Counter-Mapping, Counter-Histories, and Insurgencies of Subjugated Knowledges in the Fisher Struggle for Ennore Creek

Abstract

The Ennore wetlands in North Chennai, India were once dense with diverse habitats and interwoven histories. Many of these histories began to unravel from the 1960s onwards, when state-sponsored heavy industry began encroaching into and polluting the wetlands. Local fishers, whose lives, livelihoods, and cultural worlds were ignored by these changes, fought back in a campaign to reclaim and restore the wetlands. This paper analyses how the Save Ennore Creek Campaign and Ennore fishers used counter-mapping strategies to reveal the state's wilful suppression of fisher knowledge and worldviews using maps and plans. It draws from decolonial and ignorance studies literatures to analyse the campaign's counter-maps as cartographic, performative, and affective insurrections of subjugated knowledges and counter-histories that un-made the state's maps and plans, exposed the state's knowledge as wilful ignorance and spotlighted geographical knowledge from the margins as a way of remaking reality and opening up possibilities of alternative futures for the creek and its communities.