This chapter examines the longest and most developed road in the
Maldives archipelago, a fifteen-kilometre-long link road connecting
four islands of the Laamu (or Haddummati) Atoll. In the planning phase,
there were tensions between those who argued that the road should
connect houses to the school and the mosque and those who argued
that the road should connect the harbour to the market. Such appeals,
bifurcated along gender lines, reflect local mobility concerns and were tied
to existing political rifts between the four islands that were intensified by
the appearance of a new infrastructural asset. The built road facilitates a
multitude of local encounters as people travel further and more regularly,
but it is also through the road that islanders encounter the global forces
of capital and construction that shape their islands. The Laamu link road
was a ‘gift’ from the Chinese government, constructed by the Jiangsu
Transportation Engineering Group (JTEG), and amidst local mobility
concerns and inter-island politics swirl rumours and hearsay of land grabs
and international power struggles between China, India, the US, and
Saudi Arabia. This chapter, as well as being an ethnographic exposition
of Chinese infrastructure development in a South Asian archipelago,
explores the road as a social experience as it crosscuts competing visions
of modernity, global connectivity, and anxiety about material change on
remote coral atolls in the Indian Ocean.
