Building Back Better in India: Development, NGOs, and Artisanal Fishers after the 2004 Tsunami

By Raja Swamy

Critically examines the role of humanitarian aid and disaster reconstruction

Building Back Better in India: Development, NGOs, and Artisanal Fishers after the 2004 Tsunami addresses the ways in which natural disasters impact the strategies and priorities of neoliberalizing states in the contemporary era. In the light of growing scholarly and public concern over “disaster capitalism” and the tendency of states and powerful international financial institutions to view disasters as “opportunities” to “build back better,” Raja Swamy offers an ethnographically rich account of post-disaster reconstruction, its contested aims, and the mixed outcomes of state policy, humanitarian aid, and local resistance. Using the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami as a case study, Swamy investigates the planning and implementation of a reconstruction process that sought to radically transform the geography of a coastal district in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu.
 
Drawing on an ethnographic study conducted in Tamil Nadu’s Nagapattinam District, Swamy shows how and why the state-led, multilaterally financed, and NGO-mediated reconstruction prioritized the displacement of coastal fisher populations. Exploring the substantive differences shaping NGO action, specifically in response to core political questions affecting the well-being of their ostensible beneficiaries, this account also centers the political agency of disaster survivors and their allies among NGOs in contesting the meanings of recovery while navigating the process of reconstruction.
 
If humanitarian aid brought together NGOs and fishers as givers and recipients of aid, it also revealed in its workings competing and sometimes contradictory assumptions, goals, interests, and strategies driving the fraught historical relationship between artisanal fishers and the state. Importantly, this research foregrounds the ambiguous role of NGOs involved in the distribution of aid, as well as the agency and strategic actions of the primary recipients of aid—the fishers of Nagapattinam—as they struggled with a reconstruction process that made receipt of the humanitarian gift of housing conditional on the formal abandonment of all claims to the coast. Building Back Better in India thus bridges scholarly concerns with disasters, humanitarianism, and economic development with those focused on power, agency, and resistance.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Alabama Press
• Release date: Jun 29, 2021
• ISBN: 9780817393632

Book preview

BUILDING BACK BETTER IN INDIA

NGOGRAPHIES:

ETHNOGRAPHIC REFLECTIONS ON NGOS

SERIES EDITORS

David Lewis

Mark Schuller

EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD

Sonia Alvarez

Michael Barnett

Erica Bornstein

Inderpal Grewal

Lamia Karim

Anke Schwittay

Aradhana Sharma

Thomas Yarrow

The NGOgraphies book series explores the roles, identities, and social representations of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) through ethnographic monographs and edited volumes. The series offers detailed accounts of NGO practices, challenges the normative assumptions of existing research, and critically interrogates the ideological frameworks that underpin the policy worlds where NGOs operate.

BUILDING BACK BETTER IN INDIA

Development, NGOs, and Artisanal Fishers after the 2004 Tsunami

Raja Swamy

THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS

Tuscaloosa

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380

uapress.ua.edu

Copyright © 2021 by the University of Alabama Press

All rights reserved.

Inquiries about reproducing material from this work should be addressed to the University of Alabama Press.

Typeface: Scala Pro

Cover image: Predemolition view of bridge linking Keechankuppam fisher village with Nagapattinam, 2007; courtesy of Raja Swamy

Cover design: David Nees

Visit the author’s website at www.bbbindia.org.

Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN: 978-0-8173-2097-3

E-ISBN: 978-0-8173-9363-2

CONTENTS

List of Figures

Preface

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Introduction: Building Back Better

Part I. Nagapattinam

1. The Tsunami of 2004 and Its Aftermath

2. Artisanal Fishers, the State, and an NGO

Part II. The Politics of Humanitarianism

3. NGO Antipolitics and Politics

4. The Humanitarian Gift Economy

Part III. Economic Development and Humanitarian Aid

5. Unbridging the Future: Connectivity and Distance

6. Memory, Space, and Power

Conclusion

Glossary

Notes

Bibliography

Index

FIGURES

1.1. Snapshot of relocation in Nagapattinam Taluk

2.1. Exchange on the beach, Chandrapadi, June 2008

3.1. New Kallar, built by World Vision six kilometers inland from Kallar

3.2. Satellite image of Kallar showing the cluster of new houses under construction, financed by Social Needs, Empowerment, and Humane Awareness (SNEHA)

4.1. Houses of Mahalakshminagar on left, built by Thanjavur Multipurpose Social Service Society (TMSSS)

5.1. Keechankuppam bridge bustling with pedestrians and small vehicular traffic, November 2007

5.2. Schoolchildren returning from school on the elevated bridge, June 2008

6.1. Shrine built for Sanjai and Sivaranjani by their parents, Masilamani and Punitha, October 2007

6.2. Munch-Petersen’s empty beach

6.3. Fish drying during mathi season

PREFACE

AS I PUT THE FINISHING touches to this book, the world is in the throes of a pandemic, with casualties already running in the tens of thousands, and entire societies threatened in unprecedented ways. As a disaster, the COVID-19 pandemic is of course very different from tsunamis, hurricanes, earthquakes, or floods, not least because its spatial and temporal reach is far greater. Its devastating impacts today, however, raise several important questions that lie at the heart of this book’s primary concerns. How may we explain the manner in which states and powerful players respond to catastrophic events? While these responses may be understood or explained in terms of the capacity for urgent and effective intervention, what explains the simultaneous choices made by decision makers that prioritize the interests of the powerful and wealthy over all other considerations? This can be asked, for instance, when governments seem more concerned with the confidence of stock market investors or international creditors than they are about the disaster wreaking havoc on the bodies and lives of millions of ordinary people. Or when the economy, which in public discourse hovers over our heads like an extraneous entity that we are repeatedly told has its own health, feelings, and temperament, occupies center stage, while living, breathing human beings whose bodies and lives, exploited for profits (for the owners of the economy) under normal circumstances, and now devastated by a disaster, are asked to stand in line and wait their turn—behind the economy. Moreover, how states and powerful players—the owners and elites of society—respond to catastrophic events like pandemics or tsunamis reveals critical aspects of the relative balance of power separating them from those they govern and exploit under normal circumstances. Where public control over decision making allows for a more equitable distribution of resources and risks, people are less vulnerable to catastrophic events and stand a better chance of being able to recover from their often long-lasting effects. In contrast, this is not possible when there already exist rampant disparities in power, when large sections of humanity are already excluded under normal circumstances from the ability to control their own lives, with little or no access to the conditions of possibility for social and economic well-being. Prevailing conditions, and the inequalities of power that shape them, are therefore a critical consideration for the study of any disaster.

Another important question raised by the present pandemic has to do with the moral and political calculi driving altruistic action. Should humanitarian aid be considered an act of benevolence or a temporary substitute for something recipients are ordinarily entitled to? What if victims of disasters demand things that seem to fall completely outside the scope of aid? For instance, what if American workers demanded universal and free health care or an increase in the minimum wage alongside emergency assistance, or what if Indian migrant workers demanded monetary compensation for wages lost and forced displacement resulting from the pandemic? The presumed lines separating the domain of altruistic action from the political economy constituting the normal are far more blurry than assumed. What kinds of strategies might altruistic action itself mask—when, for instance, a big corporation makes a public show of opening a park near a toxic plant it operates, or when the building of a temple for a fishing community is financed by an adjacent shrimp farm that the community opposed and sought to dismantle not too long before? That several of these illustrations center on people demanding things is intentional. This book offers (1) a critical account of state and multilateral policy, as it translated the horror of the devastating tsunami that struck southern India in 2004 into an opportunity to push out fishing communities from the coast, and (2) a critical engagement with the question of humanitarian action and its problematic though complex relationship with the political interests of its beneficiaries. This book is also concerned with the problem of agency. How did those cast by states and humanitarians alike as problematic subjects of power—encroachers, hapless victims, cultural primitives, ungrateful recipients, and so on, to name a few—act on their reality? The insulting reduction of poorer and more socially marginalized disaster survivors into mute victims by humanitarians and the state alike is not merely a morally reprehensible denial of agency and historicity to people, but also serves as a powerful political tool in their respective arsenals. For through this definitional move, people are expected and ordered to remain mute subjects, grateful for the benevolence of righteous givers, and thereby stripped of any possibility of making demands of their world. Indeed, marginalized populations, like the artisanal fishers of Nagapattinam in this book, not only reject these disciplining expectations but in doing so actively contest the meanings and possibilities of aid itself. Furthermore, in asserting their autonomy by refusing and subverting mass relocation, fishers did so not as abstract citizens but as collective custodians of the coast and the nearshore fishery, reminding us that those struggling with the outcomes of a disaster are acutely aware of the stakes involved in both state responses to disasters and humanitarian aid regimes. I hope that readers find in this book’s account of events unfolding over several years in a small coastal district in Tamil Nadu state a modest contribution to critical dialogue on these and other important questions looming on the disaster-ridden horizon of late neoliberalism.

Ethnographic fieldwork was undertaken between September 2007 and July 2008 in Nagapattinam and adjacent Karaikal districts, in Tamil Nadu and Puducherry states, respectively. During this time, I lived in Nagapattinam town, interacting regularly with the staff, teachers, and students of a small NGO-run school dedicated to the Narikurava/Adiyan community, a marginalized, landless community considered by locals to be occupationally specialized in begging. Though during the later stages of my research I lived independently in a house in Nagapattinam town, I maintained a connection to the school, sometimes volunteering by taking on small tasks with staff or students. From this location, I conducted ethnographic research among households in the nearby fisher villages of Kallar, Keechankuppam, Ariyanattutheru, and Nambiyarnagar, as well as at the sites where many of their residents were relocated. I carried out interviews, site visits, and participant observation with staff and representatives of Social Needs, Empowerment, and Humane Awareness (SNEHA), the NGO Coordination and Resource Center (NCRC), World Vision, Sewa Bharati, and Project Concern International in Nagapattinam, Karaikal, and Chennai.

To gain an understanding of the general features of post-tsunami housing construction, I conducted two surveys. The first was a preliminary assessment of the impact of relocation on household incomes, expenditures, and credit among 174 households at the relocation sites of five fisher villages in Nagapattinam Taluk. The second survey was a region-wide documentation of relocation and beach-space use in the coastal villages of Nagapattinam and adjacent Karaikal, spread from Kallar to Pazhayar. With the generous assistance of Sudarshan Rodriguez, an ecologist working with a Bangalore-based environmental NGO, Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE), I learned how to use a GPS unit to map relocation distances and the spatial dimensions of new locations and villages, as well as beach-space use by fisher villages and nonfishing activities (infrastructure, industry, tourism, and forestry) along the Nagapattinam--Karaikal coast from Kallar in Nagapattinam Taluk to Pazhayar in Sirkazhi, bordering Cuddalore district.

Data were also collected on the structural and locational features of new housing as reported by randomly sampled households in each of these villages. I measured road distances from new settlements to villages and livelihood centers such as the harbor or fish markets, using a motorcycle odometer correlated with GPS waypoints. Data recorded fell under two categories, the first of which included the following: road distance from the new location to the village, distance from the easternmost house to the coast (area where boats and nets are typically parked and stored), and distance to the fish market/harbor. These measures were not recorded in cases where the village itself was the primary site of boat launching/landing and fish buying/selling. A second set of data focused on NGO involvement in housing construction in each village surveyed, as well as a detailed account of the status of each village’s new housing complex(es), covering (1) structural features such as sanitation infrastructure, electricity costs, site drainage, insurance, status of house ownership, and taxes, and (2) locational features such as land quality regarding drainage and elevation, and adjacent land use such as shrimp farms, industries, tourism, infrastructure, roads and pavement, and street lighting.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

THIS BOOK WOULD NOT HAVE been possible without the ample help and support of numerous individuals. To them I owe a debt of gratitude, while I take full responsibility for any shortcomings in the work. Among many mentors and guides at the University of Texas at Austin who provided invaluable intellectual nourishment and guidance, I wish to especially thank Charlie Hale, Kamran Ali, Kaushik Ghosh, James Brow, Kamala Visweswaran, Harry Cleaver, Sharmila Rudrappa, Doug Foley, Jose Limon, Richard Flores, Itty Abraham, and Snehal Shingavi. I thank the late Joseph Spielberg, as well as David Dwyer, Laurie Medina, Judy Pugh, Fred Roberts, Anne Ferguson, Khalida, and the late Javed Zaki at Michigan State University for inspiring my interest in anthropology and social theory early in my education. At the University of Tennessee I gratefully acknowledge the friendship and solidarity of my colleagues Tricia Redeker Hepner, De Ann Pendry, Bertin Louis, David Anderson, Tamar Shirinian, Paul Gellert, and Nikhil Deb, as well as the creative and inquiring energies of my graduate students Thomas Tran, Idil Issak, Raymond Da Boi, Julian McDaniel, and Mac Archer. To Rebecca Klenk—colleague, friend, inspiring scholar and teacher, who left us too soon—I offer a special thanks for her warmth and friendship and for encouraging me to finish this work.

I could not have wished for a more supportive, encouraging, and yet meticulously thorough editor to guide this book toward completion than Wendi Schnaufer at the University of Alabama Press. I also wish to thank Mark Schuller for his advice, comments, and suggestions on refining the manuscript, and Laurel Anderton for copyediting the work with great precision and care. To Dip Kapoor, thank you for challenging me to think anew about many questions around social movements and political possibility in an era increasingly marked by global patterns of nongovernmental antipolitics. Spanning academia and other areas, many of the questions this book engages have been part of innumerable conversations over many years with some wonderful friends and comrades, companions, and guides in the struggle. I am especially grateful to Biju Mathew, Anu Mandavilli, Balmurli Natrajan, Mamatha Kodidela, Ravi Vijaya Satya, Sirisha Naidu, Feroz Mehdi, Aparna Sundar, Mir Ali Hussein, Shalini Gera, Girish Agrawal, Ra Ravishankar, Ashwini Rao, Fernando Garcia, Magaly Licolli, Gilberto Rosas, and the late Usha Zacharias, whose kindness and sense of humor are sorely missed. Among many wonderful friends who made graduate school a memorable experience I would especially like to acknowledge Omer Ozcan, Mubbashir Rizvi, Damien Sojoyner, Mathangi Krishnamurthy, Mohan Ambikaipaker, Hişyar Özsoy, Ruken Sengul, Can Açiksöz, Halide Velioğlu, Kenneth Macleish, Alex Chavez, Santiago Guerra, Jodi Skipper, Nick Copeland, Diya Mehra, Indulata Prasad, Tathagatan Ravindran, Jogendro Kshetrimayum, Hafeez Jamali, Abdul Haq Chang, Noman Baig, Nikki Martere, Luciane Rocha, Jaime Alves, Claudia Chavez, Elizabeth Velasquez, and Sarah Ihmoud.

Many individuals in Nagapattinam made research for this book possible and generously shared their time and energies, patiently enduring my many questions and general interference in their lives. A special thank-you goes out to Revathi Radhakrishnan, whose work for justice and dignity over the years in Nagapattinam and beyond is exemplary. Revathi provided me with valuable guidance and assistance in Nagapattinam and challenged me to think seriously about caste and gender in shaping the complex and unequal social worlds of Nagapattinam. I also thank Senthil Babu, Mathivanan, and Kavitha Muralidharan for sharing their insights and experiences regarding the challenges facing those routinely excluded from the premises and promises of development, as well as their courageous struggles against the odds, for dignity, rights, and life. To the teachers, staff, and students at Vanavil school, especially Chitra, Jeeva, Balraj, Sarathy, and Arunachalam, many thanks are due for their friendship and hospitality, and for many wonderful conversations as we often waited for electricity to return or took walks to the beach late at night. Kumaravelu from SNEHA, with his intimate knowledge of the political economy of fishing, taught me about the intricacies of the artisanal fishing economy, as well as the problematic terrains on which fisher politics engages the state, NGOs, and private capital. I thank Jesu Rethinam Christy, director of SNEHA; Rajendran, Vanaja, Sankar, and the staff at the SNEHA library; Indrani and Bhumati; and research assistants Tamilarasi and Ravanan for their patience and assistance in making possible my research in Nagapattinam and Karaikal. In Ariyanattutheru, Keechankuppam, Akkaraipettai, and Kallar I am especially grateful to Masilamani and Punitha, Kuppuraj, Ratnavel, Thyaagu, Pandaribai, Pavunammal, Kalaimani, Senthil, Panchayatar Rajendiran, and many others for their warmth and hospitality. A special thank-you to my friend Sudarshan Rodriguez for guiding me through many facets of coastal life, and for generously sharing his research skills and insights into the world of artisanal fishing. His penchant for navigating the coast by motorcycle made fieldwork in Nagai a memorable experience. I am also indebted to both Sudarshan and Aarthi Sridhar for helping me make sense of coastal regulation. I thank A. R. Venkatachalapathy for sharing valuable insights into colonial histories of the Coromandel Coast, to Indira Peterson for her suggestions and recommendations for research into the deep and complex relationship between the Coromandel and the medieval Saiva tradition, and to Joe D’Cruz for a fascinating account of his historical research into the role of Tamil fishers in shaping the coast over millennia. I also thank Esther Fihl and the wonderful international team of scholars that she and A. R. Venkatachalapathy brought together at the University of Copenhagen for an exciting and productive symposium on Tranquebar in June 2011.

To my mother, Jayalakshmi Yegnaswamy, I thank you for everything and hope you have a spot for this book on your bookshelf. My late father, K. H. Yegnaswamy, would have been relieved that I finished this work, although he might have also mentioned softly that I am too wordy. To my children, Azad, Amar, and Meena, thank you for your patience and understanding with Dad as he sat frowning at his desk for so many days when you wanted him to watch cartoons with you. To Tamar, thank you for the loving companionship, camaraderie, and encouragement, and for your helpful readings of drafts of this book. Finally, I offer this work as an acknowledgment of the courage, determination, and fortitude of the fishers of Nagapattinam and Karaikal who, in the face of the immense tragedy of the tsunami, the subsequent efforts of the state to dislocate them, and the attempt by NGOs to buy their acquiescence, continue to ensure that it is they who define and defend the coast.

ABBREVIATIONS

ADB Asian Development Bank

AIADMK All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam party

AREDS Association of Rural Education and Development Service

BEDROC Building and Enabling Resilience of Coastal Communities

CRZ Coastal Regulation Zone

DMK Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam

ETRP Emergency Tsunami Reconstruction Project

FRP fiber-reinforced plastic

GSDP Gross State Domestic Product

IDRF India Development and Relief Fund

IMF International Monetary Fund

INA Indian National Army

INR Indian Rupee

INTACH Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage

JAM Joint Assessment Mission

LAFTI Land and Freedom for Tillers

NCC NGO Coordination Center

NCRC NGO Coordination and Resource Center

PCI Project Concern International

ROSA Rural Organization for Social Action

RSS Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, core organization of the Hindu supremacist movement

SIFFS South Indian Federation of Fishermen Societies

SMEC Snowy Mountains Engineering Corporation

SNEHA Social Needs, Empowerment, and Humane Awareness

TEAP Tsunami Emergency Assistance Program

TMSSS Thanjavur Multipurpose Social Service Society

UNDP United Nations Development Programme

USAID US Agency for International Development

VAO Village Administrative Officer

VOC Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie (Dutch East India Company)

Introduction

Building Back Better

THE MAN ACROSS THE TABLE, Father John Henry, raised his voice, and his eyebrows, and complained: They want to grab everything, just like when they go fishing! The problem for him was simply a matter of honesty and honor. The fishers of Kottaimedu village, a small fishing hamlet tucked between two vast casuarina groves on the northern fringes of Nagapattinam district’s vast coastline, had been given a plate-making machine, a device that turned palm leaves into biodegradable plates. The idea was elegant and linked modern ecological sensibilities with humanitarian aid. Further, it brought together concerns over economic well-being and what in NGO and multilateral parlance is commonly referred to as an alternative livelihood for a population on the social and economic fringes, one that tends to provoke a mix of sympathy and exasperation among officials, NGO staff, and the nonfishing denizens of Nagapattinam.

For Father John Henry and the US Agency for International Development (USAID) funded Project Concern, operating in Nagapattinam until the end of 2008 when their funding ended, the problem centered on a misunderstanding. He had personally overseen the giving of the machine to the village and was now upset with the failure of the village to put the machine to use. The goal was to enable the community to earn supplementary income from the production and sale of biodegradable plates made of leaves cut from the locally abundant areca palm (Areca catechu) tree. After a few months the village leaders had locked the machine up and were not using it, so representatives from the NGO repeatedly requested that they return the gift so it could be donated to others who could make use of it. After months of evasion, the village leaders explained to Project Concern officials that they were undergoing a leadership transition that prevented them from making decisions of such importance. Several months later, a newly elected panchayat council took over and made its final decision on the matter, arguing that since the machine was given as a gift, it could not be returned to the giver.¹ As Henry explained, his voice tinged with outrage over this audacious response, the panchayat had in fact decided to find a good buyer for the machine. He went on to offer an explanation worthy of older strains of anthropological thought—ecologically, fishers are supposedly adapted to survival strategies that require repetitively grabbing everything. Accordingly, they are prone to feel as if they should grab everything as and when the opportunity presents itself.

The fishers of Kottaimedu knew that the plate-making machine was a gift but decided that it was also an asset. Its value could be realized in ways that were more appropriate to their needs. The NGO viewed the response of the fishers as an act of bad faith. The gift had been turned into something else, its negative, an object that could be treated as a commodity and returned to the realm of market exchange from where it had been painstakingly and deliberately extricated by the NGO. Kottaimedu’s fishers thought that earning a livelihood from making biodegradable plates was only a remotely feasible idea but took the gift anyway. Their concerns with the recovery process following the devastating tsunami of December 26, 2004, lay with the restoration of their main activity—nearshore artisanal fishing. NGOs were kind, generous, and resourceful. But their ideas regarding how fishers should organize their material world were naive and out of touch. The polite refusal to adhere to the expectations of the NGO, while read as a breach by the annoyed official of Project Concern, epitomized the problem of the humanitarian gift economy in post-tsunami Nagapattinam. It signaled the manner in which the polysemous qualities of objects and services offered as gifts to local artisanal fishers by well-resourced and highly mobile NGOs embodied sharply divergent views of how communities devastated by the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004 were to recover. NGOs like Project Concern, working in close concert with the state government as agents of a broad public-private partnership, sought to turn the reconstruction of Nagapattinam into an effort to build back better. Artisanal fisher communities such as the village of Kottaimedu viewed recovery as a question of returning to a thriving custodianship of the nearshore marine fishery. Biodegradable plates could wait.

Of all the affected coastal districts of southern India, Nagapattinam suffered the worst in terms of casualties and material destruction, and it quickly became a laboratory for a massive reconstruction project involving the governments of Tamil Nadu and India, the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, the United Nations, and a host of NGOs. Presented by planners as an opportunity to build back better, reconstruction mobilized substantial financial resources from the above multilaterals, but also an unprecedented outpouring of humanitarian aid delivered largely through NGOs. The stated goal of reconstruction from very early on was not just to replace damaged or destroyed houses and infrastructure but to improve them. Rather than anchoring the goals of reconstruction in the long-term needs and economic interests of local fisher communities, officials and their multilateral partners deployed the language of opportunity and improvement to advance a radically different vision. Nagapattinam was to be improved in specific ways that prioritized the interests of capital investment and the firmer integration of the region into global circuits of accumulation while ostensibly addressing the needs of its disaster-affected population.

The opportunities envisioned spanned a range of infrastructural projects to spur economic growth such as ports, harbors, roads, and bridges, but also tourism development. Reconstruction, however, posed a problem for policy makers because it required the large-scale transformation of land and resource relations in ways that most directly affected fisher communities. The state government tried to address this in two ways. First, by prioritizing housing needs to the exclusion of locational and livelihood needs, policy makers set about authoring plans that pressured communities to accept inland relocation. Second, with NGOs brought into the process of reconstruction, relocation could now be justified in terms of not only structural improvements but also the humanitarian benevolence of caring strangers. Thus the humanitarian imperative of NGOs became closely linked to the goals of the state government, providing material and symbolic support for the relocation of fisher communities.

This book examines the interplay of three sets of interests, including those of (1) the state and multilateral agencies authoring and executing the reconstruction project, (2) the NGO-led humanitarian sector, and (3) the coastal fisher population of Nagapattinam. I use the terms interplay and interest to insist on a dynamic reading of disasters and their aftermaths that centers analysis on the agency of those involved. If the state and multilateral agencies planning at the macro level viewed the problem of reconstruction primarily as one of spurring economic growth, and if NGOs viewed their own goals and interests in humanitarian and professional terms, how did fishers view reconstruction? Expectedly, their views were inextricably linked to their own interests and goals, most importantly their relationship with land and resources. It is my contention that examining disasters and their aftermaths in light of the interplay of competing interests allows us to recognize patterns and features in the social and economic world that are constitutive of a disaster. While strategies and actions that unfold during reconstruction reveal facets of politics, they do so despite the explicit and implicit ways humanitarianism depoliticizes material and social inequalities. As recipients of aid and subjects of