'Amphibious historiography': Reading samanth subramanian's following fish: Travels around the indian coast (2010) through the actor-network theory

Abstract

This paper explores Samanth Subramanian's travel writing collection Following Fish: Travels around the Indian Coast (2010) for its strength in establishing the significance of the human-non-human connection in the Indian coastline. Although a decade old, the work stands out even today for its strength in framing 'travel' from a non-terracentric point of view, as most travel writings have been often positioned. Subramanian's travel writing is an important departure from territorial historiographies via travel. His work traces the author's movement across India's coastal regions - the frontiers, as it were, of territoriality, literally following fish. Foregrounding a non-human subject as the travel writing's object of investigation, the paper deploys actor-network theory to analyze Subramanian's reconfiguration of the cultural imaginaries of India's coastlines via mobility thus reassembling the social of India's coastlines. His work, therefore, is argued to be an assemblage of the human and non-human actants creating a new water-based examination of socialities. Fish is the central node of his navigation of India's coastline assemblage, where he examines fish as food, as medicine, as commerce and as culture. By positing India's coastal regions as waterscapes to track movement of people, objects, and every day practices vis-à-vis fish, and moving in-land with the fish in some instances, Subramanian's work does not merely function as a commentary on the coastlines, but also emphasizes the need to interrogate mobility and travel across waterscapes.