Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

Muslim fishing communities in Malabar, Kerala, occupy a “new South” within a celebrated Southern development model, facing coastal precarity and exclusion while enacting everyday forms of agency and alternative development futures.

Paper long abstract

Kerala is celebrated as a Southern “model” of human development, yet Muslim fishing communities in the Malabar region remain on the margins of this success story. This paper examines how Puslan fishers in the hamlets of Parappanangadi and Tanur experience and interpret development, poverty and precarity within the wider Kerala model. Doing ethnographic fieldwork, including participant observation and interviews with fishers, women, youth and local representatives, the paper traces how mechanisation, harbour projects, trawling bans and deep-sea regulations have shifted control over marine resources away from artisanal fishers while intensifying livelihood insecurity and debt. It analyses how landlessness, communal stigma and bureaucratic procedures restrict access to welfare schemes, housing programmes and initiatives such as Kudumbashree and coastal development projects, producing a sense of being “inside the state but outside development”. At the same time, the paper explores community responses through religious networks, informal credit, migration, local associations and struggles over schooling, which together constitute fragile yet meaningful forms of agency and moral economy. The argument is that Malabar’s Muslim fishers embody a “new South” within the Indian South, created through layered relations of power that link coastal security, fisheries governance and subnational inequality. Re-reading the Kerala model from these coastal margins, the paper contributes to debates on decolonising development, subnational peripheries and the uncertain futures of coastal livelihoods in global development.