After a clerical sanction prohibited them from fishing for a week, a group of Catholic fishers from a village on India’s southwestern coast took their church to court. They called on the state to recognize them as custodians of the local sea, protect their right to regulate trawling, and reject the church’s intermediary role. In this book, it is argued that the fishermen’s struggle requires a rethinking of Indian democracy, citizenship, and environmentalism. Rather than see these fishers as non-moderns inhabiting a bounded cultural world, or as moderns wholly captured by the logic of state power, the book illustrates how they constitute themselves as political subjects. In particular, it is shown how they produced new geographies—of regionalism, common property, alternative technology, and fisher citizenship—that underpinned claims to rights, thus using space as an instrument of justice.