ABSTRACT
'On the seashore of endless worlds children meet', wrote Indian poet and Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore, tagging a sense of hope to an ominous time and place. As liminal places, shores require careful handling to convey the exceedingly dense layers of meaning that they accrue. Significantly, the animals are killed through shore-based practices modelled after traditional forms of 'fishery' that once centred on marine mammals. Rujen is presented as compelled by larger forces to kill a cetacean in equally messy circumstances, and with no sense of malice toward the animal. Killing cetaceans is not presented as economically necessary or as environmentally viable, but rather as a site of botched relations specific to coastal communities, a powerfully contested shoring on shorelines. Far from glamourising or otherwise promoting whale and dolphin killing, they are presented as individuals making political decisions who struggle with obligations to living and dead members of communities as well as to places to which they are tied.
