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. 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 the 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 rich Arab 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 the 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 puttu in the Gulf; 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 organizations along communitarian lines, such as in the case of the 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 ‘secretive’ nature of the Gulf made the Gulf migrant an object of fantasy and contradiction. He was the suffering rich! The Gulf migrant was a sought-after groom, a fact played to hilarious effects in the comedy films of the late 1980s. In the social realist mode, the Gulf migrant became the symbol of illicit wealth and a threat to the goodness of the older ways of life.
Towards the closing years of the twentieth century, migrant narratives began appearing in the mainstream discourse. Malayalam newspapers ran accounts of Gulf migrant lives. Babu Bharadwaj published his Saudi memoirs with the well-established Mathrubhumi Press in 2000. In the early years of the twenty-first century, the newly founded Kairali television channel aired Pravasalokam (The World of Expatriates). This programme spoke about the difficult conditions faced by many migrants in the Gulf and offered its viewers the opportunity to phone in and share their woes about missing migrants, cases of unpaid labour, harassment, etc. in the Gulf. In the process it relied on a network of migrants. In 2008, Benyamin’s debut novel of Aatujeevitham was published to unprecedented success. The novel narrated the harrowing story of Najeeb who worked as a goatherd in Saudi Arabia, and was ostensibly based on the real-life experiences of a migrant by the same name.
All this points to a change in the earlier configuration of the public domain with respect to the Gulf. It is not coincidental that we now finally have the breaking out of the Gulf into the public discourse of Kerala. There have been vast changes between the conditions that existed in the late 1960s and the 1970s and those that exist now. The profile of the migrant has changed thanks to a new generation who have been trained with an eye on the opportunities in the Gulf. The state measures such as making matriculation a necessary qualification for migration to the Gulf also changed the educational profile of the migrants. The Gulf migrants have also started unionizing and putting pressure on the Indian state. The state has stretched its reach among the migrants through agencies such as the Non Resident Keralites Affairs (NoRKA) initiative of Kerala state. Moreover, the Gulf itself has changed considerably in its profiles, changing its image to tourism destinations and bureaucratic corporation states, thus making the Gulf of the migrant memoirs a thing of the past.
Surely, the Gulf could now be spoken about in the public as an experience and not just as a place of abstract labour. However, what was interesting about this new visibility—with the exception of the television programme Pravasalokam—was that it took the form of revelation. It was always a matter of opening the eyes of Malayali towards the reality of the Gulf. Thus, Salam Kodiyathur, who would put forth the Gulf experience as the major plank of his independent film movement, would begin his first ever Gulf film, Parethan Thirichu Varunnu (The Revenant), with visuals of rubbish pickers in the Gulf. Benyamin would speak of Aatujeevitham in biblical terms, as the Christ who has arrived to redeem generations of Gulf migrants from their muteness regarding the reality of their migrant lives.
The idiom of revelation suggests that though the Gulf as an experience of life could now find representation in mainstream Malayalam public discourse, it still had to resort to a poetics of secrecy. It was still about the disclosure of a secret. Such a performative revelation, rather than being a movement from a private genre of speech to a public one, is in fact a continuity of the private genre, albeit in modes that are different hitherto. The personal address and bildungsroman nature of the novel, the primacy of the individual and his loneliness in the memoir, and the individual rather than collective address that marks the new cinema, all indicate that the Gulf continues to be spoken about in the mode of a rumour. Perhaps then, rather than treating the private nature of the Gulf as an aberration of the public sphere, one should see it as constitutive of the condition of migration itself.
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.
Ah