Khadijah’s husband has been away in Dubai for 25 years. She lives with her two daughters, one of whom is pregnant, and whose husband is also working in the Arabian Peninsula in a shop as well as in a hotel; her second daughter is in school. Khadijah commented that she “had no experience of living together [with her husband]” since he left four months after marriage and saw his daughter for the first time only when she was 1.5 years old. Khadijah’s elder daughter’s husband also left four months after their marriage and she has not yet lived with her husband.
Khadijah’s experience of living apart from her spouse is repeated over generations and has become a fact of life for many households in Kerala, a southern state in India, a region from which an estimated 2.1 million men and women migrate to the countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) (Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates), many as labourers, retail, service, transportation, mainly men, and a small minority of women domestic workers. Although there are differences in migrant experiences in the different states of the Arabian Peninsula, particularly based on class, the effects on their households in Kerala is similar. Moreover, my interlocutors are unskilled and semi-skilled migrants, making their experiences similar. Migration has been seen by many of marginalized classes, genders, castes and religious groups in Kerala and India as a way to elevate their and their family’s economic and social position. Their incomes and other prerequisites often don’t qualify them to sponsor their families to migrate with them as high skilled workers are able to. As a result, thousands of migrant households in Kerala such as Khadijah’s are composed solely of women and children.
Scholars have discussed the human and social costs of such households on children, on the elderly and, only recently, on women who stay behind. Feminist migration scholars have critiqued the neglect of research on the effects of migration on women, whether they are the ones moving or staying put. They have asserted that mobility is experienced very differently by men and women given their gender and different social reproductive roles. For instance, it is much easier for men to migrate than women, whose mobility is controlled through age restrictions and other requirements by the Indian government. Interrogating whether migration creates new opportunities for women, feminist migration scholars have provided examples where it has benefited women and others where it has not. Women who stay behind are frequently dependent on their mobile spouses for remittances especially if they are not earning salaries themselves, and are thus in a subordinate power position vis a vis their partners. On the other hand, women staying behind usually become household heads, manage family finances, deal with banks and are becoming literate to perform such activities. Moreover, they may exercise personal agency to negotiate higher remittances from their husbands. While they may be taking on these non-traditional roles, they also must singlehandedly manage the challenges that the household faces. Jaya, a young Dalit mother, said that her family is so heavily indebted due to her husband’s migration expenses to Saudi Arabia that she is suffering physically and financially. She said that she is hardly able to pay the interest on the debts with the remittances she receives and is having to take out more loans. Interestingly, she is the secretary of a women’s community chittynetwork, a formally recognized rotating credit system, which provides them with some financial relief.
Migration reconfigures households, especially when women migrate out, challenging fathers to become caregivers, however in many cases reproductive roles continue to be assigned to women, such as to grandmothers or sisters in the absence of mothers. Migrant mothers are also known to perform mothering long distance using social media. Feminist migration scholars conclude that gendered effects have been mixed. Pessar and Mahler offer a theoretical framework in order to help researchers study this complex transnational process which they call the ‘gendered geographies of power’ approach, which includes the consideration of women’s social location (e.g. class, race, gender, age, migration status, etc.), geographic scales (e.g. at the level of the body, family, sending state, receiving state), personal agency, i.e. the exertion of individual action, individual initiative and ability of planning/strategizing. Women staying behind in Kerala with spouses working in the Arabian Peninsula experience fluidity in their gender roles. They are not uniformly empowered nor restricted in the absence of their spouses. Some stories follow.
Amina and Najeeb live in a middle class joint family set-up with Najeeb’s widowed mother, his married and pregnant sister whose husband is working in a different state inside India, and an unmarried sister who is engaged to be married. Najeeb is a returned migrant from Oman after having worked there on and off for over two years, first as an office worker and then in a shop. In Najeeb’s absence, Amina lived with her in-laws in a multi-generational joint family. Amina’s mother-in-law as the eldest is in charge of running the household. Her husband (Najeeb’s father) had worked in Oman for 28 years before returning to India and dying soon after. He would visit every 1.5 years and Najeeb’s mother had visited him only once with her daughter. Women did not earn any income in this traditional joint family apart from the mother-in-law receiving remittances first from her migrant husband and later from her son, Najeeb. Najeeb’s wife only received a small amount as pocket money. This arrangement indicated Amina’s financial dependence not only on Najeeb but also on her mother-in-law. Conflicts over the distribution and use of remittances in joint families can be a source of great distress for young daughter-in-laws and can contribute to the deterioration of their mental health and even estrangement.
Moreover, young married women such as Amina are expected to bear children and reproduce the family. Although women staying behind manage to conceive babies during the short holiday stays of their married husbands, there is some concern that migrant households experience a lower fertility rate and this is influencing lower population growth in Kerala. Amina had been having trouble conceiving a baby and this had created a great deal of stress for her and her in-laws. Najeeb had therefore decided to return to Kerala and the couple had been seeking medical help to address their fertility issues. This personal and sensitive topic took up a considerable proportion of interview time during which the whole joint family joined in while Amina said very little. Silence may have been very strategic on Amina’s part to avoid embarassment for herself and her family.
Dowry has become a cultural practice for all and also a status symbol. Savings from work abroad are often used for dowry for younger sisters.Women in such families are preferred by some young grooms because of the promise of higher dowries in the form of land, gold and assistance with migrating to the Arabian Peninsula. Migrant men’s marriages hinge on the amount of dowry that they can expect. However, this varies from person to person and generationally. In a Dalit family, one woman said that her husband did not demand any dowry, although she is now saving up for her daughter’s dowry. Despite exceptions, dowry is now more prevalent among migrant households demonstrating the rising value of migrant men vis a vis their prospective brides. At the same time, dowry can have some positive impacts for women too as Janaki’s story illustrates.
Janaki, her widowed mother and her two small children, live independeently in their own home which she built with her dowry. Her husband has been working in Kuwait as a supervisor in a oil company for 14 years, including 10 years before marriage. She receives the bulk of her husband’s remittances, some of which she is saving to build another home. Janaki has devised a way of combining her own independent household along with living with her in-laws’ joint family. When her husband visits every year for two months during his holidays, she moves together with him to her in-laws’ house. When he leaves, Janaki returns to her own home. Janaki herself is a trained teacher and does supply teaching while looking for a longterm permanent job. In the meantime, she does all the cooking, house cleaning and washing. Janaki anticipates that disciplining children may be an issue as the children become teenagers. Accordingly, her husband has decided that he will return in five years time when the children will be 7 and 9 respectively, thus indicating that the husband is designated as the disciplinarian in this family according to traditional gender roles.
Observations and Analyses
Comparing these migrant households in Kerala, we can see that their experiences vary depending on their social locations (class, caste, religion, age) geographical scales (household type, Kerala, country within the Arabian Peninsula), state policies both in India (emigration restrictions) and in the Arabian Peninsula (Kafala) and personal initiative and planning skills.
On the one hand, joint families with two or more generations and siblings and their families living together under the same roof or hybrid new forms where they live not together, but in close proximity to each other, become a source of social and emotional support for mothers. At the same time, young wives of migrant workers are rendered dependent on older mother-in-laws for financial sustenance and restricted in their activities as a result. Their lives revolve around bearing and raising children, thus limited to and by their reproductive capacities.
Demonstrating the agency of migrant women and their spouses, we see that some have utilized dowries and remittances to purchase land and build separate homes where women live with their mothers, unmarried sisters or other female relatives staying behind with children, thereby freeing her from the conventions and restrictions of living with in-laws and at the same time deriving emotional and social support for children and seniors. Remittances sent by migrant husbands are sent directly to these wives who can then manage household expenditures, create savings and plan future investments, children’s education, marriages and so on. Unfortunately, some women in these families end up having to manage hardships also, such as indebtedness and illness. Here class and caste become key: lower class/caste families are more susceptible to lack of capital to undertake migration and therefore are prone to becoming indebted to unscrupulous migration agents and other intermediaries. The same may be true of health precarities. Moreover, women in such families often encounter difficulties in terms of attending evening/night functions because of safety concerns and competing demands of caregiving for children and seniors at the same time. Bodies of women and children without men become a source of danger in certain times and in public spaces. Apart from handling the separation and estrangement from their spouses, mothers express concern about the need for disciplining growing children keeping in mind their fragile mental health in the absence of their fathers.
Moreover, the phenomenon of women and children staying behind and living separated from their migrant spouses are being produced and reproduced not due to personal choice but rather due to policies and practices of both the sending and receiving states, such as restrictions through their migration, sponsorship and housing policies.