2020), increasing financialisation (Halbert & Rouanet, 2014), both linked to the ideas of ‘frontier urbanism’ (Gururani & Dasgupta, 2018, p. 41). Implicit in this is that the failure of planning, policy and corruption would produce chaos, popular violence and annihilation of civic life forms. Importantly, this position, not unlike the conservative policy high grounds, poses the local as an underlying threat—these are actors and institutions that constitute an unruly terrain. Absurdly for some scholars of critical studies, the argument goes that if the chaos of cities, reflected in the peri-urban, is not understood, southern cities will collapse into a spectre of youth and other popular groups rising in revolt. ⁵ Such views of third-world urbanisation as sites that are breeding grounds of revolt and communism (Seng, 2014) are not new but foundational to how it came to be viewed and generated categories such as slums, squatters as being deviant to western liberal society (Kusno, 2020). The surprise, thus, is how these roots persist in critical scholarship.

This view of popular politics and agency, that unless it’s connected to social movements led by NGOs and activists, most if not all other realms of politics are contaminated into a politics of patron clientelism that emerges from and also underpins slum politics to fuel a mafia rule (Balakrishnan & Pani, 2021; Baliga, 2022; Doshi & Ranganathan, 2017; Gururani & Kose, 2015; Ranganathan & Doshi, 2018; Sud, 2014, 2020; Weinstein, 2008). Instead, in the context of Alappad, as we have seen, the Karayogams and local groups do play a critical role in shaping the agency of fishers, but via the space of complex negotiations with particular state spaces, rather than only visible protest. The police, panchayat and social organisations are approaching Karayogams to collaborate with anti-drug movements, accident awareness programmes, women empowerment, health camps, and so in. Moreover, most of the libraries, government hospitals, schools, playgrounds, fishing craft landing stations and fishing nets maintenance units in Alappad are in the donated lands of Karayogams. Being a political worker, the first author’s active intervention to withdraw the COVID regulations regarding fishing is another instance to show the complexities and contradictions of politics. When the district collector extended the fishing ban in the name of COVID, a group of politically active youths decided to intervene and mobilised the vallam owners’ union. Here, they sought the support of the panchayat members, drafted petitions, met their constituency member of the legislative assembly (MLA) and convinced him of the political mileage he would get. Later, due to this pressure but also due to a political opportunity to expand the constituency, the MLA’s discussion with the Ministry of Fishery and the district collector led to the lifting of the fishing ban. Many, if not all, of these interventions, involve complex politics and negotiation that include quiet politics akin to Asaf Bayat (2013), forms of non-cooperation as in James Scott’s (1985) work, but also as a spatiality of territorial politics implied by Tania Li (2010).

With this, we would argue critically about a larger framing which connects to Alappad’s nationalistic gaze, the way the local is treated. Such framing lies seriously disconnected from how actual and existing political agency by groups designated as poor and marginal get played out and their complex institutional realms, especially in small-town settings (Raman et al., 2016). It also shows a lack of problematising speculation (Patil & Benjamin, in press). Academics may see fishing communities as marginalised, but as Venkataramani (2017) shows in Mumbai’s Malad, this relates to how the poor, among other groups, draw on real estate surpluses, real estate brokers and agents to substantiate infrastructure in housing and the economy that shape their political and economic empowerment to contest elite groups. Ideas of the frontier also belie a complex understanding of land’s multiple logics. Earlier studies of land regularisation that enriched our understanding of territorial politics (Banerjee, 2002; Dupont, 2005) are lost with the category of the peri-urban (Gururani & Kose, 2015) set against the norm of North American planning and regional development. This shift in effect poses the complex logics and genealogies as deviant (Benjamin, 2017). Finally, the inability to think of the complexity of agency and power realms where empowerment and resistance are subtle works in indeterminate ways and where ambiguity to survey and sight is essential to move along (Benjamin et al., 2022; Simone & Benjamin, 2022). Perhaps such dystopian framing across ideological positions is not just premised on very thin fieldwork but deeply entangled in the politics of international research projects that pre-set agendas and narratives with fieldwork charted out for third-world or Southern research collaborators. What is missed, in actuality, is the possibility of spatial thinking.

Spatial Thinking and Politicising Knowledge Production

The general understanding of space is that it is ‘no longer viewed as a fixed and absolute container within which the world proceeds. Rather, space is seen as a co-production of those proceedings, as a process in process’ (Thrift, 2008). Considering space as a ‘singular phenomenon’ (Kobayashi, 2017, p. 1) does not account for the relative power and how these are constructed via relationships and constellations shaped by material moorings. Spatiality literature suggests that Alappad’s spatial materiality and ontologies are co-produced by land and the sea. This co-production covers the fishing economy, various constellations, religiosity and sociocultural–political relations. The first author’s studies on Alappad move across literature, memory studies, epistemologies of south frames, constructivist grounded theory and critical geography scholarships. These diversified disciplinary optics help to understand the politics of any site.

Epistemologies of the South frame help to develop spatial thinking as a conceptual approach to offer an alternative to discuss and problematise developmentalism. The recent literature on the epistemologies of the South stresses a conceptual shift. ‘An alternative thinking of the alternative’ (De Sousa Santos, 2015, p. 133) values experiential knowledge and mobilises theories from the ground. Epistemologies of South frames address the apparent gap between Western theories and subaltern experiences. Alappad appears as an example of their epistemic shift from the North. As stated above, when it comes to fishing, forms of knowledge are experiential, and sociocultural practices and worldviews are in relation to staunch regard for the sea. For instance, at the time of fishing, fishers have to consider various factors: the direction of the wind, flow, depth and colour of the water, speed and position of the craft, nature and speed of the fish shoal, and whether big fish are chasing the fish shoal or not. These forms of ‘ecology of knowledge’ (De Sousa Santos, 2008, p. 20) are experiential and relational. Extending epistemologies of south frames with the constructivist grounded theory (Charmaz, 2000) and its ‘methodological self-consciousness’ (Charmaz, 2016, p. 2) helps spatialise the knowledge. The constructivist grounded theory takes ethnography seriously in an experiential way to find meanings from narratives, memories and oral literature. It also accentuates the role of the researcher not as an observer who records details but as a copresence in the field.

In the End of the Cognitive Empire (2018), De Sousa Santos asks for a methodological framing for the epistemologies of the south. His decolonial pedagogies start with defining the ‘sociology of absences’ (De Sousa Santos, 2018, p. 2). These frameworks help to look at Alappad beyond the constraints of vulnerability and marginalisation, to recognise ‘relational ontologies’ (Escobar, 2016, p. 14) of knowledges, practices, memories, stories, oral literature, and so on, and to construct a political agency for ‘cognitive justice’ (Visvanathan, 2009, p. 5). Such formative research allows us to read about different forms of everyday practices embedded in different sociocultural and political realms (De Sousa Santos, 1977). Spatialising knowledge helps to critique the phrase, Give me your story; I will do the theory! For both authors, the first as an insider researcher of the fishing community but encountering research projects on coastal territories, and the second with a 37-year career, there have been numerous occasions to participate and partner in international collaborative projects. In the final publication, one is lucky to be placed as the second author, often as a footnote, and for many ‘starting off junior’ researchers, someplace in the thank you list. Apart from issues of morals and ethics, our point here is the framing: with the incorporation of field data, the story is set within a predetermined narrative that will ‘sell’ in the conference circuits, work with donors in future projects, or conform to, drawing from De Sousa Santos’ (2018) pre-existing Northern ideas of criticality, a route into publication seeking the nod to the big names in tenure strategic journals. The political consequences of the research on the ground are hardly of concern. And as Clark rightly emphasises, the political work of academia is necessarily collaborative, seeking to explore emergence rather than follow the glamour of meta-theories (Clarke, 2018). Why would an approach of spatiality not be that popular, except in its narrow sense? One reason could be that spatiality threatens the innocent mask of academia, opening up a pandora’s box questioning the north–south, theory–field, research budgets and authorship, the language of writing and publication (De Sousa Santos, 2018). And if it poses a consideration of substantive politics that questions existing donor practices and power structures that extend from research academia to powerful hidden lobbies, then it is even less likely to be used substantially.

Conclusion

We feel an emphasis on spatiality explored via the idea of epistemic equivalence is the key foundation to problematise provincialisation. In effect, one cannot fully explore the political spaces one encounters in varied terrains—those of fishing practices and trades or forms of governance that interconnect karayogams to new forms of institutional agencies to promote mega infrastructure and heritage. We have tried to underline that to provincialise development is to provincialise agency. The agency is constructed in material ways (land as territory, embeddedness of economy, political learning) and builds its own genealogies on its own terms that are premised not on atomised individuals but out of constellations of varied groups. We also feel that future research should acknowledge the plurality of practices, imaginations, logics and the politics of knowledge production to invent and reinvent theories from the ground.