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Contribution short abstract:

This paper aims to narrate how unseasonal precipitation during the months of November and December in recent times has opened up new spaces of contentious political struggle between landlords, farmers, agricultural labourers, and inland fishers in Chellanam, in a southern Indian state of Kerala.

Contribution long abstract:

This paper explores how monsoon uncertainties are producing new forms of competition for fisheries resources between landlords, aquaculture farmers, agricultural labourers, and the inland fishing folks in Chellanam, an eroding coastal panchayat in the state of Kerala, India. The paper will contend that the unprecedented post-monsoon rainfall has weakened the marginal communities' rights to the spaces of agriculture/aquaculture production. Chellanam is a wetland located at the confluence of the Arabian sea and the Vembanad backwaters in Cochin. The farmers used to cultivate rice (April 15- October 15) and fish (October 16-April 14) in alternate seasons in the paddy fields of East Chellanam by regulating the flow and salinity of brackish water through hydraulic engineering. In this arrangement, once the annual aquaculture contract expires in April, the resources like fish, shrimp, and crabs become the community's common good. However, unpredictable monsoon has collapsed this rotational cultivation by making the hydraulic structures ineffective in maintaining the water salinity. In 2021, in response to farmers' plea for relief, the state government in Kerala extended the permission for lucrative prawn culture for one more month at the expense of paddy cultivation. This short-term fix for revitalising the economy has unintended consequences: the inland fishers and villagers lost a month’s fishing rights to the big-scale aquaculture farmers. Accordingly, by drawing on the more than human ethnography done for my Ph.D., this paper intends to narrate how fluid geographies of Chellanam are co-constituted and co-evolved with different actors navigating the socio-natural processes like changing climate.