Mohamed Shafeeq Karinkurayil, Gulf Migrant Archives in Kerala: Reading Borders and Belonging (Oxford University Press, 2024).
Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?
Mohamed Shafeeq Karinkurayil (MSK): For some time now, I have been intrigued by the attribution of silence to the Gulf migrants from Kerala regarding their actual lives in the Gulf. As someone who grew up partly in the Dhafra region of Abu Dhabi and is from an extended family who had a significant number of its men working in the Gulf, this accusation of silence was puzzling for me. I grew up listening to the fantastic and tragic stories of the migrants, expressed in their letters home but also in other media, such as in popular Muslim songs (Mappila songs), roadside performances, and even some mainstream films. It got me thinking if this “silence” itself was a form of expression with varied ends, both on the side of the migrants as well as those left behind. That is, if the attribution of silence is due to historical factors, and if silence is actually an illegibility. This is how I came across the value of rumor as a paradigm to study the cultural expressions of the Gulf in Kerala. Because, in a rumor there is no authority offering it the guarantee of truth. At the same time, the rumor is a pleasurable exercise because of both the sense of being privy to a secret but also of being the victim whose truths can only be expressed in this particular form.
Once I considered this as a hypothesis, it made a lot of sense to me not only why the articulate Gulf migrant is still understood to be silent, but also why the narratives on the Gulf tend to be mostly exaggerated and fantastic—because rumor as a paradigm had its own principles. And rumor could also explain the way in which migrants could themselves relate to each other. Once rumor was established for me as the paradigm, it was logical to think of borderland as the topos in which rumor is operated. Here, I connect the nebulousness of rumor to the uncertainties of the borderland, and in a counter-intuitive way, in the sense that while borders are usually understood to be clear demarcations, I borrow from recent scholarship such as Thomas Nail and Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Nielson and treat borders as zones of selective passability.
The next step was to understand the historical context in which speech had to take such a form itself, and here I found the answers in the role that the Gulf played in disturbing the operations of caste in Kerala on the one hand, and the imposition of ethnic ghettoization and the complicity of migrants in the exploitative migrant labor system in the Gulf on the other.
The second and overarching objective of the book was to explain the persistence of the notion of “silence” despite the evidence of the contrary.
J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?
MSK: The book looks at migrant photography, films, and literature through the prism of the border. The book had two objectives. First, there was the need for a book that would introduce its readers to the many forms of cultural expression to which Gulf migration in Kerala has given rise. Benyamin and Deepak Unnikrishnan are rightly celebrated globally, but there is by now a significant oeuvre of Gulf writing in Malayalam that remains largely unknown outside the language, and it is important to speak about it. Similarly, migrant photographs are the most prolific of representation of the Gulf life but have been mostly ignored in academic and mainstream cultural analysis.
The second and overarching objective of the book was to explain the persistence of the notion of “silence” despite the evidence of the contrary. The border as a method was put to work as an operation through which the Gulf migrants maintain exclusive zones of meaning while also translating their experience to universality. It had to show selective passability that certain frames, words, gestures were performing. In the process, the book also explains the lure of the Gulf migration phenomenon itself. That is, you are missing out on the attraction of the Gulf if you think only of the economic element. In a way, silence is at the heart of the Gulf phenomenon—not in the conventional way, that migrants hide their agonies from future migration aspirants, but that the Gulf gave rise to competing knowledges, some as realistic expectations and others as pleasurable possibilities.
J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?
MSK: In the past, I have focused my research on the intangibles of the Gulf-Kerala migration phenomenon. As part of this I have looked at the power of Gulf aspirations in changing Kerala, the possibilities of intimacy in the face of ethnic divisions, the modes of belonging among Gulf migrants, the memory of migrations, and so on. This book continues to explore the ineffable affectiveness of Gulf migration.
What is new in Gulf Migrant Archives in Kerala is the frame of the border itself. Here, the book is darker, as opposed to the sunshine and breeze and mirth I brought into my previous works. It is dark because the idea of the border is also premised on the complicity of the migrant in the oppressive system of labor contracts and the insecurities that the dependence on migration brings into the affective configuration of Kerala. Borders are about imperceptible insides and outsides, and doubtful loyalties. What we have here is a somber reconsideration of the operations behind the vocal “silence” that characterize the Gulf migration in Kerala.
J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?
MSK: The book builds upon existing academic scholarship and is written with academic protocol. The use of the border as a method involves some close reading of primary texts, varied as they are in media and genre, and in each case I have used medium-specific readings. The book is aimed at scholars of migration studies, cultural studies, memory studies, area studies, and so on. At the same time, I am hoping that any general reader will be able to pick up the book and read through the pages and find it engaging. I have tried to write it in a narrative fashion and to give adequate context and occasional anecdote to keep engaging the reader.
J: What other projects are you working on now?
MSK: The book concludes with a discussion on the need to preserve the archives of migration. In a way this is ironic, because I am asking to preserve what is considered the silent era of the Gulf migration in Kerala. Today, there are indeed a lot of narratives. Logically, then, I am now looking to take the first steps towards such a preservation, involving public participation.
Excerpt from the book (from the Introduction, pages 12 to 16)
Gulf migration has been credited with being the most important single factor which contributed to the reduction of unemployment, the alleviation of poverty, and redistribution of wealth in Kerala since the 1970s. The early migrants to the Gulf were mostly drawn from the economically and socially deprived, and migration was understood to be one of the avenues of improving one’s social location. As Robin Jeffrey noted in 1992, “the ‘Gulf boom’ has in a sense provided the hope that politics held out in the 1940s and 1950s.” The wage differential involved in Gulf migration, that one can earn a lot more money in the Gulf doing an inferior job than many respectable jobs in Kerala, severed the link between occupation and remuneration. Migration bracketed one’s work while allowing its results to circulate in the public sphere. The migrant could now accumulate luxurious good around him. The Gulf is credited with being the source for the introduction or popularization of gadgets such as cassette recorders, still and movie camera, washing machines, etc. Conspicuous consumption and excessive spending in life-cycle rituals were strategies through which migrants from lower social orders try to better their social status in the face of the public back home.
While migration played an important role in the redistribution of wealth, it also drew its grammar and efficacy from the value system of a hierarchical society. The turn to religion as well as masculinity can be seen to the assumption of respectability. However, these strategies work only to a certain extent, as caste in a bounded society is not easy to shrug off from public memory. The Gulf had to contend with the local realities in Kerala which would not allow it to be a living reality, let alone a model for life.
The invisibility of production could also be read as the unavailability of a public discourse to speak about labour. The fact that the only way in which one’s profession could break into the public sphere, through unionization, was not a possibility in the case of the Gulf migrants because migration essentially did not fit into the existing logic of unionization, which is premised upon the (now unravelling) fit between the worker and the citizen. Migration brought about a break in this fit in that it divorced citizenship from labour. One belonged somewhere and laboured elsewhere. The invisibilization of the Gulf can therefore be read as the deprivation of a public language of rights to speak about the Gulf.
To return to the film we began this chapter with, Vilkkanundu Swapgnangal, which referred to Dubai as a rumour—the film begins with a group of men finding their way to Khor Fakkan on a small dhow. These means of arriving at the Gulf was undocumented. Typically, the migrant of the late 1960s reached the Gulf outside the state’s ambit. They travelled without documents and reached a land which had not yet attained its present political contours. The state as the trainer and the protector of the Gulf migrants was not so in the case of these early migrants. The state was a rumour. This break between the state and labour made the Gulf a public secret in that it did not fall under the domain of a public discussion. As far as the state and the civil society discourse which was tied to the state were concerned, the Gulf migration did not exist.
This privatization of the Gulf in the public sphere of Kerala meant that while Gulf is much spoken about, it is spoken about as if it is a private affair. This was a genre of speaking as if in private, and not really a discourse which was confined spatially to the public sphere (say, in the private confines of one’s home). An important aspect of this privatization is how the effects of Gulf, when inhabiting the genres of the private, can take on idioms and tropes that would be considered irrational as public talk, but has force in the public as occulted knowledge precisely because it belongs to the private. These idioms and tropes tried to explain the almost miraculous mobility that was made possible by the Gulf. The migrant who found a treasure, the Arab rich man who gave his everything to a migrant because of immense trust, as well as the fabulous characters of the wise Arab, the terribly cruel Arab or the incredibly stupid Arab are all part of this private talk, and so are the fabulous cunning migrant, the sincere-to-death migrant, the thieving migrant, the all-sacrificing migrant as well as the migrant who would sell his very own people to Arab lust. The Gulf was, basically, a genre considered private, with all its force, emotions and affect, but devoid of a public language other than that of remittance. It was part of this very privatization of the Gulf that Gulf became a space of exaggeration in Kerala—that everything in the Gulf is better and bigger (‘our puttu is this much, but in the Gulf their puttu is this much’, the street narrator would say and gesture the wide expanse with his hands to show the bigness of it, that people travel there in planes like we do in buses, etc.).
These conditions gave rise to paradoxical forms of visibility for the Gulf. On the one hand, the Gulf as a source of remittance allowed one to try their hand at cultural citizenship. The developmental thrust along governmental lines together with communitarian mobilization in politics meant that the Gulf money came to be invested in Kerala as community capital for projects such as schools, colleges, and hospitals, and such funding were made possible in the Gulf through organization along communitarian lines, such as in the case of Kerala Muslim Cultural Centre, which is affiliated to the political party Muslim League which is influential among the Muslims of Kerala. At the same time, as a place of labour with its own experiences, the Gulf had to occupy a private genre of discourse in Kerala, as all professions devoid of unions were. The occupational struggles of the Gulf migrant worker did not find a channel in Kerala. The migrant’s tears, sweat, dreams, miseries, were all private affairs. As far as the public sphere was concerned, the Gulf was a source of remittance alone.
This excerpt from The Gulf Migrant Archives in Kerala: Reading Borders and Belonging by Mohamed Shafeeq Karinkurayil has been published with permission from Oxford University Press.
