This post builds on the research article ““Do they do our thozhil?”: Toxic Industrialization, Uncertainty, and Refusal in North Chennai” which was published in the August 2025 issue of the Society’s peer-reviewed journal, Cultural Anthropology.
In this interview, Rishabh Raghavan discusses his encounter with everyday life in Ennore, as residents contest authoritative discourse on pollution and toxicity, assert their ties to place and livelihood, and live between loss and aspiration. He reflects on moments when his interlocutors challenged or redirected his inquiries, which served as important lessons in doing fieldwork within uneven spatial histories and representing the experience of environmental harm.
Poornima Rajeshwar (PR): Your article offers a rich and layered account of refusal as a way to understand how the people of Ennore, and more broadly industrialized regions of North Chennai, relate to toxic industrialization and urban marginality. You show how residents contest dominant narratives of toxicity—for instance, by refusing to accept that the fish are contaminated by industrial waste and therefore pose a health risk. You suggest that this denial is not simply a lack of knowledge but a deliberate stance against seeing their fishing practices as the locus of environmental harm, redirecting attention to the industries that have transformed Ennore’s waters. Could you elaborate on why you characterize this as a form of refusal, and how you distinguish between not knowing and refusing to know?
Rishabh Raghavan (RR): This is a great question. To be honest, all the questions that you’ve sent me are. The primary reason I found thinking with the scholarship on “refusal” very useful was because it gives credence to social, political, and epistemological modes of life that stem from a rejection of long-formed hierarchies embedded in something like the state/subject relation. In analyzing my material, I found that my fisher interlocutors vocalized stances of refusal to me fairly frequently. While at times partial and processual, and occasionally even contradictory, their refusal to cede to how Ennore was known, governed, and narrativized by others became the most powerful moments wherein they revealed how uncompromising they were about their ties to, desires for, and place in Ennore. Take the case of me bringing up the report about the contaminated fish. Pandian’s refusal to endorse the report became a moment wherein he refused to facilitate a discourse about Ennore that undid the fisher’s historical relationship to their home, skirted around the men’s livelihood that was central to that relationship, and sidestepped the fact that many more young men in the village desired to be fishermen in a place that was only becoming more and more industrial. He was refusing to know that the fish was contaminated because it was a story that required his consultation, if not simply a story that was his to tell. In turn, he quickly rerouted the conversation. The industries were polluting Ennore’s ecology and that’s the conversation he would like to have with me. In effect, he was telling me that was where I had to begin my conversation with him and perhaps then, he might have himself told me that he noticed perceivable changes (beyond just the size of their catch) to the fish.
PR: If refusal emerges in your article first as an epistemological and political stance, it also appears very concretely in your interactions in the field. When you were speaking with Pandian, his irritation at your questions about fish contamination revealed not only a refusal of official narratives about pollution but also unsettled your own assumptions as a researcher, including how you understood their area and the zone of industrial pollution. How did moments like this shape the unfolding of your fieldwork? Did they change your understanding of what the “field” was and how to study it? And how did they influence the way you came to see and represent environmental damage?
RR: This question really helps me unpack my previous response a little more. When Pandian refused to endorse the findings in the report I had brought up, he was in some ways refusing to engage with me. I, often uncritically, traversed the length of the city in a way that was possible only to me. I had the resources to do so, had the time to do so, and had—as many fishermen pointed out—the option of leaving Ennore anytime I desired. They, on the other hand, witnessed Ennore’s industrialization firsthand, took on the pollution that came with it, and worked hard at navigating the ruptures it created in their lives. And yet, it was me who was there attempting to narrativize Ennore’s pollution. I always gauged some apprehension towards my being there from the fishermen, even if there was a level of trust that was built between my interlocutors and me. To be honest, if you asked me then what it was that stood between the fishers and me, I couldn’t tell you. Over time, I started analyzing this emotive force that was always there and took cues from what I was being told to realize I was a part of something bigger, something more systemic that the fishermen were experiencing. I had no preset definition of the “field” per se, but found that my history of residing in Chennai—which in itself is an economic, social, and caste indicator—clashed in many ways with a deeply uneven spatial history of the city. In specific, I had the potential to reify boundaries, narratives, and perceptions that exasperated that unevenness, and the fishermen were not only wary about this but were also quick to challenge me. Why are you here? What are you going to say? Where do you live? All of these questions stay with me till date and have most definitely pushed me to consider my position when it comes to either studying or writing about environmental damage. They became the foundation to writing the article for instance, and have influenced my own politics greatly.
PR: Your interlocutors use thozhil to describe estuarine fishing as a traditional and inherited form of labor. Alongside this, other forms of work emerged—contract or permanent employment with state-owned and private companies, as well as the aspiration for what some called a “proper job.” How did your interlocutors navigate these different categories of work and livelihood? And how do these shifting ideas of work reveal broader changes in Ennore, both in material terms and in the meanings attached to labor?
RR: The meaning of work consistently shifted within conversations and were hard to pin down. Broadly, with the industrialization of the region, I found that the fishermen I interacted with were caught between wanting to persist with thozhil and thereby continue being fishermen in their home, and expressing some displeasure towards needing to dip into the contract market because they felt anxious about their prospects of being fishermen in a place that was only becoming more industrial. For instance, there was a day during fishing season where a fisherman had caught prawns worth INR 1.5 lakhs. I met Velu around that time and he was proud to tell me about it. It seemed to come as a reminder to Velu that thozhil could still be immensely profitable and rewarding even with the power plants enclosing the estuary. A month or so later, Velu spoke of how he wasn’t catching enough prawns. He blamed Ennore’s power plants and was convinced he’d have to take on contractual wage work very soon, meaning he’d have to not only do work he disliked but also be supervised by someone else. Those were the moments where his wish to be a permanent employee, a work opportunity he believed the state power generation company had to grant the fishers as compensation for the impediments the power plants caused their livelihoods, was at its strongest. In their oscillations between thozhil, contract work, and permanent work, I believe the fishermen were experiencing seasonal and material shifts in Ennore. Work became a way to mediate those experiences, putting into perspective who they were, where they were, and what was happening in Ennore. It seemed to stretch the fishermen in so many ways, really telling of how difficult it is to live with sustained toxic industrialization.
Acts of refusal shift shape and often end up mapping the contradictions of living in places undergoing toxic industrialization that also happen to be vibrant ecologies with long histories of labor.
PR: Building on what you describe about living with sustained toxic industrialization and its pressures on everyday life, I want to return to a central insight of your article: that refusal, even in the face of extreme harm and loss, is never absolute. The fishermen you worked with both reject certain framings of their lives—like being blamed for pollution—while also demanding state action, compensation, and infrastructural change. This creates a productive messiness about what exactly should change and how. Across the world, communities living amid toxic industrialization confront similar entanglements, where resistance and reliance coexist. How do you see this tension shaping our theoretical understanding of refusal? What does it reveal about the possibilities and limits of refusal as a way to think about toxic worlds, especially when people are at once opposing and seeking transformation from the very forces that harm them?
RR: That’s a great question. I guess it begins with an understanding that refusal is often contradictory, partial, and/or processual. Acts of refusal shift shape and often end up mapping the contradictions of living in places undergoing toxic industrialization that also happen to be vibrant ecologies with long histories of labor. Crucially, I believe beyond its theoretical potential, the scope of refusal offering methodological cues is something that needs to be taken a lot more seriously. Like I said, there were moments where the fishermen were refusing to entertain questions I asked because they were concerned about me furthering a particular discourse about Ennore that they found problematic. As a PhD student, those were difficult moments for me to process and make sense of. Yet, they pushed me to ask questions about myself, my research, and my politics for a long time. At that moment, it did reshape my methodology, as I fumbled with different answers to their questions about my research, occasionally being afforded a little more time to explain myself or even rephrase my questions. Slowly, and with much reflection, I began to see the wide scope with which refusal was deployed, in the process learning about how I could have been complicit in furthering the chemical violence that the fishers endured, and how I began shifting my position as a researcher to engage in a conversation that the fishermen found more equitable. In some ways, refusal also became the basis by which those who proximately engaged with toxic industrialization made allies and I think that’s an important way to approach thinking of and studying toxic worlds.