Rethinking Caste and Fisheries Governance on the South Indian Coast

In 2003, fishers in the Tamil Nadu village of Devanampattinam set fire to the ring-seine nets that had just arrived on their shore. The gear could encircle an entire shoal at once, and many feared it would gather the sea’s catch into the hands of a few. The protest was real, and for a time it held. Yet in the years that followed, as state support and expanding markets remade the fishery, members of the same community came to own more ring seines than anyone else in the village (Singh, 2022).

The story unsettles a familiar assumption about how inequality works in India. This was not a conflict between castes long understood as dominant and subordinate, nor between a landlord and the laborers who worked his fields. It unfolded within a single fishing community, as new forms of capital, technology, and political influence reshaped who could access the sea and on what terms. To understand how a community organized around a shared occupational identity came to produce hierarchies of its own, we have to look beyond the frameworks through which caste has most often been understood.

When we ask what threatens India’s coastal fishing communities, the answer usually arrives in the language of rising seas, warming currents, declining fish stocks, and eroding shorelines. These pressures are real and increasingly well understood. Yet the challenges facing these communities are not solely ecological. They are social and political, rooted in how coastal communities are governed and how their identities are understood. As questions of gender, class, Indigenous rights, and social equity have become increasingly central to debates about the future of the ocean, caste has remained largely absent. This absence is striking. Across much of South Asia, caste continues to shape access to livelihoods, political authority, and the distribution of risk itself. If ocean governance is concerned with who benefits from marine resources and who remains most vulnerable to environmental and economic change, then caste cannot remain outside the frame.

Caste on the coast does not function the way it has been understood in India’s agrarian interior, yet fisheries governance and climate adaptation continue to read coastal communities through largely land-based frameworks. Emerging inequities within the fishing communities of the Coromandel coast of Tamil Nadu – the stretch running from Cuddalore down through Nagapattinam – suggest that rigid caste hierarchies are shaped not only by longstanding social structures but also by mechanization, market integration, and political projects that increasingly seek to fold historically distinct coastal identities into broader national narratives. These dynamics matter because they shape who is counted, who is governed, and who remains most exposed as climate pressures intensify.

Caste Is Not a Ladder

The popular image of caste as a fixed, ancient ladder of ritual purity – Brahmins at the top, Dalits at the bottom – is precisely the image that obscures what happens on the coast. Caste is better understood through two overlapping concepts. The first is varna, the four-fold classificatory scheme of priests, warriors, merchants, and laborers that many people outside India recognize. The second is jati, the thousands of localized, often occupational communities through which caste is actually lived: marriage, memory, labor, kinship, belonging. It is at the level of jati, not varna, that most social life takes place, and these lived realities do not always fit neatly into a single, all-encompassing hierarchy.

Although jati is where caste is lived most concretely, the discussion below necessarily operates at a more aggregated level. The available evidence on coastal fishing communities speaks largely to caste as a broad social category, a unit that is, in practice, a proxy for many distinct jatis grouped within larger social, political, or administrative classifications. This is itself part of the problem I want to highlight. The limited granularity through which the coast becomes visible is not only a limitation of the available evidence, but a feature of how coastal society has been governed and studied. Fisheries governance, census classifications, and even academic research frequently treat communities as coherent social units, obscuring important differences within them (Cohn, 1987; Subramanian, 2009; Kumar, 2025). When I describe conflict or differentiation “within a caste,” then, the more precise question and one the existing evidence cannot yet fully answer is whether these tensions are emerging among different jatis, occupational groups, or class positions that have been aggregated into a single category. The lack of granularity may itself be revealing, reflecting the ways governance and research have rendered a more complex social world legible through simplified categories.

This distinction matters because caste is not a uniform ranking applied identically across India. It is shaped by region, occupation, ecology, and history. The version that appears today as singular and timeless was, in part, reinforced through colonial efforts to classify, rank, and govern India’s diverse social worlds; through censuses, legal classifications, and bureaucratic ordering, colonial governance elevated caste into one of the primary ways Indian society could be known and administered. What looks fixed today was historically contingent, politically constructed, and remains subject to transformation. As scholars from B.R. Ambedkar (2014) to contemporary Dalit thinkers such as Sukhdeo Thorat (Thorat and Newman, 2010) and Anand Teltumbde (2018) have shown, caste is not simply a matter of identity or belief; it structures labor, access to resources, political authority, and social recognition. Yet much of what we know about it comes from agrarian contexts, where land ownership, tenancy, and labor relations are central to how hierarchy reproduces itself. The coast raises a different set of questions.

When the Coast Does Not Fit the Model

Despite its variations, caste in India has largely been theorized through land. Land titling, tenancy, labor exploitation, the political economy of poverty, the “conjugated oppression” in which caste and class compound into something greater than their parts; these have shaped how scholars understand caste power. Dalit political struggles have often been organized around land rights, because land is where caste inequality becomes visible, contestable, and politically meaningful.

The coast shows why this land-based lens may be insufficient. This is not to suggest that caste disappeared there, or that fishing communities lived outside systems of exclusion. The question is rather what happens when caste is organized through marine livelihoods instead of land-based production. The ownership, tenancy, and agrarian labor relations through which much of the literature approaches caste are largely absent in the fishing village, which invites us to ask whether occupational identity, marine access, and community governance generate different forms of hierarchy, solidarity, and political authority.

Fishing communities along the Coromandel Coast were often organized through occupationally distinct settlements where community, livelihood, and identity were closely intertwined. They were never free from inequality, but social differentiation appears to have operated differently from agrarian caste relations: forms of exclusion existed, yet it was not always structured through the landlord–tenant relations that dominate the scholarship on rural caste politics. Fishing communities engaged the broader caste order through exchange rather than shared production, and their authority was generated from within. The clearest example is the ur panchayat, the village council through which fishing caste settlements have long governed themselves by allocating access to fishing grounds, regulating gear, settling disputes, and managing the coastal commons, exercising real authority over village life despite holding no recognition from the state (Bavinck, 2001). Communities whose livelihoods depended on collective engagement with an unpredictable sea developed forms of organization and authority that do not fit neatly within conventional agrarian models of caste.

The Transformation of Coastal Society

The coast, however, is not static. Since the 1960s, state-driven fisheries modernization – mechanization, export-oriented development, the so-called Blue Revolution – has transformed the political economy of fishing across South India. Trawlers, motorized vessels, new infrastructure, and expanding export markets brought real economic opportunity, but they also introduced new differentiation within communities once organized around a shared occupational identity. Today, some of the most significant conflicts in fisheries are not between dominant and marginalized castes in the conventional sense; they occur within fishing communities themselves.  Ring seines have made the divide difficult to ignore. A single boat and net can cost tens of millions of rupees, placing ownership beyond the reach of most fishers and concentrating it among a small number of investors. Others work the nets as crew or compete in the same waters with smaller and slower craft. As the technology spread, customary understandings of access and entitlement gave way to a simpler principle: whoever commands the most capital, fishes first. In 2021, the tension boiled over into open violence between fisher hamlets along the coast (Singh, 2022). Small-scale fishers increasingly compete with capital-owning members of their own caste who hold larger vessels, greater access to state subsidies, and stronger political influence. Nearshore fishing grounds are contested less through inherited social hierarchy than through uneven access to capital and technology.

Dispossession on this coast arrives not through an upper-caste landlord but through a capital-owning member of one’s own community. A once-egalitarian occupational community is being stratified from within, along lines that increasingly resemble the agrarian hierarchy it did not originally have. A hierarchy long assumed to be ancient may, in part, be the product of much more recent shifts in technology, markets, and governance. Yet fisheries governance has been slow to recognize this. Policy still tends to treat fishing communities as coherent, internally homogeneous units even as access to capital and political influence grows uneven within them. Categories like “traditional fisher,” “stakeholder,” or “fishing community” make coastal society legible to the state, but they also obscure the unequal power emerging inside these communities. Tamil Nadu’s annual fishing ban shows what this flattening conceals: imposed on “fishers” as a single category, its costs fall unevenly, as better-capitalized boat owners are positioned to recover quickly while crew laborers and women fish traders, those living closest to subsistence absorb the steepest losses (Novak Colwell et al., 2017).

What Fisheries Governance Has Failed to See

For decades, fisheries governance scholarship in South India has focused on institutions, resource management, customary law, and conflicts between fishing sectors, generating important insight into how fishing communities organize themselves and engage the state (e.g., Kurien, 1992; Bavinck, 2001; Subramanian, 2009). Yet the categories through which this scholarship understands the coast may themselves obscure critical dimensions of social life. Treating “fishing communities” as coherent units whose interests can be represented through cooperatives, customary institutions, or stakeholder consultations means inheriting the state’s own assumptions about who counts as a fisher and whose claims are politically relevant.

The consequences are visible in what stays absent from the literature. Dalit coastal communities rarely appear as subjects of fisheries governance research, despite living and working within coastal economies. Fisherwomen are discussed as beneficiaries, entrepreneurs, or participants, but rarely as political actors whose experience should reshape how governance is understood (Ram, 1991; Hapke, 2001; Rao & Djohari, 2024; Sahana, 2025). These absences reveal how certain forms of labor, identity, and authority become visible while others remain outside the frame and governance does not merely respond to social reality, it helps produce it. The categories used by researchers, policymakers, and development agencies shape whose knowledge counts, whose vulnerability is recognized, and whose future becomes the object of intervention.

Communities Invisible on the Coast

This misrecognition falls hardest on Dalit coastal populations. The reason is structural rather than incidental. Dalit engagement with fishing is often one component of a diversified livelihood: a household may fish seasonally while also taking on sanitation work, agricultural labor, construction, or other wage employment. That multiplicity creates a paradox. They are often not recognized as a “fishing caste” within governance systems organized around occupational identity, yet they also remain peripheral to a Dalit studies tradition focused largely on land and agrarian relations. They fall through the gap between two literatures and, more consequentially, between governance and policy spheres. Fisheries governance recognizes fishers through occupational categories built around the region’s Backward and Most Backward fishing castes, meaning Dalits classified separately as Scheduled Castes are often not recognized as fishers at all. Caste-based welfare policy, meanwhile, reaches them as Scheduled Castes, but through frameworks shaped largely by agrarian experiences of exclusion rather than coastal labor. A coastal Dalit household may participate in fishing yet not be recognized as a fisher; recognized as Dalit, yet not through the realities of life on the coast.

There is an epistemic dimension to this absence, as well. Research on South Indian fisheries has largely been carried out by scholars from outside these communities and very rarely from the most marginalized among them. Frameworks built without that proximity tend not to register the people they were never designed to see; coastal Dalit life simply falls outside the social worlds and the research questions of those studying the coast. The silence in the literature is not only a matter of how livelihoods are categorized, but of who has been positioned to ask the questions in the first place.

A similar invisibility shapes the experience of fisherwomen. Across South India, women have long been central to fish processing, vending, marketing, household finance, and the social networks that sustain fishing livelihoods. Yet governance continues to define fishing primarily through male participation at sea. When gender enters fisheries policy, caste tends to disappear; when caste enters governance debates, women disappear. The result is a double erasure that obscures how labor, authority, and adaptation are actually experienced along the coast.

Climate Adaptation Without Talking About Climate

Why does any of this matter for ocean governance? Climate adaptation is usually framed as a technical challenge: infrastructure, relocation, disaster preparedness, livelihood diversification, ecosystem management. But adaptation is also a governance project. The categories through which communities become legible to the state shape who is recognized, who receives support, and whose claims carry political weight, and these questions sharpen in a moment of political change. Caste under modern conditions does not simply fade; it often consolidates horizontally, as localized groups cluster into larger blocs competing for power, recognition, and state resources.

Hindu nationalist politics has pursued its own version of this consolidation, incorporating India’s diverse caste identities into a broader narrative of Hindu belonging (Sharma, 2012). On the coast the implications may be particularly significant, because Hindutva is rooted largely in upper-caste, agrarian, and urban visions of Indian identity that leave little room for identities organized through marine livelihoods. As governance increasingly recognizes coastal populations through administratively legible caste categories, historically distinct coastal identities risk being drawn into these broader frameworks, giving the coast by administrative and ideological design, the very hierarchy it once lacked. The coast is not merely adapting to environmental change; it is being politically reordered.

Even Tamil Nadu’s Dravidian tradition, which has resisted northern Hindu nationalism for a century, offers only partial shelter: it is anti-Brahmin without ever becoming fully anti-caste, and Dalits remain excluded even within that resistance. What may be unfolding is not simply the persistence of caste but a reorganization of how caste becomes politically meaningful. Fluid coastal identities are increasingly read through fixed administrative categories, even though fishers’ own sense of belonging does not always map onto the state’s Scheduled Caste and Other Backward Class classifications. A tension grows between how coastal communities understand themselves and how governance understands them.

This nationalization of coastal caste runs directly into the state’s growing interest in coastal climate adaptation. A population sorted into legible categories is easier to govern, relocate, and administer as the object of adaptation policy and the damage falls precisely on the capacities these communities will most need. Collective action, resource sharing, and community-based governance, the very things that let a fishing village manage its commons and bargain with outside power, depend on a cohesion that the coast’s relative separateness once sustained: relationships that cannot be reduced to infrastructure or economics.

The question of what climate change will do physically to fish and shorelines is increasingly well studied. The question of what simplistic and agrarian-based approaches will do to the politics of caste-based identity and class in fisheries is not studied well or otherwise. This is a reductionist approach and risks misunderstanding the very communities it seeks to support. The challenge is not simply adapting to a changing climate. It is recognizing how caste, governance, and changing power dynamics are remaking the coast itself.

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About the author:

Harshitha Sai Viswanathan is a Ph.D. student in Marine Affairs at the University of Rhode Island. Her research examines how caste, gender, and political-economic transformation shape fisheries governance and climate adaptation in South India, with a particular focus on questions of ocean equity, environmental justice, and social inclusion. Drawing on political ecology, critical caste studies, and ocean governance, she explores how systems of power influence access to marine resources, decision-making, and adaptation in coastal communities. Prior to her doctoral studies, she worked on climate resilience, fisheries governance, and environmental policy initiatives with Washington Sea Grant, the Northwest Seaport Alliance, and the Convention on Biological Diversity. Growing up in the United Arab Emirates and working across the Middle East, India, and the United States has shaped her interest in how social hierarchies influence who benefits from marine resources, who bears environmental risks, and whose voices are recognized in decisions about the future of the ocean policy.

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