South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies

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Making Way for Ships: Displacement, Religion and

Urban Space-Making in India’s Southwest Littoral

Carmel Christy K.J.

To cite this article: Carmel Christy K.J. (2022): Making Way for Ships: Displacement, Religion and
Urban Space-Making in India’s Southwest Littoral, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, DOI:
10.1080/00856401.2022.2096338

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2022.2096338

Published online: 09 Aug 2022.

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SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES
https://doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2022.2096338

ARTICLE

Making Way for Ships: Displacement, Religion and Urban

Space-Making in India’s Southwest Littoral
Carmel Christy K.J.
Department of Journalism, Kamala Nehru College, University of Delhi, Delhi, India

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
This article foregrounds the interlinkages between the urban Development; displacement;
space-making of Kochi, religion and the displacement of shore ghost stories; Kochi;
communities in the decades after the Independence of India in literature; lived religion;
ship-building; shore
1947. I analyse the happenings and narratives around post- communities; urban space
Independent India’s development initiatives as a site to under-
stand space, land and sea as crucial resources in relation to the
development of the city and the displacement of the shore com-
munities. 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, bio-
graphical notes, ethnographic accounts, myths and literature to
recreate this forgotten chapter in the development of Kochi.

Introduction
The Arabian Sea and its backwaters along the south-western coast of India have played
a prominent role in shaping Cochin. The proximity to sea routes has connected
Cochin more to Southeast Asia, East Africa and West Asia than to the rest of India,
thus complicating the concept of a small, provincial city constituting a mere spot in the
larger contemporary Indian nation-state.1 The sea has brought traders from the Arab
countries and China, and Portuguese (1503–1663), Dutch (1663–1773) and British
(1814–1947) colonisers and missionaries. The presence and influence of major
European colonisers and the diversity of traders who came through the shores which
open to the wider world mark Kochi’s historically distinct development from other
similar cities in India (Figure 1).2

CONTACT Carmel Christy K.J. carmel.christi@gmail.com

1. Ashis Nandy, ‘Time Travel to a Possible Self: Searching for the Alternative Cosmopolitanism of Cochin’, Japanese
Journal of Political Science 1, no. 2 (2000): 295–327; 298.
2. I use Kochi to refer to the larger part of the city and Cochin to denote the seashore that is part of the city.

ß 2022 South Asian Studies Association of Australia

2 C. CHRISTY K.J.

Figure 1. Map of South India. Source: Robert Bristow, Cochin Saga, 153.

The economic nerve centre of Kerala, Cochin also finds its place as a multicultural
city.3 Indian sociologist Ashis Nandy sees the multiculturalism of Cochin as offering a
possibility for harmony, despite the difference and suspicion each community holds for
the others.4 Historian Dilip Menon argues, ‘Kochi and Ernakulam are certainly the
most cosmopolitan cities in Kerala. One could call Trivandrum a Nair town, and

3. Kerala, located on the southern tip of India, was hailed for its model of development in which social indicators
of education and health were on a high scale despite slow economic progress.
4. Nandy, Time Travel.
 SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES 3

Kozhikode, a Muslim hinterland. Kochi belongs to everyone, and everyone can belong
to Kochi, so there is this cosmopolitan port-city dimension which continues’.5
Despite the co-existence of diverse cultures and people, port cities in India are also
shaped and marred by rifts stemming from religious, caste and linguistic differences.6
The focus on the cosmopolitanism of Kochi and other port cities in some of the earlier
studies often submerges the crucial aspects of contestations, oppression, displacement,
loss of habitat and marginalisation of lower-caste people and minorities in the making
of the city. This paper goes beyond the much talked about multiculturalism of Kochi to
focus on the contested making of the city based on religion and caste.
Several scholars have discussed the role of contestations around religion and politics
in shaping the urban culture in India. Thomas Blom Hansen, writing about Mumbai in
his book, Wages of Violence, deliberates the role of the Shiv Sena, a Marathi nativist
and Hindu Right-wing political party, in shaping the politics and culture of the post-
colonial city.7 Atreyee Sen’s book, Shiv Sena Women, delineates a fraught narrative of
working-class women members negotiating patriarchy, subservience and violence by
actively participating in the Hindu nationalist party activities.8 Recent scholarship on
Muslims and urban spaces discuss the socio-economic decline of the community in the
form of segregation and ‘ghettoisation’ in Indian cities.9 The post-colonial experience
of the communal dyad between the two major religious groups, Hindus and Muslims,
in relation to urbanity is captured in this scholarship. There is scope for turning one’s
attention to urban space-making in specific contexts, taking into consideration local
practices, caste relations and diverse religious cultures.
Layers of stratification, discrimination, suspicion and haggling for power are some
defining aspects of urban space-making in Indian cities. Political anthropologist Nicolas
Jaoul, in his study of the Dalit movement in Uttar Pradesh from the 1990s, argues that
the Dalits used public demonstrations to express their much-deserved claim on the urban
space and thereby inserted themselves into the democratisation process in the country.10
As I demonstrate in this paper, the displacement of shore communities for develop-
ment in Kochi not only raises the question of spatial injustice, but also brings out nar-
ratives of losing a slice of their history and ways of being in the world by being
connected to that land. This article, along with a discussion of the forgotten history of
displacement for development, also focuses on the cultural and spiritual meanings of
loss of land for the displaced Christian shore communities. By doing this, the article
signposts the need to be attentive to the many meanings of displacement in urban
space-making along with the immediate political and economic concerns.

5. Dilip Menon, ‘Thinking a Local Cosmopolitanism—The Kochi Muziris Biennale: Interview with Dilip Menon by
Riyas Komu and C.S. Venkiteswaran’, Kafila, October 18, 2017, accessed May 25, 2019, https://kafila.online/2017/
10/18/thinking-a-local-cosmopolitanism-the-kochi-muziris-biennale-interview-with-dilip-menon-by-riyas-komu-
and-cs-venkiteswaran/.
6. Lakshmi Subramanian, ed., Ports, Towns, Cities: A Historical Tour of the Indian Littoral (Mumbai: Marg Publications, 2008).
7. Thomas Blom Hansen, Wages of Violence: Naming and Identity in Postcolonial Bombay (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2002).
8. Atreyee Sen, Shiv Sena Women: Violence and Communalism in a Bombay Slum (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 2007).
9. Laurent Gayer and Christophe Jaffrelot, ed., Muslims in Indian Cities: Trajectories of Marginalisation (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2012).
10. Nicolas Jaoul, ‘Dalit Processions: Street Politics and Democratisation in India’, in Staging Politics: Power and Performance
in Asia and Africa, ed. Julia C. Strauss and Donal B. Cruise O’Brien (London: I.B. Tauris, 2007): 173–93; 174.
4 C. CHRISTY K.J.

More recently, studies on urban religion expanded the horizon of urban studies and
religious studies: urban studies to encompass the spatialisation of religion, and religious
studies to look beyond the sacred to understand lived religions in city spaces.11 Peter
van der Veer’s edited volume, Handbook of Religion and the Asian City, explores the
dynamic co-creation of religion and urban spaces in Indian and Chinese cities.12 This
emerging scholarship—about how immaterial and sometimes invisible processes that
can be traced to religion shape and foster urban spaces, and vice versa—provides a cru-
cial tool for understanding a port city like Cochin, whose history and the present are
entangled with trader and coloniser interest in both spices and religion.13
Chris Baker elaborates on the relationship between urbanity and religion: ‘The
material processes and development of urban formation and planning are shaped, but
also subverted, by non-material or invisible processes that emerge from the moral, eth-
ical, spiritual and religious world views of ordinary citizens as they live or “perform”
their embodied presences in the public urban sphere’.14 Urban formation is both a
material process and an embodied process in which intangible aspects of citizens’ lives
such as lived religion enliven city spaces and its structures. In other words, cosmopolit-
anism, which is considered a defining aspect of Cochin in some earlier analyses, does
not in itself make religion irrelevant to understanding the city’s urbanity.
Rather, my paper demonstrates how the modern city of Kochi is built and lived
through its entanglement with religion and lower-caste shore communities, who are
becoming an invisiblised presence in the city as they are pushed to the periphery due
to displacement. To do this, I analyse the displacement of the shore communities for
the establishment of the Cochin Shipyard, a major national development project, begun
along the coast of Cochin after Independence. The dislocation of a Catholic church
and cemetery into a dry dock for ships provides entry points to discuss the meanings
of religious place-making for its believers and for the new entrants to the ‘transformed’
space. This analysis also foregrounds how the interconnections of religion and caste
become significant in the spatial reorganisation of the modern city of Kochi.
In the course of this research, I have analysed newspaper reports, biographical notes,
ethnographic accounts, myths and vernacular literature and interviews with journalists,
the Cochin Shipyard management (2018) and local clergy to bring out the history of
displacement of the shore communities in the urban space-making of Kochi.15 This
chapter of history is almost forgotten and appeared as a short, single-column news
report in the newspapers in 1972. This makes it necessary for me to look elsewhere in
literature and ethnographic accounts to reconstruct this recent past.16 Historian Sanal
Mohan, in his book, Modernity of Slavery, conducted an ethnographic history of ‘Caste

11. David Garbin and Anna Strhan, ed., Religion and the Global City (London: Bloomsbury, 2017).
12. Peter van der Veer, Handbook of Religion and the Asian City: Aspiration and Urbanization in the Twenty-First
Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015).
13. Pius Malekandathil, ‘Cross, Sword and Conflicts: A Study of the Political Meanings of the Struggle between the
Padroado Real and the Propaganda Fide’, Studies in History 27, no. 2 (2011): 251–67, https://doi.org/10.1177/
0257643012459418.
14. Chris Baker, ‘Religion as “Urban White Noise”—Material Practices of Everyday Religion at the “Unquiet Frontiers”
of the Hyper-Diverse City’, in Religion and the Global City, ed. David Garbin and Anna Strhan (London:
Bloomsbury, 2017): 222–39; 222.
15. All interviews were conducted in Malayalam and translated by the author.
16. The Hindu, April 29, 1972: 8.
 SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES 5

slavery’ to foreground the agential articulations of Dalits in colonial Kerala.17 Drawing

from several other such works, Mohan combines archival research with ethnographic
fieldwork to bring out the layered meanings of the conversion of the slave castes to
Christianity and their resistance to caste-based inequalities.18 Also, following
Gyanendra Pandey’s observation that ‘silence is not an absence’, I expand the multi-
layered meanings of this footnote in the history of Kochi by weaving together diverse
materials in an interpretative framework.19 The paper has three sections which chart
out the connections between the flows of Catholicism to the shores; the idea of the
Cochin Shipyard materialising despite several bottlenecks; and the transformation of
land from a religious place to a modern space that defines the city today.

The open shores: Bounded flows

As with other port cities, people of many races and ethnicities merged into the real and
imagined life of Kochi.20 Spices from Malabar have been traded through the Cochin
port since the fourteenth century.21 A 1514 treaty between Rome and Portugal, known
as Padroado Real, authorised the Portuguese Crown to trade and evangelise in
Cochin.22 As per the agreement, the Portuguese agreed to bring missionaries for pros-
elytisation in return for protection from other European competitors in the sea routes
in their expedition to expand their colonisation interests. The Portuguese facilitated
this proselytising mission led by Franciscan and Jesuit missionaries along the coast in
the early sixteenth century, as a result of which large numbers of fisher communities,
including the Paravars, Mukkuvars and Araya, converted and came to be known as
Latin Catholics.23
The missionaries were surprised to discover that there were already Christian
believers in the inlands who called themselves Thomas Christians or Syrian Christians.
The interventions of the missionaries to ‘reform’ the existing ancient Christians from
their ‘pagan’ rituals often led to conflicts. Nonetheless, not just conversion of the fisher
communities along the coast, but also the catholicisation of the Syrian Christians in
Kerala was an outcome of missionary interventions. These reforms were also

17. P. Sanal Mohan, Modernity of Slavery: Struggles against Caste Inequality in Colonial Kerala (New Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 2015): 1.
18. Mohan, Modernity of Slavery, 4–5.
19. Gyanendra Pandey, ‘Un-Archived Histories: The “Mad” and the “Trifling”’, Economic & Political Weekly 47, no. 1
(2012): 37–41; 41.
20. Mythical figures such as Kappiri Muthappan (literal translation: Black Grandpa) also became part of the everyday
life of the city. He is believed to roam around the streets of Fort Cochin even today. The story of Kappiri
Muthappan traces back to the Black slaves of the Portuguese colonisers whom they buried alive to guard their
treasure before they fled Cochin to escape the Dutch in 1662.
21. Cranganore (Muziris) in Cochin and Quilon (now Kollam) in Travancore are recorded as the major ports in South
India till the fourteenth century. By the mid fourteenth century, Cochin emerged as a major port which is
attributed to the decline of the Periyar river port in Cranganore due to floods and related natural changes: see
Robert Bristow, Cochin Saga (Cochin: Bristow Memorial Society, 2015).
22. Malekandathil, Cross, Sword and Conflicts, 251–67.
23. Bayly (1989) points out that the Paravas in Tamil Nadu gained mobility over the Mukkuvas and other similar
caste groups by the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This was facilitated by what Bayly calls an
‘accident of geography’—a particularly rich pearl-bearing oyster bed between Tirunelveli and Ramnad from
where they originally come: see Susan Bayly, Saints, Goddesses and Kings: Muslims and Christians in South Indian
Society, 1700–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
6 C. CHRISTY K.J.

intertwined with the trading interests of the Portuguese as the Syrian Christians were
prosperous spice farmers and traders.24
The history and practice of Christianity was enmeshed with the existing relations of
hierarchies in Cochin and Travancore.25 Despite converting to Christianity, Syrian
Christians segregated themselves from lower-caste groups as they claimed upper-caste
Hindu lineage before conversion.26 Fishermen were considered to be polluting
castes and their conversion did not banish their caste status. As in Brahmanical
castes, marriage across different sections of Christians is still a rarity due to the caste
factor. Latin Catholics, who mostly resided along the shores, are economically and
socially disadvantaged in comparison to the more prosperous Syrian Christians liv-
ing inland.
The transnational flows and merging of different forms of Christianity, mediated
through trade and religion, was a process that created several layers of faith and prac-
tice.27 As several developmental projects gained momentum after Independence in
1947, the Cochin littoral became central to the development of the modern city of
Kochi. The next section discusses one such project on the Cochin shore that displaced
the coastal populations, including the Latin Catholics.

The Cochin Shipyard: A national aspiration

The transnational history of Cochin was enhanced by the development of another sea-
related enterprise after Independence—the establishment of The Cochin Shipyard
Limited, a public-sector company that builds and repairs ships (Figure 2).
Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of India, had an extensive development
plan entailing the establishment of modern public institutions such as dams, univer-
sities and public companies. During the establishment of these development projects,
at least 65 million people were displaced between 1950 and 2005.28 In their report,
Nadine Walicki and Marita Swain note that displacement was considered a necessary
sacrifice for development.29 According to them, it was only later, in the 1980s, that dis-
placed communities began protesting. In 2013, the Indian National Congress-led UPA
government passed The Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land
Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013, to address displacement caused

24. Malekandathil, Cross, Sword and Conflicts, 251–67.

25. Three Malayalam speaking kingdoms—Travancore, Cochin and Malabar—were merged together to form the
state of Kerala after the Independence of India.
26. Sonja Thomas, Privileged Minorities: Syrian Christianity, Gender, and Minority Rights in Postcolonial India (Seattle,
WA: University of Washington Press, 2018).
27. According to G. Aloysius, different hierarchical sections among Christians in Kerala belie the promise of
conversion itself. Syrian Christians are politically and culturally dominant as compared to the other sections of
Christians. The Latin Catholics are recognised as socially and economically backward and come under the Other
Backward Classes (OBC) in the state list for communities deserving of affirmative action. Dalit Christians are
included under the Other Eligible Classes (OEC) category. For more details, see G. Aloysius, Nationalism without
a Nation in India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997).
28. Walter Fernandes, ‘India’s Forced Displacement Policy: Is Compensation Up to Its Functions?’ in Can
Compensation Prevent Impoverishment? Reforming Compensation through Investments and Benefit Sharing, ed. M.
Cernea and H. Mathur (London: Oxford University Press, 2009): 180–207.
29. Nadine Walicki and Marita Swain, ‘Pushed Aside: Displaced for “Development” in India’, in Thematic Report of
the Norwegian Refugee Council and Internal Displacement Monitoring Committee (Geneva: The Internal
Displacement Monitoring Centre, 2016): 6–54; 15.
 SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES 7

Figure 2. View of the coast of Kochi. The approximate location of the Cochin Shipyard is marked
with a dark spot. Source: Google Earth, accessed August 12, 2020.

by development.30 However, the provisions in the Act to ensure compensation and

rehabilitation for displaced people were weakened by the Right to Fair Compensation
and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement (Amendment)
Bill, 2015, introduced by the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government, led by
the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).31 So, despite the debates in recent decades, India is
yet to legally address this crucial question of loss of habitat and livelihood for millions
of displaced communities.
Against this backdrop, the long history of urban development-induced displacement
in India started drawing more scholarly attention.32 Several studies have focused on
the transformations and displacement in cities in the period after the adoption of liber-
alisation policies in the 1990s.33 Arjun Appadurai discusses the question of housing for
the urban poor in Mumbai along with the excessive flow of capital into the city, espe-
cially after globalisation.34 Appadurai foregrounds the resilience of the urban poor to
keep their homes habitable despite the state’s urge to conceal large urban slums to
propagate the image of a growing global city. This paper, while drawing from these
debates in recent decades, focuses on development-induced displacement in Kochi

30. The Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act,
2013, accessed September 26, 2021, https://legislative.gov.in/sites/default/files/A2013-30.pdf; also see Michael M.
Cernea, ‘Progress in India: New Legislation to Protect Persons Internally Displaced by Development Projects’,
Brookings, October 2013, accessed June 28, 2020, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2013/10/21/
progress-in-india-new-legislation-to-protect-persons-internally-displaced-by-development-projects/.
31. At the time of publication of this article, the Amendment Bill (2015) has not been passed in the Rajya Sabha.
32. Annapurna Shaw and Tara Saharan, ‘Urban Development-Induced Displacement and Quality of Life in Kolkata’,
Environment & Urbanization 31, no. 2 (2018): 597–614, https://doi.org/10.1177/0956247818816891.
33. K.C. Smitha and Dev Pal Barun, ‘Spatial Reproduction of Urban Poverty in Global City: Gender, Informality and
Mobility in Bengaluru’, Economic & Political Weekly 53, no. 3 (2018): 67–76.
34. Arjun Appadurai, The Future as a Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition (London: Verso, 2013).
8 C. CHRISTY K.J.

from the 1950s to the 1970s.35 While unfolding the concerns of the displaced shore
communities for the national project of the Cochin Shipyard, the paper traces the con-
versations around displacement and the community’s responses to leaving their habitat
and livelihood 50 years ago.
The reality of displacement and impoverishment of the poorer sections, mostly
lower castes and religious minorities, was subsumed within the narrative of progress of
the nation in the decades after Independence. Nehru, whose emphasis on development
via public institutions and enterprises is well known, compared them to places of wor-
ship such as a temple, gurdwara or mosque, in an attempt to equate modernity with
religion.36 Despite this rhetoric, religion and caste complicated Indian modernity. The
establishment of the Cochin Shipyard, one of the ten most successful public-sector
undertakings and the biggest shipyard in India today, is entangled in the encounter
between religion, state, caste, displacement and development. This encounter provides
entry points to understand the making of a space from a living and religious one to a
modern enterprise. The rest of my paper captures some of these moments of transition
of both space and people.
Though Cochin has a longer history of shipbuilding,37 the idea of a modern ship-
yard in Cochin was in line with the Nehruvian imagination of development.38 The plan
for a shipyard in Cochin was sanctioned by the central government in 1959, but it fell
to the state government of Kerala to oversee the land acquisition, which created
delays.39 It took 13 years to establish the yard, by which time Nehru was no more. It
was inaugurated by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi on April 29, 1972.
The shipyard was a major development spatially and economically. There were
some necessary geographical considerations that were decisive in the location of the
shipyard. First, it had to be built near the new Cochin Port for logistical reasons,
including easier transfer of goods from the ships. The old Cochin Port had degenerated
in the late nineteenth century. After facing many bureaucratic hurdles, a British engin-
eer, Sir Robert Bristow, managed to get permission to build a new port in Cochin,
which was functional by 1928. The location of the port was chosen considering several
factors, which Bristow enumerates in his memoirs. At some point, he was considering

35. Displacement of the shore communities without compensation and rehabilitation continues in Kochi. Hundreds
of families were evicted for the International Transshipment Container Terminal in 2008. For details, see K. Indu
and S. Irudaya Rajan, ‘Contested Urban Landscapes: Development-Induced Displacement, Involuntary
Resettlement and State Violence in Kochi, Kerala’, in India Migration Report, ed. S. Irudaya Rajan (London:
Routledge, 2016).
36. While inaugurating the Bhakra-Nangal Dam in Himachal Pradesh in October 1963, Nehru said, ‘This Dam has
been built up with the unrelenting toil of man for the benefit of mankind and therefore is worthy of worship.
May you call it a Temple or a Gurudwara or a Mosque, it inspires our administration and reverence’: Jawaharlal
Nehru, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru Ji’s Inaugural Speech, Bhakra village, India, November 17, 1955, accessed July 5,
2022, http://bbmb.gov.in/speech.htm.
37. K.L. Bernard, ‘Ship Building in Ancient Cochin: A Historical Study’, in The Kerala History Association Golden Jubilee
Souvenir, ed. C.K. Kareem (Cochin: Kerala History Association, 1995): 39–57.
38. Anjana Singh notes that there was ‘a shipyard for fitting out ships and a special carpenter’s yard where
shipwrights repaired ships and boats’ during the Dutch colonial time in Cochin. The availability of timber and
the craftsmanship of the natives provided the necessary conditions for shipbuilding to thrive. A Malayalam
novel, Lanthan Batheriyile Luthiniyakal (Litanies of the Dutch Battery) by N.S. Madhavan, has several characters
who refer to the shipbuilding tradition in their families: see Anjana Singh, Fort Cochin in Kerala (1750–1830):
The Social Condition of a Dutch Community in an Indian Milieu (Leiden: Brill, 2010): 40; N.S. Madhavan, Lanthan
Batheriyile Luthiniyakal (Litanies of the Dutch Battery) (Kottayam: DC Books, 2003).
39. The Hindu, April 29, 1972: 12.
 SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES 9

the possibility of Ernakulam (the central part of Cochin) as the spot for the frontage of
the modern port. Word spread and he was promptly approached by a prominent local,
who urged him to reconsider:
Good Morning, Mr. Bristow. My name is X, as you know. They told me you were busy,
but I have come to see you about a plan which I believe you will welcome. It will save
you a lot of money, and I know you are all out for economy. May I tell you about it?
(Bristow): Well, that sounds good to me. What is it?
Have you got the Wolfe Barry plan here? Yes, I see you have.
May I use it? … Here—you know all about it, of course—is the frontage proposed to be
acquired at Ernakulam. Do you know, however, that this is the most expensive site you
could possibly choose? Inhabited by all rich people of the town?
(Bristow): Is that really so? I did not know it.
Ah! I thought not. Well, here is my suggestion … . Buy this frontage, immediately south
of it. Here you have a much poorer class of people, fishermen and such-like. The land
will be cheaper and you will avoid all the trouble which will inevitably arise if you try to
turn the best of Ernakulam into a wharf.40
The lobbying was successful, and it was determined that it was feasible and economical
to displace the poor to make space for the project. The frontage of the port was built to
the south of Ernakulam instead of the more geographically viable Ernakulam itself. In
the case of Cochin port, it was the pressure from the local elites on colonial projects,
coupled with the ambitions of the colonisers, which resulted in the displacement of
the fishermen.
Three decades later, after Independence, a development project of the Indian state
along the shores caused the further displacement of the shore communities to the
fringes of the city (Figure 3).
Around 115 families of the shore communities, mostly Latin Catholics, had been liv-
ing on the shore south of the port.41 Many of them were kudikidappukar (tenants) of
landlords such as the Syrian Christian Kochouseph. Vincent, a Latin Catholic tenant of
Kochouseph, remembers that they were supposed to look after the landlord’s land
round the year.42 They could take five coconuts every time the coconuts were plucked
once every two to three months. They were also supposed to give ‘kazscha’ (literally
meaning ‘vision’, here it means compulsory gift-giving) annually to the landlord,
mostly in the form of harvest from the land such as the best bunch of plantains (paz-
hakkula). Eighty percent of the landless tenants were Latin Catholics, and the rest were
Ezhava, along with four Syrian Christian, Araya and Dalit families.43
The tenants’ future was uncertain after the construction of the Cochin Shipyard was
announced. They were informed about their imminent displacement, but there was no
information about how or when this would be. The land required included the

40. Bristow, Cochin Saga, 116.

41. While records show the number of displaced tenants as 115, there are around 200 displaced families residing in
the relocated area of the city.
42. Vincent, Ernakulam, interviewed by the author, August 1, 2017. The names of all the interviewees have been
changed to protect the research participants.
43. Ezhava is a lower-caste group who are administratively grouped among the Other Backward Classes. Arayas are
fishermen who come under the Other Eligible Classes category.
10 C. CHRISTY K.J.

Figure 3. Cochin Shipyard construction site, 1973. The dry dock of the yard is indicated in the pic-
ture with a dark spot. As per the collected accounts, the Varavukad church must have been located
closer to the dock. The neighbouring land of the Cochin Shipyard site in this photograph is full of
trees and wetlands in contrast to the previous Google Earth image, which shows more concrete
structures around the yard. Source: Cochin Shipyard Ltd Archives.

Varavukad church, a spiritual abode for the local Latin Catholic families in the area
(Figure 4).
The community was particularly reluctant to leave the cemetery attached to the
church where their forefathers were buried.44 More importantly, there was no promise
of compensation for the church and the shore neighbourhood they were to leave
behind. The place they were eventually relocated to is now marked as a working-class
colony in the heart of the newly organised city.
Spatially, they occupy a part of the city, but that space was stigmatised as it was known
that they were a community of converted lower-caste fishermen who were relocated for
development. Their eviction and relocation inland profoundly transformed their occupa-
tion and ways of living. These transformations are marked and sustained through eco-
nomic and spatial cultural codes that continue to demarcate their lower-caste social
status. The spatial arrangement of the city therefore retains the memories and lived expe-
riences of the material and cultural development that communities underwent in relation
to their religious and caste lives. The next section demonstrates how the conversations

44. Mary, Ernakulam, interviewed by the author, July 12, 2018; also see Leonard John Chakkalakkal, ‘Perumanoor St.
George Parish: A Brief History’, in 275th Anniversary Celebrations Souvenir of the St. George Church (Perumanoor,
Cochin, 2018): 38–45; 41.
 SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES 11

Figure 4. Varavukad church, 1674–1972. The transition of the space mentioned in the photograph
of the ship becomes more apparent when compared with this picture of the Varavukad church.
The documents of the church dating back to 1674 show that it may have been built several deca-
des before that. The junction before the road to the church from Old Thevara Road was known as
Kurishumukku (literally translated as the Cross Junction). The road from the nearby railway line to
the erstwhile church is still known as Kurishupalli Road (Cross Church Road). Even though the
church is long gone, traces of its existence, although they go largely unnoticed, remain in the
names of places. Source: Cochin Shipyard Ltd Archives.

about development and religion were conflated in the stalemate of the eviction of the
shore communities and their church as well as the ways in which the community mem-
bers remember their migration into the newly organised part of the city.

Shifting lives of space, religion, modernity

In 1965, Tamio, a consultant engineer from the Mitsubishi Heavy Industries of Japan,
announced that the location of Varavukad church was crucial for building the ship-
yard.45 The shipyard had to be built closer to the existing port. The church and its
premises to the south of the port was an ideal location for the shipyard. The life of the
shore communities was intricately woven into the life of the 400-year-old church. The

45. Mitsubishi Heavy Industries of Japan signed an agreement for a technical collaboration in February 1965: see
The Hindu, April 29, 1972: 12.
12 C. CHRISTY K.J.

state government, which was in charge of the land acquisition, technically did not have
the authority to acquire a religious institution. The stalemate between the church,
parishioners and the state therefore reached a roadblock: if the land could not be
acquired, the location of the shipyard would have to be moved to another state. The
Varavukad church owned almost an acre of land, the official records of which date
back to 1674. The parishioners lived in the area around the church.
The church played a significant role in the economic and cultural life of the Latin
Catholic parishioners. As tenants of a rich Syrian Christian landlord, they did not tech-
nically own any land, but were living off the produce of the land and the shores. K.M.
Roy, a well-known Malayalam journalist, was one of the young leaders at that time. He
took a leading role in negotiating the land acquisition with the church and the state.
Roy notes about the tenants, ‘[T]hey were people without work or their own land living
there … ’.46 Joseph, one of the evictees from the land who lives in the newly formed
colony in the city, reminisces about their life in Perumanoor:
I was born there, so was my mother and her grandparents as far as all of them
remembered. My father used to work in the Thevara College printing press which was
owned by missionaries. When he lost his job as he was a communist, he started working
at Scholar Press run by writer and politician Annie Thayyil. When this press was also
shut down, he joined a construction site as a manual labourer in Madras till he was
paralysed after a fall at the work site. Many of us used to do fishing in our free time as
children and some grown-ups used to weave fish nets and venture into the waters
for fishing.47
Many similar accounts of the inhabitants of Perumanoor demonstrate their lives in
poverty, inconsistent work and their close ties as well as disagreements with the church
and the shore.48 Most of them were not educated beyond the primary level due to their
economic and social status in the intersecting hierarchies of class, caste and religion.
The proposal that they vacate their land was not welcomed with enthusiasm by the
community as the land had become synonymous with their lives, rituals and work.
Despite their poverty, their homes, land and the shore were crucial for them to make
meaning of their lives; as Appadurai notes, homes always ‘carry a trace of the human
need to expand the meaning of human life by association with elementary forms of
shelter’.49 Moreover, the churchyard promised a place to rest after death, providing
meaning to their lives as periodical visits to the cemetery to pray for their dead forefa-
thers was an important thread tracing their faith through life and death.
It is in this context that the Varavukad church and the cemetery became a central
point of discussion in the land acquisition for the Cochin Shipyard. The following is an
excerpt from a memoir by Dr. Alexander Vadakkumthala, who was the parish priest at
the time of vacating the church and the cemetery:
It was impossible to imagine leaving the Church and the cemetery which was almost
400 years old where life and sweat of the people were intermeshed with the land.

46. K.M. Roy, Ernakulam, interviewed by the author, June 12, 2018.
47. Joseph, Ernakulam, interviewed by the author, June 10, 2018.
48. Ajantha Subramaniam discusses the close, yet complex relationship between the church and the Catholic
fisherfolk along the Kanyakumari coast: Ajantha Subramaniam, Shorelines: Space and Rights in South India
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010).
49. Appadurai, The Future, 116.
 SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES 13

Finally, people of the parish agreed for the ultimate sacrifice considering the
opportunities for progress, employment opportunities for the youth and economic
progress of the nation … . With some government contribution and other resources, new
land for the church was allotted in the field near the cremation ground for Hindus.
Many were dissatisfied with the church being established near the cremation ground of
Hindus. As there were no other options, the construction of the cemetery and the
church started and it was rechristened as ‘Ambikapuram’ Church. Once Ambikapuram
Church was built, we left from the Varavukad Church in the form of a procession. That
scene of departing from the land where people had lived and were emotionally and
spiritually rooted for four centuries was heart-breaking. Many cried inconsolably. People
kissed the soil of the cemetery and the Church; some took a handful of soil in their
hands … . That’s how we vacated our land for the larger good of the nation.50
As leaving the cemetery behind was seen as losing a part of the community, one of
the ways in which they came to terms with it was by digging the land till six feet down
and transferring all the soil they dug up into the new Ambikapuram cemetery
(Figures 5 and 6).51
They considered it as taking their forefathers’ remains with them to keep continuity
with their new life in another place. The place and the soil were essential for them to
keep in touch with their past. Despite a centralised format in its practices, rituals and
faith, incidents like this one indicate that Catholicism, as a lived religion, does accom-
modate cultural and social rituals that sometimes decentralise and spatialise religion in
relation to the territories on which it lives. This spatialisation of Catholicism in the rit-
uals of transition of the cemetery comes through in the memories of parishioners’
accounts of leaving Perumanoor and the church for an uncertain future in another
part of the city.
Job, an erstwhile occupant of Perumanoor, distinctly remembers that they had
stopped burying bodies at Varavukad cemetery six months before they transferred the
remains to Ambikapuram. The parishioners had already relocated to the two-room
houses provided by the government by the 1970s, but it took longer for the church to
be relocated. A new church and cemetery had to be built. Construction of the shipyard
had already started by this time. However, the believers had permission to visit the
church inside the shipyard premises till it was razed in 1972. The new church at
Ambikapuram was ready by then.52

The afterlife of the cemetery in Cochin Shipyard

Space exists in the lives of people who occupy it as material, cultural, affective and pol-
itical entities. The parishioners started going to the new church in Ambikapuram by
January 1972.53 Cochin Shipyard began its operations. The land where the cemetery

50. Alexander Vadakkumthala, ‘Cochin Shipyard and Varavukad Church’, in 275th Anniversary Celebrations Souvenir
of the St. George Church (Perumanoor, Cochin, 2018): 57, my translation of the excerpt from Malayalam.
51. Job, Ernakulam, interviewed by the author, July 11, 2018; Leonard John Chakkalakkal, Ernakulam, interviewed
by the author, July 15, 2018.
52. The state government allotted a new piece of land for the church in its current location after several years of
negotiation. The church was built with the resources from the church as the government only agreed to
provide the land: for more details, see Chakkalakkal, Perumanoor, 41.
53. Chakkalakkal, Perumanoor, 42: ‘Though the Church was inaugurated on 16 January 1972, the new cemetery was
dedicated for service only on April 2, 1973’.
14 C. CHRISTY K.J.

Figure 5. Procession after leaving the shore, 1972. This evocative photograph shows the last pro-
cession carrying the remains from the Varavukad church cemetery to the newly built church in
Ambikapuram. This is noted as an emotionally and spiritually crucial moment for the people of the
land as it signified their move from the shore to the new space as well as their leaving their sacred
spiritual abode behind. The procession is led by the senior members of the parish (kombreriakkar)
holding the ceremonial umbrella, parish cross and candle-stands, followed by children. This photo-
graph is also a historical edict of the urban life of the early 1970s with the police in their khaki
shorts and boots, the public transport bus and the children without footwear. Source: Cochin
Shipyard Ltd Archives.

stood was being rebuilt into a dry dock (a contained space within which water can be
retained or drained as required for ships to enter and be repaired) for the shipyard.
Despite the apparent mechanisation of the land, the parishioners sought to maintain
their relationship with the old Varavukad cemetery in the form of stories while many
myths and stories started circulating in the larger society as well.
Literature, stories and myths provide what formal histories cannot always offer—a
leap beyond the recognised reason and logic, a disposition that accommodates the
unexplainable excess of human lives. The displacement of the shore communities
found little space in the formal history of the city. However, stories and myths keep
this memory alive in different forms in the public sphere. The erstwhile cemetery was a
site of the community’s historical connection to the land and their ancestors whose his-
tory was otherwise not recorded elsewhere. So it was also a historical and affective
thread of their being that was lost for the members of the community in this transition.
While some of the interviews capture the affective meanings of the transition for the
community, an analysis of vernacular literature portrays the erstwhile religious site as a
place of revengeful ghosts.
 SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES 15

Figure 6. Procession after leaving the shore, 1972. The women’s section of the procession illus-
trates the sombre mood of the event. The woman walking first on the right side of the lane can
be seen holding her right hand to her face as if she were still processing the departure from her
land. This picture also gives glimpses of the traditional clothes of the Christian women of those
times. The elderly woman in the second position on the left line can be seen wearing a chatta
(blouse) and a mundu (a long piece of white cloth wrapped around the waist) and a mekkamo-
thiram (a thick golden ring earring worn on top of the earlobes). The separate sections for women
and men indicate the continuing gendered display of piety and politics in urban spaces. Source:
Cochin Shipyard Ltd Archives.

One such story is particularly compelling in this context. Set in the 1970s,
‘Kappalshaalayile Pretham (Ghost in the Shipyard)’ is a short story by Vadayar Sasi
who worked as an engineer in the Cochin Shipyard from the early 1970s.54 Taken from
the 2010 book, Abhilashnagarile Ayalkkar (Neighbours of Abhilash Nagar), the story
narrates how workers clearing the cemetery to build a dry dock for the shipyard are
attacked by the cemetery’s vengeful ‘ghosts’. Here is an excerpt which narrates the
clearing of the cemetery:
I was the team leader of the construction activities of the new Shipyard. Dry-dock was
to be built in a suburb (velimpradesham) that included a cemetery. Wooden crosses that
bore the round letters ‘Rest in Peace’ were covered by wild creepers. Our team cleaned
that expansive piece of land. We uprooted colonies of wild creepers. We cut down the
wild trees. Destroyed the grave stones. We removed the remains of foul-smelling dead
bodies from their graves.
The moist wind from the Arabian Sea swallowed the stench and flew away … .55

54. Vadayar Sasi, ‘Kappalshaalayile Pretham (Ghost in the Shipyard)’, in Abhilashnagarile Ayalkkar (Neighbours of
Abhilashnagar) (Kottayam: Current Books, 2010): 58–68.
55. Sasi, Kappalshaalayile, 59, my translation of the excerpt from Malayalam.
16 C. CHRISTY K.J.

The form and content of this part of the story is laid out in such a manner that it cre-
ates the ambience of a wild grave that was tamed by force. The grave seems abandoned
and ready to be cleared. The ritualistic presence of the forefathers’ remains in the grave
in the earlier section can be contrasted with how they become decayed bodies in the
story. While the grave symbolised the continuity of the life-cycle to the believers, the
aspiration for progress is depicted as made possible through a deliberate discontinuity
and othering of that space. The transformation of the land of the people to the aban-
doned land of this space may be read as how this space had to be reshaped from a
space of the unknown wild into the familiar by forcibly taming it.
The story narrates how the ghosts were angered at being removed from the graves
and attacked a driver. The driver details his experience: ‘I have heard that there were
ghosts here even before. A young woman who died in a car accident was buried here.
The car she was driving hit a truck and she died. Today is Friday. Ghosts come out on
Fridays’.56 The transition from a religious site occupied by the Latin Catholic believers
to a modern space hosting sophisticated technology to repair and make ships was
riddled with ruptures as well as continuities—rupture of the aura of that space as
sacred into something that marks modernity and progress in development linguistics.
This was not a smooth break. The grave returns as a wild presence to be feared even
amidst all the technology and machines that epitomise successful scientific advances.
The ‘ghosts’ analogise the past life of this space which seems to haunt the present. The
new modern life of the space is made possible through a continuity of the ‘othering’ of
the unknown ‘native’, as ‘ghosts’. The fear of the ‘ghost’ is about the fear of the
unknown other, who in this case is the relocated ‘native’. This is made clearer in the
narrative as the story progresses:
I was travelling sitting on a wooden bench in the train one day. I heard a stranger
narrating this story. The Cochin Shipyard is possessed by ghosts. The devil drives the
jeep from below the dock to the road above. Then, it pushes the jeep down to the dock
and goes on shouting. Some engineers who were in the jeep are seriously hurt and are
admitted to the hospital. The reason for this attack is the ghosts’ resentment in
constructing the dock in their land. Astrologers and shamans predict that there will be
41 deaths if they continue constructing the dock in this place.57
The material landscape often lives through its social past and is subverted by belief
systems and myths. The dissatisfied ghosts in the story are proprietorial about their
space. The narrative of ghosts attacking the driver as well as the astrologers’ prediction
that 41 people would die from their attacks indicate the revenge of the uprooted
‘ghosts’. A close reading of the story in context reveals how ‘displacement’ and unjust
management of the other in the creation of a modern space is haunted by the
unspoken fears of the project of modernity. The writer recounted in his conversation
with me in April 2019 that he penned the story based on a real-life accident in the
dock and a conversation he overheard while travelling back to his home in southern
Kerala from the shipyard by train in the 1970s. Even after decades of eviction, the
cemetery remained as a wild presence within the shipyard and in public memory, as
the writer remembers.

56. Sasi, Kappalshaalayile, 63.

57. Sasi, Kappalshaalayile, 65.
 SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES 17

The evicted shore communities who accepted the state government’s offer still live
in the meagre three and a half cents (1524.460 square feet) of land allocated to each
family, about a kilometre and a half away from the newly built Ambikapuram church.58
Over time, they have settled down in their new homes. Now there are several families
on these small plots of land as their children have started families but found it difficult
to afford land for themselves in another part of the city. Had the government not
offered the land to the tenants, it would have been the responsibility of the landlord
under the Kerala Land Reforms Act, 1969.59 The Syrian Christian landlord was not
only saved from this responsibility, but the Kerala government also compensated him
for the land occupied by the shore communities, including the Latin Catholic tenants.60
This incident was another example of how land reforms, which were meant to abolish
centralisation of property in the hands of traditional caste landlords, were actually sub-
verted to protect their interests more than the interests of the landless lower-
caste tenants.
The new locality to which the earlier tenants were relocated is known by the informal
name of ‘Shipyard Colony’. The word ‘colony’ is used in the current socio-cultural dis-
course in Kerala with a degrading connotation to refer to the clustered houses offered
by the government to landless Dalit, tribal and lower-caste communities. Thus, in the
heart of Kochi, there is another working-class colony of the former shore-dwellers, who,
despite their displacement from the littoral, are still ‘peripheral’ to the city’s existence.
The city space is saturated with meanings of social relations and hierarchies despite its
centrality on the geographical map. This also highlights the need to analyse the city as a
geographical space produced, experienced and perceived through social relations and
connections as well as physical fabric and infrastructure.
The meaning and life of a place is inscribed by different stakeholders through
diverse frames. A narrative about the eviction written by the then parish priest, Dr.
Alexander Vadakkumthala, mentioned in the previous section, as well as other writ-
ings, mention the ‘supreme sacrifice’ of the parishioners for the progress of the nation.
This is very much in tune with the prevalent discourse of development which espouses
the need to sacrifice for the larger good of nation-building. However, some of the pre-
vious inhabitants of Perumanoor, when I asked them about their displacement, remem-
bered their land more vividly as lush green land with coconut trees, mango trees,
jackfruit trees and their lives as intricately woven with the rituals related to the church
and the shore.
This contrasts with their new settlement, where there is not enough space for a tree
to grow in the congested premises. In addition, they did not possess ownership of the

58. Land is an important resource for marginalised communities even when they don’t have ownership over it.
They end up relying on the land for sustenance as the opportunities for jobs or other income are few. Several
organised political struggles such as the Chengara Land Struggle (2007), Muthanga Struggle (2003) and the 48-
day sit-in-strike (2001) by Dalits and Adivasis demanded cultivable land, which shows that the Land Reforms
Act did not result in redistribution of land: Sunny Kapikad, ‘Kerala Model: A Dalit Critique’, in No Alphabet in
Sight: New Dalit Writing from South India, ed. K. Satyanarayana and Susie Tharu (New Delhi: Penguin Books,
2011): 464–74.
59. The land reforms debate was introduced by the first democratically elected Communist government of Kerala in
1957, which was vehemently opposed by the land-owning groups.
60. While the total price paid to the landowners was Rs170 lakh (Rs17 million), the resettlement scheme for the
115 tenants was estimated to cost Rs5.42 lakh (Rs500,000)!: The Hindu, April 20, 1972: 8.
18 C. CHRISTY K.J.

Figure 7. The launching of MV Rani Padmini, the first ship from the Cochin Shipyard, July 24,
1981. The rolling out of MV Rani Padmini was a celebratory moment for the company and the city.
It was completed almost a decade after the yard started its operations. This was also a symbolic
moment in the transition of space from a lived one to a fully equipped, machinated one. Source:
Cochin Shipyard Ltd Archives.

new land from the time they moved there in the 1970s until 1993. Though they were
not tenants of landlords any more, they had to wait for another two decades to obtain
ownership of their relocated land from the state. A change from the shore to another
part of the city brought different forms of marginalisation and challenges such as find-
ing new work and so on. Nevertheless, their lives and conversations are also about the
promise of change, as many of them are today associated with the shipyard as manual
labourers. Even so, they say that the tallest crane that they can see from their houses,
which bears the name of the Cochin Shipyard, reminds them of belonging in a place
and a shore they never owned and a new life in the heart of the city where they have
been attempting to cultivate belonging (Figure 7).

Conclusion
A place of living exists both as tangible, in the form of the built environment, and the
intangible, as a home which is the site of memories, life and transition. Space is also
the site on which development projects rest, which bring displacement and marginal-
isation alongside ‘progress’. This paper, while constructing a post-Independence history
of development-induced displacement, also captures the experience of transition for
 SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES 19

the shore communities. Their narratives reflect not just a sense of loss and spatial
injustice, but also their aspirations for becoming part of the developing city, a dream
which has faded in recent years. Though their displacement is nearly forgotten in the
official history of the city, I have shown that the circulation of stories in the form of
myths and literature leaves traces of the incident by depicting the ancestors of the erst-
while inhabitants as ‘revengeful ghosts’ and the religious site as a ‘dreaded’ place. Thus,
the paper brings out the interconnected narratives of the unjust distribution of space
for the lower-caste shore communities and their memories of the place, which are still
a recurring theme in their conversations, as well as the mythical narrative of their
‘revenge’ in popular culture. In the paper, space remains as a crucial analytic to under-
stand the dynamic exchange between religion, caste, state and urban ‘development’ as
well as to consider multiple meanings and responses to displacement in urban
space-making.

Acknowledgments
I wish to express my gratitude to the two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments
as well as to Dr. Kama Maclean, editor of South Asia, for helping me through revisions of the
article. I would also like to thank Dr. Malcolm McKinnon for his suggestions on an earlier
draft of the paper and the senior residents of Shipyard Colony for sharing their endless
resource of knowledge about Kochi with me.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).