The Shape of Space

Not long after the fish kill that brought Ravindranath, Jaison, and many solidarity organizers to Gandhamur, participants in the campaign had a major clash with police in which many were injured. The police confiscated cameras and cell phones and deleted nearly all of the photos and video of the violence, but in the small amount of footage that remains, Action

Council members and solidarity organizers can be seen shouting, tussling, and ultimately fleeing side-by-side. This event brought a new wave of support from solidarity organizers. But

ultimately, it also heightened existing tensions in their collaboration with the Action Council.

The company, the police, labor unions, and some newspapers framed the violence as instigated by "extremists" (tīvravādikaḷ) from outside the village. Solidarity organizers demanded that the Gandhamur Action Council publicly refute these claims, especially after one politician close to Vijayan implied that they were true. But although Vijayan acknowledged these claims were false, he was not as vocal about it as solidarity organizers would have liked.

There are many ways one might interpret Vijayan's "silence" regarding these accusations, but many solidarity organizers later described this as the beginning of the end of the

collaboration. Some described Vijayan's failure to adequately refute these accusations as an intensely painful betrayal of their relationships with the local people. They acknowledged that they were outsiders (and many acknowledged being "extremists" as well), but they wanted Vijayan to affirm that locals and solidarity organizers had endured the blows of police batons together. In particular, they wanted him to stand up to the offending politician—who, like Jaison,

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was a member of the ruling party. For them, Vijayan's failure to correct this politician was taken as a sign that the local Action Council had, in fact, been hijacked.

Claims by campaign opponents about outsiders in Gandhamur exacerbated already existing tensions within the campaign. The conflict between insider and outsider perspectives had been primarily a conflict over aspects of the organizing process, but now it also became a conflict over how the campaign would position itself within a broader public discourse about insiders and outsiders in people's struggle. Claims about meddling outsiders in Gandhamur implicitly asserted a normative scalar configuration that circumscribed the legitimate

representatives of the people to particular locales, while non-localized mobilization was rendered

"extremist" and targeted for repression. Thus, an organizer's personal vision was not the only thing at stake in claims about the scalar configuration of purposes or roles; there were also tactical choices to be made, responding to other claims within a contentious political arena. And organizers were far from the loudest or most authoritative claimants.

The tactical implications of accusations by the campaign's opponents point to an additional reason that there is no single best way of scaling insider and outsider roles: scales of similar configuration can be employed to very different ends. In opponents' claims about outsiders, we have a normative scaling of "the local people" that is very compatible with nāṭ-centric organizing. Perhaps this is one reason that Vijayan did not make more effort to oppose these claims. But here, nāṭ-centric scales were turned against the campaign, threatening to isolate it from outside support, or even to undermine its legitimacy as a people's struggle altogether.

Because scales can be repurposed in such ways, decisions about the best scale cannot be made once and for all.

In this chapter, I have shown how insiders and outsiders in an environmental campaign

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were distinguished by different perspectives on the shape, the moral bent, of space. As we saw with Jaison and Ravindranath, different scalar perspectives can become a litmus test for sorting insiders from outsiders. But the same scales of value involved in insider/outsider distinctions can also be important to sorting legitimate campaigns from illegitimate. This makes the stakes in understanding potential conflicts in scalar perspective that much higher. Paying attention to scaling can help organizers to understand where others—both collaborators and opponents—are coming from and to assess the ethical and tactical implications of different ways seeing the world. For insiders and outsiders, understanding the other's point of view might not lead to any shared perspective, but it does offer a starting point for finding ways to work together.

Thus, we have seen how different evaluative frameworks entailed divergent approaches to organizing processes and tactics, ultimately making collaboration between solidarity

organizers and Action Council members unsustainable. Within this analysis, the activists' different scalar perspectives appear as one kind of causal force driving the pursuit of

environmental and social change. In the next two chapters, I follow the activists associated with Kēraḷīyam and the Gandhamur Action Council down their divergent paths, exploring how each creatively elaborated its particular understanding of people's struggle and sought to persuade others to join its cause.

My analysis begins, in the next chapter, with an analysis of the work of the magazine in constructing people's struggle as a publicly recognized and performable type of politics. I trace the trajectories of force that motivate activists associated with Kēraḷīyam to intervene in campaigns like the one in Gandhamur and to represent these campaigns as instances within a broader social movement. Thus, I give an account of how the scalar perspective of

"consciousness" presented in this chapter becomes so powerful for them.

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