Transverse Solidarity: Water, Power, and Resistance

Conceived as Transverse Solidarity, the Cola Quit Plachimada struggle in a rural hamlet in the Indian state of Kerala reveals how the socio-economic sustainability of communities is of as much importance as environmental, cultural, and political justification for a social movement and its success. The implicit theoretical notion is further enriched and elucidated by the ethnographic narration of a plurality of contested issues and struggles at multiple sites of power. The study addresses how a water-based subaltern movement gradually grew into transverse solidarity within the space between civil society and the state/governing institutions, politicizing them and consequently making allies of them, and how the discursive and material practices of structure-authorities and macro-power relations were contested.