The subaltern port city and its streets: anticolonialism in and around the public spaces of Tuticorin, South India, c.1906–1908

In the first decade of the twentieth century, a group of Indian nationalists established the Swadeshi Steam Navigation Company (SSNCo) in the South Indian port of Tuticorin. Established to defeat the British imperial shipping monopoly from the port, the SSNCo was an attempt to establish an industrial-capitalist basis for a future Indian nation. The SSNCo spurred a wave of nationalist anticolonial agitation in Tuticorin and the surrounding district, with “swadeshi” slogans and activism becoming visible across the city and the district, industrial strikes in cotton mills, and, eventually, violent suppression of protest by the police forces of the Government of India. This paper uses these events to investigate two related avenues of historical research into port cities, firstly by arguing for increased recognition of the role of smaller port cities in the emergence of, and resistance to, European imperialism, and secondly, for more work on the “subaltern” aspects of social and political activity in the streets and public spaces of these port cities. By exploring the ways in which the SSNCo spurred spectacular and mundane changes to the urban form of Tuticorin, this paper enhances understanding of seemingly marginal colonial port cities as spaces of anticolonial agitation.