Making Way for Ships: Displacement, Religion and Urban Space-Making in India’s Southwest Littoral

Abstract

This article foregrounds the interlinkages between the urban space-making of Kochi, religion and the displacement of shore communities in the decades after the Independence of India in 1947. I analyse the happenings and narratives around post-Independent India’s development initiatives as a site to understand space, land and sea as crucial resources in relation to the development of the city and the displacement of the shore communities. Specifically, I examine how the establishment of the Cochin Shipyard, a public-sector company which builds and repairs ships, is entangled with displacement and religion in the development history of Kochi, a comparatively small port city on the south-western coast of the Indian subcontinent. I also trace the refiguring of the displaced people’s land as the place of ‘revengeful ghosts’ in vernacular literature, which, I argue, shows anxieties about the unjust treatment of the evicted communities. I use a diverse range of sources including newspaper reports, biographical notes, ethnographic accounts, myths and literature to recreate this forgotten chapter in the development of Kochi.