Introduction: Port Environments in South Asia

Massive modern port projects across the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Ocean in the twenty-first century are where anxieties about the global economy, state sovereignty, and climate change converge. Interlinked container yards, automated coal terminals, and conveyor belts within fortified enclaves make up the stuff of megaports today. Many of these port projects are agents of a country's geopolitical aspirations: they promise trade alliances between nation-states through technologies of shipping and logistics. Others are also agents of securitization: they promise to fiercely protect state borders through mega-infrastructures that not only connect but also conquer the coast. Such political economic ambitions embodied by megaport projects rest on unprecedented capital and technology sourced from power domains that often cut across public and private sectors. Ports today are certainly conduits of trade in an interconnected world of commodity flows and supply chains. But they are more than just conduits of trade. They promise to enact nation-building projects via geopolitical expansion, they promise expanding frontiers of resource extraction across land and sea. Such scalar ambitions embodied by ports have transformative effects on the physical environment on which they are built. Port constructions engineer rigid boundaries between land and sea, rendering coastlines vulnerable to sea-level rise. Port operations generate effluents from imports like coal and oil that contaminate coastal environments, with devastating consequences for ecologies.¹ They generate debates about the future of the world, where futures of economic growth through technological revolutions in shipping and logistics clash with ecological collapse caused by such mega-infrastructures on already vulnerable coastlines.

This interdisciplinary special section enters such debates by focusing on ports in South Asia. The South Asian coastline, after all, is today a site of aggressive port development even as scientists project it to be an early victim of the rising sea. Aspirations for global supremacy intensify the push for ports across South Asia. They also enmesh these ports in complex and changing international relations. In the recent G-20 summit in New Delhi, for example, global leaders announced a rail and ports deal connecting the Middle East to South Asia.² US president Joe Biden argued that bridging ports across the two continents would lead to a “more stable, more prosperous and integrated Middle East.”³ The deal aims to move energy and trade from the Gulf to Europe by cutting shipping times, costs, and fuel. News reports note that this deal comes at a critical moment when Biden seeks to counter China's Belt and Road initiative by projecting Washington, DC, as an alternative partner and investor in global infrastructure for developing countries.⁴ South Asia's ports, therefore, are sites where emerging trade agreements aspire to connect the South Asian region to Asia and the Indian Ocean but also to Europe and America. They are sites where private players, nation-states, regional bodies, and foreign investors orchestrate complex complementary and competitive relationships. But these megaports also activate resource extraction in places like Australia, Africa, Russia, and the Middle East. Therefore, ports along South Asia's coastlines radically reshape ecologies in their immediate vicinity and across the Indian Ocean. Such contested futures between ecology and economy colliding on the South Asian coastline and rippling into the ocean propel us to unpack the past, present, and future of ports in the region. In so doing, we speak to broader concerns of climate justice, infrastructure development, and capital circulations that bind port environments worldwide.

Essays in this section collectively make an argument for studying port environments. Projected ecological disasters render the South Asian coastline especially vulnerable to climate change: they compel a deeper engagement with its port environments. In what follows, we explain what we mean by port environments—an approach or a conceptual framework we develop as scholars working across history, anthropology, cultural geography, and media studies. Our approach to port environments is firstly historically situated. That is, we situate the current push for ports in the historically sedimented processes that have shaped the production of port environments as we know them today. British colonialism, Indian Ocean trade, and princely states, as well as coastal development in the 1950s and 60s, are some of the many intersecting historical forces, essays in this volume consider to highlight “the durable, accretive nature”⁵ of port environments.

Located at the heart of the Indian Ocean region, South Asia's ports have long been active in regional and long-distance trade. Of all the monsoon systems in the world, Asia's monsoons have the most tremendous scale,⁶ with a direct consequence for just how busy the Indian Ocean trading region has been. Monsoon winds reverse directions twice a year in this region, resulting historically in a sharp intensity and frequency of comings and goings of sailing vessels at South Asia's ports. But beyond the monsoons, ports rose and fell across this vast coastline as a result of many factors. Political shifts, commercial reorientations, and ecological changes played critical roles in the region's rise and decline of ports. As David Ludden highlights in his essay in this issue, “A Spatial History of Seaports in South Asia,” before the nineteenth century, numerous ports dotted the coastline through which commodities moved. Commerce across South Asia, therefore, remained highly dispersed. The onset of British rule began to transform this scattered pattern of trade, especially from the mid-nineteenth century onward. During this period, associated with unprecedented technological developments like the rise of steam, the expansion of railways, and the mass production of manufactured goods, commerce came to be concentrated around a few chosen ports. These chosen ports also attracted the bulk of state investment. Preexisting ports that served as essential centers in Indian Ocean trade networks saw a dramatic fall in commercial fortunes under this new dispensation. Other ports like Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras emerged in their place. These newer ports were not just centers of trade; they played equally important administrative and financial roles. Many early histories of South Asian ports were, therefore, essentially concerned with unpacking political and socioeconomic developments through a study of these ports.⁷ Because these ports also became prime urban centers, they simultaneously emerged as essential sites for some of the first and most critical urban histories emerging out of South Asia.⁸ Through close case studies focused on specific port cities, South Asian historians highlighted the distinct forms of urbanism experienced in port cities, especially under colonial conditions.⁹ This port city paradigm quickly became entrenched as the most common and influential framework for historical scholarship on ports. This rich and penetrating body of scholarship has significantly advanced our understanding of processes like urbanization and its place-specific trajectories around the South Asian coastline.

But such a focus on port cities has meant that the “making” of ports themselves hasn't received much attention from historians. Scholarship seems to have largely taken for granted or ignored the processes through which actors built quays and jetties, dredged harbors, and constructed artificial islands along dynamic and volatile coastlines. Historians focused on the surrounding urban processes instead. However, the means through which points along coastlines were transformed into commercial hubs were anything but simple. From the mid-nineteenth century onward, particularly as industrialization revolutionized mobility worldwide, port development began to involve unprecedented mobilization of labor and capital and the extraordinary transformation of coastal environments. Calling attention to these developments, the essays in this special section examine port environments to highlight the ecological reconfigurations as well as the connected financial, technological, and legal transformations behind the making of ports. While this means departing from the port city framework in some respects, our focus on port environments does not preclude urban ecological processes and the creation of essentially unequal urban environments. We recognize that port infrastructures have consequences for the urban in multiple ways. For Nikhil Anand and Lalitha Kamath, for example, in their “Eviscerating the Sea,” “port environments” is a lens into how urban processes exceed the terrestrial confines of the city as these processes colonize the sea through many anthropogenic, historically situated developments—from port development to port redevelopment and expansion to offshore drilling—that worsens the lives of already marginal fisherfolk through exclusions and contaminations.

As port construction began to involve ever increasing amounts of financial investment and technological interventions in the late nineteenth century, it generated a significant hierarchy among the region's ports. During British rule, ports in South Asia were either classified as “minor” or “major.” Major ports were placed under the central government and attracted most of the state's attention. When India became independent in 1947, there were only five major ports in India, highlighting the concentrated pattern of trade that would characterize colonial rule. While independence would bring some changes by introducing a third category of intermediate ports, this colonial structure would largely persist. Both Devika Shankar's “A Harbor That Never Was” and Ludden's “A Spatial History of Seaports in South Asia” engage with the development and persistence of this hierarchy. Shankar highlights the structural factors that made it almost impossible for ports to transition to the status of a “major” port under colonial rule through a focus on an abandoned port development project at Tuticorin. Ludden highlights the lasting effects of this pattern. As he points out, by the turn of the twentieth century, the number of important ports in India had shrunk from fifty-two in 1841 to sixteen in 1914. With these big ports practically monopolizing investment in infrastructure development, this hierarchy continues to shape developmental trajectories down to the present day, including in the high-profile Sagarmala project initiated by the current Indian government as part of its push for “port-led development” where the emphasis is not only on port development; port projects are not just about shipping but about boosting growth through interlinked manufacturing and processing units and connected railway lines and highways.

While the legacy of colonial rule in shaping South Asia's ports is unmistakable, we must consider how the last few decades ushered political, financial, and technological changes that created significant departures from colonial patterns and hierarchies of port building. Globally, both neoliberalism and the logistics revolution¹⁰ exemplified by the rise of containerized shipping, have radically transformed ports and the instruments that finance them. The logistics revolution introduced fast-paced transformations in automatizing labor. It also accelerated the potential of integrating transport through new technologies like the standard shipping container.¹¹ The shipping container, by being a uniform shape and size, accelerated inter-modality or the possibility of seamless transfers across different modes of transport—road, railways, sea.¹²

In India, it was with liberalization in the 1990s that such technological and financial developments began to restructure port development concertedly. India's embrace of liberalization encouraged foreign direct investments and private sector participation in ports: it allowed state governments to garner technological and economic investments from a wider range of sources than before. In the 2000s, this encouragement was further reaffirmed through the Special Economic Zone (SEZ) Act. The act stimulated the expansion of ports into manufacturing, processing, and rapid connectivity through highways, terminals, and private railways.¹³ With the SEZ Act, both public and private port proponents and developers could potentially control swaths of coastal land for port-led development. They could lease these acquired lands to other corporate entities. These corporate entities could be contracted to expand the port's cargo-handling capacities as well as to support the development of industrial manufacturing and processing units within the megaport's expanding premises. Such political, financial, and technological changes in addition to spatial expansion stimulate ports, in the contemporary moment, to grow outside of already established, extensively built-up metropolitan cities that were once colonial presidencies. This means that port developments in small rural port towns like Mundra in the Gulf of Kutch, Western India, now compete with and have the potential to overshadow established ports like Mumbai, throwing up new questions for port environments in the twenty-first century.

Indeed, if the humble shipping container did more for international trade than any global trade policy—through its intermodality¹⁴— South Asia's tryst with the container may have begun around 1956 when the container was invented,¹⁵ but became more serious only after the 1990s and more so after the 2000s. Ludden notes how “container ports typically expand across open coast regions or move in old port peripheries.” Just as the port of New York relocated across the Hudson to Newark, New Jersey, with the emergence of containers that needed more space, in this issue, we see how containerization moves and expands the port of Bombay to newer parts of Bombay in the late 1960s (Anand and Kamath), and expands to sites whose maritime glories precede the late nineteenth century. In this way, it remakes newer parts of the South Asia coastline. Such is the uneven geography of South Asia's port development within a broader fabric of Asia as a space of transregional connections.¹⁶

These newer ports aspire to enter the same league as established ports like Singapore, Shanghai, Hong Kong, and other East Asian ports, which rose to prominence as containerized hubs through the nation-state's logic of territorial accumulation well before the 1990s (see Ludden). But it is essential to highlight that although such ambitious port development in South Asia may be rampant, it is still in its nascent phase. A case in point is that although the Mundra Port in Western India often supersedes the Jawaharlal Nehru Port in Mumbai in terms of trade-by-volume, it is the only port in South Asia that has made it to the list of the world's top fifty container ports.¹⁷ This is not simply a matter of empirical detail; it qualifies the hype around port development in South Asia. It allows us to ask what futures remain possible before containerized shipping reengineers the entire South Asian coastline.

Approaching this shifting landscape of ports in South Asia through a focus on port environments allows us to insert ecological dynamics into the recent critical scholarship on logistics seriously.¹⁸ Logistics, as we know, entails an integrated system of moving commodities through automated ships, container yards, oil pipelines, roads, and railways.¹⁹ Scholars highlight how materializing this system to ensure seamless flows rests on radically restructuring space and ceaselessly exploiting labor.²⁰ In this special section, we insert material physical environments into these insights on space and labor. We do so by focusing on the more than just the land–sea interface that grounds oceanic connections in the physical environments they transform. Our conceptualization of port environments includes muddy waters, tidal areas, creeks, shoals, and sand bars, as well as their shifting encounters with law, technology, and shipping. But it also includes surrounding dry lands and the sea where ports spread their tentacles through oil fields, resource prospecting, manufacturing and processing, railway lines, and land speculations.

Finally, by conceptualizing port environments as more than just the land–sea interface, we reiterate and remain invested in the wider political-economic and legal forces that become entangled in logistics (Shankar, Raman). For example, in “Eviscerating the Sea” Anand and Kamath show how port infrastructures transform fisher commons into zones of exclusions. But it is through a legal historical conversation that Bhavani Raman in “Muddy Waters: Coastal Property in India” highlights how such exclusion zones ironically rest on extending state protection onto coastlines. Turning the coast into a zone of accumulation seems to entail not only producing the coast as wasteland (Anusha), but also evading strong ownership titles to shores and waters by casting coasts as commons sheltered by the state (Raman). Ports are where agendas of the state meet the sea as a frontier of expansion, whether it be in the expanding imperial hubs of the nineteenth century or those of twenty-first-century South Asia (Ludden).

Simply put, “Port Environments in South Asia” allows us to move from intimate interactions with local ecologies to the underlying political and legal debates shaping the making and remaking of ports and coasts. Our approach to port environments is thoroughly historical. We consider the historicity of South Asia as it includes and extends beyond the land-sea interface to address material biophysical forces and the broader legal, political, and economic tensions that become enmeshed at the nexus of land and sea. Bringing together ethnographic and archival methods, this collection of articles probes the cultural and political desires and discontents entangled in port building and seeks to nurture alternative ways of inhabiting the coastline.

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