Presentation short abstract

This paper examines how industrialization of the Kosasthalaiyar River in Ennore produces inter-subaltern hierarchies of vulnerability among fisher castes, Dalit fishers, women, and nonhumans, revealing how power, precarity, and resistance shape subaltern environmentalism.

Presentation long abstract

This paper explores the transformation of the Kosasthalaiyar River in North Chennai from an estuarine lifeline to an industrial river sustaining the city’s extractive economy. Once supporting fishing, saltpan, and agrarian livelihoods, the river now bears toxic effluents from power plants, ports, and petrochemical industries, intensifying ecological precarity and social inequality.

Grounded in political ecology, the paper conceptualizes the Kosasthalaiyar as a hydrosocial territory where state-led industrialization and caste-based urban planning reproduce spatial hierarchies. Subalternity is relational and is in continuous construction through its interaction with hegemony and power. Drawing on Rob Nixon’s notion of the Anthropocene as “unequal human agency, unequal human vulnerability, unequal impacts,” the paper emphasizes that the degree of subalternity differs among various groups within Ennore, among fisher castes, Dalit fishermen, women, and nonhuman species—creating inter-subaltern hierarchies.

Using ethnographic research, it documents the social practices and differentiated access, vulnerabilities, and precarity of Ennore’s communities, who contest environmental degradation through alternative practices of care, protest, and adaptation. In recognising how vulnerability and resistance are differentiated, the paper situates subaltern environmentalism as a politics attentive to layered precarity- human and nonhuman alike. It calls for urban and environmental planning that centers these plural voices, reimagining the Kosasthalaiyar not as an industrial frontier but as a living commons requiring justice, restoration, and inclusion.