Beyond Morality: The Moral Economy Framework and the Fisheries in Mumbai

Introduction

Politics around the environment, especially recently, has been a deeply divisive issue. Polarizing views and visions around the questions of conservation and protection have dulled in many ways our understanding of how communities with intimate links to natural resources organize their lives and livelihoods around it. Such views have either led us to imagine nature in puritanical terms free of all human intervention, as evidenced in recent conservation attempts in the forests (Rai, 2019) and on the coasts (CRZ, 2001, 2011) or to see resource dependent communities as the standard bearers of sustainability and equitable living practices (Kurien, 2004; Pinkerton, 2015). The latter view considers cultural values of fairness and equity as emblematic of resource dependent communities, and consequently considers such communities as an embodiment of moral economies, posited as being ideal institutions for the governance of common resources, standing apart from privatized and neoliberal market or state driven interventions.

However, a belief in community-led institutional governance has often resulted in overlooking the social relations that inform such governance (Menon & Lele, 2003). Intra-community inequality and concerns over new entrants to the commons, for instance, have been left unaddressed both in academia and social movements. Given that social values and commitments, particularly towards ecology, are seen as foundational in defining political action in both movements and theory, the focus has increasingly come to lie with who possesses these values and whether this is defined on the basis of community identity or through resource use (Cadigan, 1999).

With a focus on the change to the moral economy of the fisheries of Mumbai, this article analyses political responses of the fisher movement directed towards securing rights for the Kolis, a traditional fishing community in Mumbai, and conserving resources of the sea. The article contextualizes the ‘radical’ conception of the moral economy—where class is an essential analytical category—to explore Koli political action. The article demonstrates that a ‘radical’ conception of the moral economy departs from an imagined juxtaposition between moral and political economy. Instead, the ‘radical’ conception captures the complex strategies that communities adopt to establish new norms of production and provisioning, which need not always tend towards social equity or ecological sustainability. This, I argue, enables us to consider new possibilities within community-led governance of resources.

To empirically situate these questions, I draw on a qualitative study of the Koli fishing community in Mumbai. The case of the Koli fishing community in Mumbai is well suited to understand the social relations around which an older pre-capitalist moral economy of the fisheries was built. The Kolis are a caste community practicing fishing, based in Mumbai, and claim indigeneity to the islands of Bombay. ¹ The Son Koli fishers have been documented as fishers for many centuries, ranking low in the caste hierarchy, and consequently the community has been listed as socially and economically backward in the state of Maharashtra.

The Political Economy of the Fisheries

The traditional practice of fishing, practiced on a small-scale for consumption and exchange in local markets, was first a subject of change under colonial rule, which set out to modernize the fisheries but quickly gave up on it. ² This was subsequently reimagined by the postcolonial state through the 1950s and 1960s, which initiated a capitalist transformation in the fisheries in the state of Maharashtra and mechanized the fisheries (Department of Fisheries, n.d.). The practice of fishing soon came to be dramatically altered from a caste-based livelihood to a capitalist enterprise in which new capitalists and workers entered. At the same time, the state-led modernization project also introduced subsidies for new mechanized technology and trawl and purse seine nets, to be purchased by Koli fishers, to create a new capitalist class in the community. Social relations of labour were significantly impacted through these interventions, especially with the entry of such capital-intensive technology, and the creation of a new class of boat owners who were distinct from workers on boats, a stark contrast to previous livelihood patterns. Even as significant changes had been initiated, the traditional gender division of labour of the community, in which men undertook fishing and women did the selling, curing and drying of fish, remained largely intact. At the time when men’s work was being radically transformed, Koli women’s work received scant attention and support from the state. These significant changes in the fisheries led to a shift away from an older moral economy and the Kolis asserting against it in a variety of ways.

Thompson (1971) conceptualized the response to ruptures in the moral economy of a community as a form of class action; Koli action, however, has not been built on class solidarity but rather on a consolidation of community identity. Yet class remains vital to understand the transformation of fisheries, especially in light of the change to an earlier ‘ethic of provision’ and a politics that foregrounds sustainable resource use. Among the Kolis, the disruption of an older moral economy in the fisheries of Mumbai implicated new ‘external’ entrants to the fisheries, such as the state, non-Koli capitalists and migrant workers.

This article is based on in-depth interviews with Koli interlocutors as well as activists from the local fisheries movements conducted during 2013–2014 and a multi-sited ethnography covering two koliwadas [Koli settlements] and a fish market in Mumbai. I entered the field primarily through my introduction with activists from the National Fishworkers’ Forum (henceforth NFF), a national organization working towards securing rights for small-scale and artisanal fishers, and its regional affiliate organization, the Maharashtra Machimaar Kruti Samiti (henceforth MMKS), and through senior leaders Rambhau Patil and N. D. Koli who introduced me to women activists in the MMKS. It was their suggestion that I study the gendered aspects of the work and the movement more closely. A friend from the community also enabled my early access to a koliwada he resided in, and it was through these vital introductions that I began my study. Interviews with Koli fishers and activists have been used to situate and analyse political responses of the Kolis to the capitalist transformation in the fisheries and changes to the city of Mumbai. Interviews were also conducted with non-Koli owners and workers in the fisheries, but not with migrant fish sellers.

Unpacking Community Governance and the Moral Economy

In the literature on management, governance and conservation of common resources, it has been common to consider community-led approaches as the anti-thesis to market-driven privatized initiatives. Both market-driven and community-based approaches are typically suggested as a critique to top-down state-led management (St. Martin, 2005). But even as market- and community-driven approaches may share more in common than their critique of the state (Mansfield, 2004), there remains a tendency to view communities as driven by culture and market approaches as defined by capital, suggesting an opposition between both (Gudeman & Rivera-Gutiérrez, 2002). Although such approaches have been critiqued (Cadigan, 1999; Judd, 1997; Mies, 2014; Olson, 2011; St. Martin, 2006; Trawick, 2001; Tsing, 2003), approaches that call for participatory management and governance tend to obscure more difficult questions of how the community itself should be defined (Agrawal & Gibson, 1999). The romanticization of communities positing them as victims of the state has also been critiqued (Baviskar, 2008; Kumar & Vasan, 1997; Payne, 2013), but there remains a tendency to view such resource-dependent communities and their practices as built around a collective commitment to ecological sustainability. In this framework, forms of production are perceived to be based on moral obligations, shaped by norms of reciprocity and equity. This has often, erroneously, been considered as the ‘moral economy’ of the community (Cordell, 1989; McCay & Acheson, 1988; McGoodwin, 1991; Pinkerton, 2015), suggesting that economic concerns and logic remain outside the domain of cultural values. Even when moral economies are not viewed as embodying cultural values alone, they are considered as epitomizing principles of fairness and equity (Menon et al., 2018).

But the moral economy, a concept developed by E. P. Thompson (1971), was imagined differently. Developed to understand the food riots in eighteenth-century England which broke out as a response to price rise, Thompson argued that the riots were not an emotional response but a political one, indicative of the social indignation about the disruption of the earlier normative order. The moral economy suggested the social norms around provisioning ‘legitimate and what were illegitimate practices in marketing, milling, baking, etc … grounded upon a consistent traditional view of social norms and obligations, of the proper economic functions of several parties within the community’ (1971, p. 79).

Though collective community norms and consensus were central to the moral economy, the moral economy did not, in fact, in Thompson’s conception, exemplify a morality which was inherently antagonistic to capitalism or individual gain. While social norms of the moral economy incorporated the notion of reciprocal relations, these were not always equitable. As Thompson argued, the legitimacy of the pre-capitalist market of food was based on a paternalistic model, and the food riots were also precipitated by the lords of the manor who enjoyed market rights and were aggrieved at the profits made by middlemen and traders (1971, p. 95). Seen as such, moral economies are the social norms around production and exchange and do not ‘naturally’ demonstrate any commitment towards equity or sustainability. Scott’s (1976) study on peasants in the twentieth-century Myanmar and Vietnam highlighted this, and he argued that peasant livelihoods were based on ‘the moral economy of the subsistence ethic’, which was disrupted through colonial state formation and the expansion of markets. Consequent rebellions were not based on an opposition to inequality per se, but rather to new forms of it. Antagonism that emerged around the moral economy (Scott, 1976; Thompson, 1971) was therefore not a result of the end of the moral economy, destroyed by capitalism, but rather of the shift from one moral economic order to another. However, in the years following the work of Thompson (1971) and Scott (1976), moral economies have often been interpreted as antagonistic to capitalist societies, such that interventions of technology and markets into resource dependent communities are read as not the entry of a new form of moral economy but rather as the death of the moral economy itself. As this article highlights, there are two essential problems with such a formulation. The first is that it prevents an understanding of the moral economy as it actually operates, that is, looking at the relation between social norms and economic practices around provisioning, which involves a range of social actors such that even capitalist societies have a moral economy albeit one that is substantially different from pre-capitalist societies. The second is that linking moral economies to specific communities sets limits on determining current and potential participants in the moral economy.

In contrast, I seek to return to early formulations of the term ‘moral economy’ where it was an approach to understanding shifts in social norms around production and provisioning. Moments of disruption in an existing moral economy (Scott, 1976; Thompson, 1971) were thus significant in indicating how communities and people responded to shifts in these norms. But the current conflation made of moral economies with specific communities raises questions about both resource use and the democratic governance of common resources.

The concept of the term ‘moral economy’ has been primarily deployed to understand the manner in which social relations operate in the domain of economic activity. As Bolton and Laaser (2013, p. 515) argue, ‘A moral economy framework reveals the struggle below the surface of the homogeneity of the capitalist system between different parties that evaluate, re-negotiate, revise and re-establish the conditions they live under’. In the hands of its early users, particularly Thompson (1971) and Scott (1976), the framework engendered a way to articulate the shift from one moral economy to another. Thompson’s approach focused on collective social action and analysed how class featured significantly in shaping both the moral economy and the response to its disruption. He wrote, ‘Economic class-conflict in nineteenth-century England found its characteristic expression in the matter of wages; in eighteenth-century England the working people were most quickly inflamed to action by rising prices’ (Thompson, 1971, p. 79). A related approach that has been associated with the moral economy is that of Polanyi, whose work on embeddedness, emphasized the role of social relations in non-market societies and the manner in which market societies severed the market from such relations. However, it has been critiqued for not adequately considering class. As Burawoy argued, class consciousness was only seen as emerging in Polanyi’s work under conditions of an external threat (Bolton & Laaser, 2013, p. 513; Palomera & Vetta, 2016, p. 13).

Given this rich history, the term has potential to frame analysis of continuity and change and engage in questions of social reproduction from both a macro and a ‘grounded perspective’ (Palomera & Vetta, 2016, p. 5). However, recent literature has taken the concept in directions very different from its early conceptualization—the ‘morality of the economy’ or an ‘economy of morals’ constitutes more recent ways in which the moral economy has been interpreted (Palomera & Vetta, 2016, p. 5). However, both conceptions remain substantively different from what the moral economy was intended to capture. Outside of these new turns, when moral economy has been used to return to questions of social reproduction, there is a tendency to assume that the norms of provisioning define the actions of only some actors, typically members of a community (Cadigan, 1999; Judd, 1997; Palomera & Vetta, 2016, p. 5). The approach has thus been used to focus on ‘conditions and consequences of exchange’, often to the detriment of one that examines the relationship between production and exchange within markets (Bolton & Laaser, 2013, p. 513). In contrast with this, and in line with a more radical consideration, Palomera and Vetta (2016, p. 3) argue that the moral economy offers the anthropological route to understanding political economy. For it to be able to capture transformations and responses to it, they offer three important additions to the concept of the moral economy. The first, widens the term to include provisioning and social reproduction without being restricted to one kind of social actor. Second, moral economies are not associated exclusively with past or idealized forms of societies. Third, an inclusion of ‘non-action’ within the moral economy approach, which otherwise emphasized action by motivated social actors.

The first and second conceptualizations counter the embedded approach to the moral economy, which conflates morality with communities and sees the moral economy as an embodiment of dense social relations, which are absent within market society and mainstream economic theory. But, as Booth (1994) indicated, the distinction created between the moral and political economy does not always stand, and it remains possible to consider social and relational (not necessarily reciprocal) aspects within market society as well. In other words, all economies are moral economies. In addition, as both Thompson (1971) and Scott (1976) suggest, moral economies do not imply idealized societies free of inequality, instead they determine acceptable/unacceptable levels of inequality. Changes to an existing moral economy could lead to political assertion, but Palomera and Vetta draw from Hann (2010) to suggest that if the moral economy is about ‘beliefs, practices and emotions’ then it can be used to understand action, as wells as its absence, which can be arrived through ‘a conceptualization that understands class dispositions more broadly’ (Palomera & Vetta, 2016, p. 15).

These radical formulations of the moral economy indicate that market societies are not amoral and devoid of social relations and meaning. They also provide a useful way to understand the processes that are unleashed with capital accumulation. In other words, the framework engenders an analysis of capitalism and social reproduction through an anthropological route of understanding class and different systems of value that interact in society. Conceptually then, the framework is not reducible to ‘solidarity economies’, which has more often than not been how it is viewed within academic analyses (Cadigan, 1999; Judd, 1997; Mies, 2014; Trawick, 2001; Tsing, 2003) and at times within social movements too. For instance, the fisher movement in Mumbai often refers to the social norms of the Koli community as rooted in sustainable livelihood practices and to the capitalist shift in the fisheries as ‘external’ disruption to the community. Emerging from such a conflation of the moral economy to the morality of the community, political action is framed through community identity rather than class, even as both feature together.

A Moral Economy of the Fisheries

The coastline of Mumbai, with its natural harbours and creeks, has primed it for fishing to thrive, and the Koli community, which considers itself indigenous to islands of Bombay, have practiced fishing here for many centuries (Nair, 2021, pp. 69, 71; Punekar, 1959, p. 3). As a caste-based occupation, fishing and fishers are considered low in the caste hierarchy, and the Son Koli caste in Mumbai struggle with their caste-based marginalization, even as the symbolic representation of Mumbai draws on Koli culture and identity. From a caste-based practice, which relied on customary knowledge and practices, fishing came to be radically transformed from the early twentieth century with the development of new technology, supported by a colonial state that was keen to boost revenue (Subramanian, 2009). The policy continues in form and content; in Maharashtra, it was with an eye on the export market that state-led schemes were initiated through the 1950s–1960s for infrastructural development in the fisheries alongside the introduction of capital-intensive technology of new boats and nets. Resultantly, fishing—which once involved smaller boats, a wide variety of nets depending on the depth of water and different kinds of fish to be caught, and the participation in labour by the owner of boats and other fishers—was increasingly replaced with large boats, large nets (practising indiscriminate fishing) and a class of owners who no longer participated in fishing. This project also imagined a social transformation, introducing state subsidies to enable Kolis to become new capitalists (by establishing owner cooperatives). But critically it also led to fishing transforming from a caste-based practice of the Kolis to one which was thrust open to other castes, through the capital investment in the fisheries by dominant caste businesspersons and through the many workers who now laboured in the fisheries.

Central to this transformation was the spectacular increase in fish production. ³ Its everyday transformation came in the form of fish no longer being the cheap source of protein it once was. Prices in domestic markets have risen steadily over the last five decades; a member and organizer of the daily auction of a co-operative remembered how, in the 1970s, he would often receive free Pomfret as perk of his work, which was now difficult for him to access and buy because of its high cost. This corresponds to the NSSO data on household consumption, which indicates that the average monthly consumption of fish in Mumbai in 1989–1990 was approximately 3 kilograms and, by 2011–12, this fell to approximately 2 kilograms. This was a sharp fall and is uncommon for a growing economy. The share of fish consumption remained the same (at 39%) in the period of 1989–1990 and in 2011–2012, indicating that costs of fish rose in this period (Nair, 2021, p. 35). With an export market which is supplied fish by both large-mechanized crafts with deep sea fishing capabilities as well as smaller boats (Parthasarathy, 2011), the domestic market changed substantially.

That state policies have played a foundational role here is evident; state subsidies on fuel, for instance, were only available on diesel but not kerosene, since the former is used by bigger mechanized crafts such as trawlers, while kerosene was used by smaller boats. There was a clear push made by the state towards capital intensification with subsidies and loans made available for the purchase of trawlers. Further, the state, by opening up deep sea fishing and actively seeking private capital investment in it, had opened the door to non-traditional players—entrepreneurs as well as corporates, who viewed it as a lucrative business.

Small-scale fishing, traditionally practised by Kolis, has become increasingly unviable under these circumstances. As the entrenchment of capitalism proceeds, those with small-mechanized boats find that they are being pushed out of competition by capitalists, from the Koli and other caste communities, who use trawlers and purse seine net boats. ⁴ Those pushed out through competition, usually seek work as labour on other boats or try to move out of fishing altogether. The capitalist fisheries remain in need of labour, and this need is now met by many migrants, who make their way to Mumbai from both interior districts of Maharashtra and other parts of the country, seeking work in the city.

These transformations have altered longstanding livelihood patterns among Koli fishers, and the problems they face have been articulated by many as a disruption of the values of the community, with earlier guarantees of food and income now lost. Small-scale fishing for the Kolis had previously brought together individual boat owners with other Koli men who worked on boats together. Owners claimed an extra share of the fish in the division of what was caught, the rest being equally divided; this embodied Koli norms of labour, which was captured in the evocative line recounted by many Koli fisherwomen—‘one boat can sustain ten families’. A departure from this came through the capitalist transformation, where significantly, boat owners from the 1960s onward did no longer fully participate in the labour of fishing, instead hiring waged labour for this (though payments are often still referred to as a form of shares) and view their own role as financers and managers. Increasingly, workers on the boat comprise of migrants to the city, adding to the social distance that now exists between boat owners and fishing workers. This social and economic distinction between owners and workers, coupled with production for export markets, has led Kolis to believe that the fish caught by purse seine net boats benefit the owners alone, to the detriment of the larger community.

The new capitalist mode of production in the fisheries of India has therefore been considered as distinct from an earlier moral economy based on smaller scales of production and different norms of provision (Subramanian, 2009). The basis of social production was rooted in norms that saw a basic level of availability of catch and therefore income security for the community as well as rested on a gendered division of labour in the fisheries (men catch fish, women sell the fish). The nature of new technology and the accompanying capitalist system disrupted this moral economy in two ways: through the capitalist distinction in classes of owners and workers and through technology directed towards increased production at the cost of ecological destruction. Through both these modes, dearth of income and fish come to be part of the new life in the fisheries. Koli fisher men and women encounter this through poor fish quality, and juvenile fish as part of the daily catch which points to the problems of depletion that lie in the future. The political response of the Kolis to these shifts did not rest on the illegitimacy of the wealth of capitalists but highlighted that the community was defined by its values of production, with technology, provisioning and ecology central to this conceptualization.

This position has been shaped and mobilized by the MMKS in Mumbai over the many years of its activity. Much like in other coastal regions, federated organizations of fishers emerged to safeguard the interests of small-scale fishers who typically belonged to traditional fishing communities. In Maharashtra, the organization began under the leadership of Bhai Bandarkar in 1965 when state-led mechanization was already in force and focussed primarily on disputes between trawlers and small-scale fishermen and fishers from different states, but it also addressed ecological issues of depleting fish resources and pollution of coastal waters. As part of its mobilizational efforts on these issues, the MMKS coordinates closely with fisher cooperatives in different koliwadas in the state and actively campaigns on the sustainability of small-scale fishing that was traditionally practiced. ⁵

Unfettered Technologies and Perilous Ecologies

Perhaps one of the most significant impacts of technological interventions through the 1960s in the fisheries is overfishing, with trawling expanding in Maharashtra from 1965. Declines in fish harvest (Kurien & Achari, 1990) and the poor quality of harvests have resulted in lowered incomes of those dependent on fishing, including fisherwomen. The disruption to the norm of provision was thus linked directly to the capitalist transformation in the fisheries and made possible specifically through the advent of new technology. Trawlers and purse seine netters, designed to enhance the volume of the catch, allowed for indiscriminate fishing, and the drive to expand production also led to fishing during the monsoon (when fish breeding takes place). ⁶ Both these practices contributed to declines in fish catch and stood in stark contrast to traditional fishing practices that were built around passive means of fishing (with specific nets used for catching specific species), and where the technology and infrastructure, and norms of the pre-capitalist production, did not lend itself to overfishing.

This is likely one of the reasons why in discussions around ecological destruction, purse seine nets were seen to be against community values. Lata* and Rama*, Koli fish vendors in local markets, believed the use of trawlers and purse seine nets was an infringement on the collective right to the seas and moved away from a substantive cooperative spirit to one based on individual profit. This is not to suggest a romanticized vision of how fishing was pursued prior to the entry of capitalism and new technology. Even as the community worked with the principle of sustenance, it remained internally divided, with class and gender-based divisions and inequalities common to the community. Despite this, small-scale production by Kolis prior to shifting to more capital-intensive forms was one that enabled access to fish as both resource and food, through its gendered division of labour as well its class division between owners who also laboured and workers. As Thompson frames it, these had been the acceptable levels of provisioning, even if they had been unequal.

Although individual ownership of property has existed in the fisheries prior to its capitalist turn, the colonial state and Indian state pursued a policy of cooperative ownership in the fisheries (Subramanian, 2009). However, in practice, trawlers and purse seine netters were typically individually owned or with a dominant individual owner and sleeping partners and disrupted older practices because individual owners no longer participated in the labour of fishing and did not pay workers an equal share of the catch, as was the case in small-scale fishing. Among the Kolis, it was only those with access to credit and capital who could transition as capitalists, as the state only provided subsidies. Small-scale Koli fishers were rendered marginal through new scales of production and through problems of severe pollution on the coast which inhibited fishing in creek and inshore waters. In such a context, small-scale fishers who were affected by this new technology believed shifting to trawlers and purse seine nets might be the only way for them to survive in fishing. The impact on those working on boats has been acute. Sujay*, who had worked on a trawler, moved out of fishing altogether because of declining catches, which reduced his income to three or four thousand rupees per month. ⁷ Even trawler owners agreed that while the business expanded with the use of purse seine nets in the short run, the fish catch registered a decline in the long run. Owners of trawlers and purse seine netters often admitted apologetically about this ecological damage indicative of a rising consensus on this. Many boat owners, like Dinesh*, who owned a purse seine net boat, developed a complicated approach to this, where he supported his own fisher cooperative’s position against trawlers and purse seine nets because of the ecological damage it caused, but continued to employ the technology himself: ‘If the people around me do it why not me’. ⁸

Much of the criticism around new technology was directed at purse seine nets and not trawlers, as the sheer volume that a purse seine net caught led to the perception that it was the worst of the two. For many Koli trawler owners, it was not their fault but rather that of the state, which had enabled and encouraged the use of this technology through its financial aids and schemes; the state was seen as contributing to the disruption of earlier norms and was culpable for the loss the community faced.

Labour and its Discontents

Despite the adverse impact on ecology and depressed wages in the fisheries, other forms of work remain open to Koli men in Mumbai. Improved education levels for Koli men over the last few decades have enabled them to venture into other kinds of work in the city, meeting their aspiration for ‘office jobs’ away from manual work. This has been especially important in the context of the caste discrimination that the Kolis faced historically, which led to low education levels in the community and which in turn shaped the needs and aspirations for both education and formal, skilled work in the community. Consequently, younger men in the community are keen to find work outside of the fisheries even as many suggested that they would like to maintain some relation with the fisheries, as it was a vital part of their community identity. For those with social and financial capital means to do so, a route to participate in the fisheries and ‘traditional’ work without being engaged in manual labour lay in joining the new capitalist class, enabled through the financial aid extended by the state. Those without the means to do so sought jobs outside the fisheries, such as in office administration or as lifeguards in water sports companies.

But the change in the fisheries and new technology also enabled the entry of informal workers from other castes into fishing. No longer was it necessary to know how to navigate using stars or learn about particular nets used at different depths. The physical labour of hauling nets was now mechanized, and boats come equipped with GPS, sonar systems and so on, which has meant that the skills necessary for fishing have changed and moved away from a reliance on customary knowledge; non-Koli fishers could now learn such skills on the job.

Similar moves out of the fisheries, however, have not been possible for Koli women, who have not only suffered the consequence of low education levels preventing their entry into formal work (Nair, 2021, pp. 101–106, p.108) but also from an absence of state support for their work. The state considered only fishing as its subject of modernity and made attempts to take the community of men along in this change. No change in technology or skills was initiated for Koli women’s work of fish cleaning, selling, drying and curing, which long remained out of sight for both the state and the MMKS itself, which only began to address the impact of the capitalist transformation on women’s work in the last decade. The expansion of the fisheries had also brought new entrants into women’s work in the form of agents of export firms who competed with, and often outbid, Koli fisherwomen to buy fish in the daily auctions, and informal workers to the city began to sell fish, a work once only undertaken by Koli women. Without access to credit, Koli fisherwomen were forced to buy cheaper quality fish to sell in local markets. They also perceived that traditional fish markets in Mumbai, from which they sold fish, were threatened through the practices of new entrants who sold fish door-to-door.

In the contestation that has emerged around the changing moral economy, without any support from the organized fisher movement or the state, Koli fisherwomen often held ‘new entrants’ as responsible for their conditions. This has much to do with Mumbai’s history of nativist politics, in which parties like the Shiva Sena built a popular discourse around the rights of the ‘sons of the soil’ (Hansen, 2001; Heuzé, 1996). As more non-Kolis began to participate in fish work, Koli women who were underrepresented in fisher cooperatives, and had limited links with the MMKS at the time, began to organize with the Shiv Sena to claim a right to work and to the city, while asserting their identity as an indigenous community. Through the late 1990s and early 2000s as members of the party, and through fish vendor cooperatives that were closely linked to the Sena, Koli fisherwomen agitated against migrant men (Mishra, 2004), especially from Northern India (hostile figures for the Sena through the late 1990s), who they believed marginalized Kolis and their traditional practices by selling fish at lower rates and entering work previously undertaken by women alone. If capital-driven technology had ruptured the norms of production, the norms of exchange were seen to be significantly altered by migrant fishers, who, Koli fisherwomen argued, bypassed traditional sites of exchange (the market) and evolved new modes through which fish retail was practised (house-to-house vending). Fisherwomen also believed that had fish catch not declined, their work would not be made as difficult with new entrants. Squeezed in a competitive market, they leaned towards retaining exclusive rights for the Kolis in post-harvest work. Given that the older moral economy was understood as rooted in sustainable production within the movement, Kolis were arguing for a return to this moral economy, where they alone could participate as sustainable fishers.

Could this form of political action by the Kolis be understood as community action where the boundaries of the community were reinforced, or as a form of class action? In other words, when questions are being raised about the ecological destruction made possible through the transformation, is it grounded in questions of new technologies and new systems of production and exchange or in the ethnic and caste origins of ‘violators’?

The answer lies somewhere in between. For Kolis, the disruption of the older moral economy violated norms of sustainability and provisioning, norms that the community claimed were inherent to them. The work of the MMKS was critical in shaping such a formulation which emphasized that small-scale fishing practised by traditional fishing communities exemplified sustainable practices, in line with the shift of the NFF itself towards an emphasis on ecological sustainability from the 1990s onward. ⁹ The political stance of the MMKS and Kolis raised the question of whether sustainability was a conscious part of the norms of traditional fishing communities. As political action based on the morality of the community emerged, it inevitably led to questions of who could participate in the moral economy, even as the broad concern was on the kind of moral economy being established.

The Kolis have been responding to a changed political economy, where the ethic of provision was fundamentally altered. The effects of this are not specific to the Kolis. However, the caste-based nature of their livelihood activity makes the impact of the changes concentrated in the community. Morality understood as community values, however, has been centre-stage with the MMKS and NFF who viewed the disruption and transformation as a challenge to traditional fishing communities. This had also emerged from the need to consolidate fishing communities to contest policy changes such as the entry of foreign capital into the fisheries through deep sea fishing policies initiated by the state (Nair, 2021, pp. 142–143; Subramanian, 2009, pp. 206–207). Consequently, demands for change often rested on a return to traditional livelihood practices and on governance of common resources (sea and coastal land) through community-led institutions. But to understand and unpack what has occurred in the fisheries through a moral economy approach requires situating both change and political action within macro processes of capital accumulation.

Politics of the Community/Politics of the Environment

Environmental movements have typically been seen as representative of either larger anti-capitalist politics or reduced to closer local issues, while, in reality, local dynamics often shape broader concerns. Kumar and Vasan (1997) highlight that resource dependent communities do not possess an innate sense of environmental consciousness and like communities elsewhere local undercurrents, economic calculations and intra-community hierarchies, as well as macro concerns, shape their practices.

Even as activists in the fisher movement were alert to these concerns, they believed that it was an ecological consciousness and threats to the environment which would consolidate the community. In Mumbai, political assertion has thus primarily been around a community that is defined on the basis of a shared morality identified through both caste and indigenous links to the city. This assertion continues in the language of ecological sustainability that came to define the NFF approach from the late 1980s onward (Subramanian, 2009).

Rambhau Patil, ex-chairperson of the MMKS noted that from the 1960s onwards, mechanization led to the depletion of resources, while polluted waters were also a concern, which led to sustainability becoming the central platform of the movement. Given that state policies were premised on boosting production, sustainability was a difficult agenda to popularize, with Kolis complicit in its violation. The most pertinent demand in this context, for him, was that the produce of fisheries should be distributed equally and that the biodiversity of the seas be maintained through conservation efforts. But, for this to happen, it was imperative that the fisheries be scaled down and that access be restricted to a small group of sustainable fishers. But while Rambhau and MMKS imagined this through the restriction on the entry of large capital ‘from outside’, for many fishers, particularly women, the focus came to rest on migrant workers.

There are two critical formulations that emerge from the framework that Rambhau and other activists of the NFF and MMKS employed. The first is that despite what may appear as a nostalgia for the past, what the movement outlines is a plan for the future. The movement lays the groundwork for what the new norms and ethics around provisioning should look like. Given that new technologies have rendered reliance on customary knowledge obsolete, limiting participants in the fisheries and regulating technology comes from future proofing the fisheries for Kolis. The second is that they do not absolve traditional communities for worsening conditions in the fisheries. However, the disruption of environmentally conscious local practices is ultimately tied to state policy, which encouraged new technology that spurred overfishing and enabled the entry of ‘outsiders’.

This ‘outsider’ for the MMKS is not the migrant, but large capital which they argue was not present within the community and thus necessarily entered from outside. ¹⁰ This draws from an earlier class-based politics of the NFF, which contested trawler ownership and considered small-scale and artisanal fishers as the primary political subjects of the fisher movement. Beginning from 1989, however, the NFF consciously moved away from class questions to emphasize ecological sustainability (Subramanian, 2009, p. 214). The target remained destructive technology, but the shift away from class led to a broader consensus on ecological sustainability within traditional fishing communities. In Mumbai, the MMKS actively mobilized against technology and large capital’s entry but articulated this as capital entering from ‘outside’ the community. This politics interacted, unintentionally, with a longer history of nativist politics in the city (Hansen, 2001; Heuzé, 1996), such that the fault line was not drawn on the basis of ownership of technology but rather of who belonged to a traditional fishing community and who did not. This discourse, in turn, draws on the belief that traditional fishers are integrally linked to sustainable fishing practices.

This has come to significantly shape the political consciousness of the Kolis as it has prevented a consideration of intra-community hierarchy and led to the assumption that migrants can only be secondary subjects in the fisheries. While the community has adopted a broadly unified stance with the MMKS on limiting destructive technology, its internal hierarchies, of class, especially on the distinction between owners and workers, and a traditional gendered division of labour adhered to by the community, has defined a position that continues to foreground community identity and values. This is evident when Koli boat owners claim to follow ‘traditional work’ of the community while running trawlers. But there are diverse fishing workers currently in the fisheries—migrants and non-Kolis working as labour on boats, in cleaning and processing fish for export, and selling fish. The interests of such workers remains rarely represented.

Hollowing out the Moral Economy

While the fisher movement has distanced itself from the question of class, there has also been an emptying out of class from the moral economy approach. As Thompson (1971) indicated, the moral economy was not to be understood as ‘values’ alone, capital and class featured prominently in the concept. Interpreted as such, a moral economy then incorporates a range of social actors in a variety of different positions, even hierarchically organized, who are part of an economic and social regime with defined sets of practices and values. Such a formulation stands at odds with some of the work that has taken place around the moral economy, which has tended to view the moral economy in ‘dichotomous terms’ (Palomera & Vetta, 2016, p. 11).

Apart from this, there has been the perpetuation of the notion that the moral economy is associated with a single community and not varied participants. In such conceptualizations, only a particular community is identified as embodying or participating in a moral economy. This, however, presents some problems, as argued by Palomera and Vetta (2016, p. 6):

[M]oral economy can only be associated with an actor if it also designates, complementarily, the broad field in which such an agent is inscribed. And even then, locating a particular subject for a moral economy involves challenges that are very hard to rise to, such as ‘the identification of a social group with a common moral economy’, or the analysis of ‘people’s individual ideas and practices and their relation to collective moral frameworks.

Given the nature of the caste-based livelihood, it is possible in some ways to discuss the commonality of values and practices from the basis of a community. However, rarely are communities self-sufficient, especially in the domain of exchange, where social relations with others come alive. It is relevant then to consider not only how Kolis of varying class positions participate in the moral economy but also how non-Kolis do. Equating the moral economy with the morality of a single community takes away from the ways in which the moral economy represents a broader social norm on production and exchange and the centrality of class to it.

Palomera and Vetta (2016) push for a return of class within the concept of the moral economy, which would engender a wider consideration of class action, including, as they argue, forms of non-participation in action. It is in such a conception of the moral economy, where there are both winners and losers, participants and non-participant actors, which we must situate the contestation that emerges among the Kolis. When the moral economy of fishing shifted, the norms of provisioning altered not just for fishers but also for the public who consume this fish. One instance of this was the rise in price and resultant falls in fish consumption in domestic markets. It is true that political action did not involve all such consumers, such as in the food riots that Thompson examined, but important lessons remain. The absence of reactions from others does not mean that the change in the fisheries affected the Kolis alone or that the Kolis’ response towards migrants can be reduced to a simple communal reaction. Class, after all, is neither a spontaneous nor the most sophisticated political identity. It is, like all political identities, messy and one whose conscious emergence does not eliminate other forms of identity. Koli responses were shaped by both local dynamics and macro concerns. Class, if recognized within this moral economy, enables a better understanding of Koli responses. It clarifies why Koli fishing workers and fisherwomen—those worst affected by the transformation—were keen to change the moral economy of fishing by returning to small-scale fishing, and why Koli capitalists justified trawler fishing while making a case for its regulation rather than a ban to promote conservation. Both groups, participants in the ‘new’ moral economy of fishing, were arguing for new social conditions of production that would safeguard their own roles within fishing. There was a sense among the Kolis that shared norm on sustenance and provisioning had fundamentally changed. Even trawler owners recognized this, declaring that new forms of fishing were leaving others without a livelihood and harming the seas. In the new moral economy, however, Koli trawler owners accepted the entry of non-Koli workers on boats, while Koli fisherwomen suggested that the little work that was available ought to remain in their hands. Both responses are future oriented. A few male trawler owners also suggested that the rupture in the moral economy provided grounds for new ‘progressive’ norms, such as a departure from the traditional gendered division of labour, which restricted fishing to men, such that Koli women could potentially be trawler owners as ownership no longer entailed participation in labour. It has, however, not been the case that women have become trawler owners, indicating that norms of the division of labour and access to capital and credit continue to determine ownership in favour of men.

A class and caste-based understanding of the moral economy also makes evident why there was early support among Kolis for technological transformation. Koli men who were previously boat owners were among those who were in the financial position to avail of state subsidies to own trawlers. Their ‘breach’ of older norms took place also because of the financial benefits and perceptions of social gain that would come with the transformation. New owners were not engaged in the manual work of fishing and, given the caste associations with manual work, they were eager to move beyond it. The systemic denial of education to Kolis in the past made formal or ‘office work’ aspirational, and this was considered an improvement over the hard labour in the fisheries. The ability to avoid manual labour, while remaining linked to the traditional work of the community, which trawler ownership brings, does not neatly translate into either a break with or conformity to community norms. Rather, it is indicative of a shift which we are better placed to understand if both caste and class are placed within the analytical framework.

Koli women, however, did not find the same possibilities available to them in the ongoing transformation. Their mobility through education was also blocked because of the discrimination they faced. ¹¹ For fisherwomen, who had been unable to transition to non-manual work, to which they too aspired, the competitive market of fish retail shaped their political demand of fish work being restricted to members of the community. Given the divisions and hierarchies present within the community, the changing norms of provisioning clearly worked to the benefit of some and to the detriment of others.

A class-based moral economy approach also opens up space for a consideration of the effects of large-scale fishing on non-Koli participants. Many migrants who participate in the transformed fisheries work under difficult conditions. This includes workers in fish processing firms, who are almost exclusively women from other castes and typically migrants. The hours of work are long, conditions bad and the pay is poor. Yet this has not resulted in a broad alliance emerging between new fisherwomen and Koli women. The MMKS has made an effort to build such a broad alliance of fishers defined not by region or caste but by the practice of work—small-scale fishing. But this has relied on a conflation of morality and community built on the belief that traditional fishers are embedded in equitable social relations and sustainable livelihood practices limiting their ability to organize diverse fishers.

For Kolis, the question is one of the rightful participant in the new moral economy of fishing, and what, if any, the role of migrant and non-Koli fishers will be in future. Currently, migrant workers remain tied to work either as labour on boats, in fish processing or as fish vendors. Given that the political imagination of a new moral economy for Kolis is linked to their community identity and culture, the issue is not that migrants will find no work in the fisheries, but rather that their role, both economic and social, will be secondary to the Kolis. This is particularly concerning if sustainability also rides on community management of the fisheries. Much discussion on common resources have centred on the role local communities can play in more responsible management. While this form of decentralized management ought to be encouraged, a community-based approach must also consider the participation of other communities (a point made by the NFF in its response to the Draft Traditional Coastal and Marine Fisherfolk (Protection of Rights) Act, 2009) and acknowledge intra-community inequities. It would be vital, therefore, not to conflate the shared morality approach of the movement with that of the moral economy since the former fails to account for the differing class-based responses among the Kolis themselves. In seeking to foreground communities in resource management, a moral economy approach would instead entail that the collective consensus also accounts for new participants, not those who extract from resources, but rather those who are dependent upon it.

Conclusion

Our responses to environmental crises more recently have turned to the belief that community-led institutions are best suited to govern and manage resources. While it is certainly the case that democratic participation has engendered better governance practices, it is vital to note that to enable such wide participation, communities must not be narrowly defined (Agrawal & Gibson, 1999).

As this article highlights, dichotomous views of resource dependent communities as inherently sustainable and confronting ‘others’ with opposing values has entered the discourse of movements who view this from the perspective of the morality of the community. However, it has also informed academic discourse which frames this as a response to the changed moral economy of the community. The caste-based nature of the livelihood lends itself to such a conceptualization of the moral economy. Yet, it is problematic to view only older regimes as defining the moral economy and to see its shared nature as defined by a single community alone. This has had the effect of understanding the moral economy on the basis of a specific community of participants rather than on the basis of varied participants of differing classes coming together to establish acceptable norms around production and exchange.

Within the movement, as this article demonstrates, a shift away from the class question has prevented wider solidarities of communities from being built, for instance, between different kinds of fish workers. But this is certainly not a question reserved for the movement alone. If we are to better understand the responses of communities and people to a changing political economy, then the moral economy approach remains vital as it highlights both how and why people respond to this change. As Thompson clarified, the English crowd did not erupt in a riot over the dearth of food, theirs was a politics of establishing new acceptable norms. In a similar fashion, it would be far too easy to read the response of the Kolis to the changing political economy as a knee-jerk response to new entrants. To return class to the question of the moral economy allows us to recognize that the market economy of the fisheries is a new form of the moral economy. More importantly, this also means that governance cannot be reduced to the act of relying on a community’s values to transcend structural pressures.