ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the transformation of international tourism in Kovalam from its inception as a hippie haven in the 1960s to its current status as a globalised tourist site for mass tourist consumption. It highlights the ways in which state discourses pertaining to international tourist development in Kerala have become increasingly embellished by neoliberalism and the ways in which this has adversely affected the local population. The chapter details the innovative response to neoliberal development by a group of young Scheduled Caste (SC) men who live and work in Kovalam. It discusses that as a result groups of local people in Kovalam are being forced to adopt underground and other illicit labour strategies in an attempt to etch out a living wage for themselves including a SC young men. The young men utilise forms of popular culture and global artifacts within their habitus to articulate a hybridised subcultural identity locally referred to as the beach boy.
