“DO THEY DO OUR THOZHIL?”: Toxic Industrialization, Uncertainty, and Refusal in North Chennai

Abstract

This article shows how acts of refusal mediated different experiences of uncertainty among the artisanal fishermen who lived and worked in Ennore's (Chennai, India) polluted landscape. In uncovering how some of these uncertainties were experienced as a result of histories of urban segregation that rendered peripheral locations like Ennore seemingly appropriate to house polluting industries, and thereafter sustained through the bodily demands of thozhil (the profession of artisanal fishing) in a contaminated river, the article posits acts of partial, processual, and contradictory forms of refusal as ways in which different fishermen reconciled some of their experiences of living with Ennore's petrochemical pollution. In critically engaging emic terms like area and thozhil that the fishermen used to flag their stances of refusal, and also showing how collective assemblies became instrumental in challenging Ennore's polluting industries, the article argues that refusal not only helped the fishermen forge lives and make claims in places that were becoming more industrial and toxic but also mediated their relationship to a place they knew as, and desired to continue calling, their home.