Land, Politics, Work and Home-Life at Adimalathura: Towards A Local History

Abstract

This paper focuses on the fishing hamlet of Adimalathura located on the coast of the Thiruvananthapuram district in Kerala, which has been identified as an area of extreme developmental disadvantage. Without claiming to be a full-fledged local history, it seeks to construct, through the memories of selected local residents, a coherent narrative of the past which would help us contextualize the present in this site. Tracing the intertwined trajectories of land, politics, development, and home-life at Adimalathura through in-depth interviews with local residents, it reflects upon the ‘multiple governmentalities’, that of the Catholic Church and the State, that have shaped everyday life in this hamlet. It is argued that the specific form of marginalization experienced by the people here is that of dispossession. Of particular interest is the shaping of an ‘oppositional civil society’ here in the late 20th century, which challenged this dispossession, but which is now being reshaped into a more non-oppositional ‘state-centric’ civil society.