Taming the Shore and taming mobile coastal labour in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth Madras

 Much of the existing historiography on archiving the multifarious histories of mobility in the Indian Ocean have privileged the study of the lascar, dock labour and the indenture migrant as constituting objects of maritime labour. In thinking about littoral labour in colonial Madras, this talk moves away from the deep sea proletariat to documenting the amphibious and contingent histories of coastal communities who served as vital channels of transport and communication for colonial state formation and empire building in South India. In the absence of a natural harbor in Madras, the colonial state in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was dependent on the hard labour of a motley group of fishermen to transport essential supplies from the ships to the shore. The fluid boundaries between land and sea and the anomalous juridical status of the beach enabled the coastal communities to pilfer and land the precious cargo at strategic points without getting impounded by the port officials. As the port attracted increased shipping traffic in the nineteenth century, multiple channels of pilferage and smuggling via cheaply manufactured masulah boats threatened to unsettle the colonial rule of law. Coastal local labour resisted the bureaucratic and jurisdictional logics of a commercial economic space constructed around labor discipline and contractual obligations mediated by legal jurisprudence and jurisdictions. Given that shore lines were underwritten by regimes of illegality and border crossings, this talk focuses on how the colonial state embarked on a project to design the urban coastline in Madras through property making, pier building and policing of labour.