On global and multiple linkages in the making of an ordinary place: Parangipettai-porto novo

Abstract

This chapter is about a locality recognised as a town long before the colonial period: a historical sea-gate on the Coromandel Coast, known as Parangipettai today, but also as Porto Novo, Mohammed or Mahmud Bandar. With 25,000 inhabitants in 2011, it had remained a non-growth locality for half a century, a place that had fallen off the map of Indian liberal development. Nevertheless, behind a landscape of decay and ruin, dotted with 200 Sufi tombs, a lively network of circulation emerges beside a rich diaspora connected to an expanding Muslim community. It reveals complex ramifications of transnational trade, subaltern cosmopolitanism and intensive job circulation in South-East Asia and the Gulf monarchies, fuel flows and accumulations of wealth. An unbound town appears, with linkages throughout the Indian Ocean. Parangipettai is a relevant case for SUBURBIN as it questions, as many Indian localities could, the dominant metro-centric narratives and the prevalent conception of development as necessarily driven by urban concentration and a mechanical redistribution of wealth. Indian Ocean connections have been of great importance for over two centuries. Hence, the hierarchical model usually associated with the spatial and size distribution of cities does not apply here. Parangipettai is not a place of redistribution of banal activities, dependent on a chain of larger cities. Nevertheless, the business friendly developmentalist perspective can be seen in the implementation of a mega-power plant that will serve distant industrial needs and support the large cities’ access to a continuous electricity supply.