‘Ours Is a Species Adapted to Life on Water’: Land, Livelihood and the Peculiar Geography of Kuttanad, Kerala

Through a historical and ethnographic approach grounded in the rice-growing, low-lying region of Kuttanad in Kerala, this article traces threads of continuity between reclamation projects initiated in the British colonial period and the postcolonial construction of the Thanneermukkom bund in 1974. I argue that ideologies of agrarian settlement and technocratic intervention, set into motion under colonial capitalism, continue to confine the geography and ecology of Kuttanad’s water-saturated landscape, even as farmers and fisherfolk rely upon small-scale, collectivist techniques that emerge from the bottom up. When the history of agrarian cultivation and the flow of rivers is understood as mobile and dynamic rather than permanently settled or fixed, then solutions for climate adaptation in riverine ecosystems may seek to embrace principles of flexibility over control, aligning with—rather than seeking to master—the recurrence of seasons and cycles, such as the necessarily overflowing floods of the annual monsoons.