The days of plenty: images of first generation Malayali migrants in the Arabian Gulf

ABSTRACT

The impossibility of citizenship for migrant labourers in the Gulf countries and the circular migration that entails makes the migrant experiences of the Gulf transient. This paper is an attempt to approach migrant memory as a resource that would allow us to see migrants as active negotiators of their destination, wrenching the migrant tale out of ghettoisation, despair and trauma to afford space for a more complicated rendering of the migrant lives. Taking photographs from the early migrants to the Gulf from the south Indian state of Kerala as its primary material, the paper also problematizes the role of the photograph as unmediated access to the past and dwells on a method to look at photographs. The paper recreates the life of these early migrants with interpretive engagement from the author who had spent his childhood in the locality.

KEYWORDS:

• Gulf migration
• Kerala
• memory
• photography
• photo-ethnography

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank the anonymous reviewers for their immensely helpful comments, the editors of this special issue – Deimantas Valanciunas and Clelia Clini, and acknowledge with gratitude Chandan Bose, and the participants of this study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Mohamed Shafeeq Karinkurayil is an Assistant Professor at Manipal Centre for Humanities, Manipal Academy of Higher Education (MAHE). His ongoing research is on cultures of migration.

Notes

1 For an attempt to represent some of these memories, see Ilias (2018). The page ‘gulfsouthasia’ on Instagram occasionally carries narratives on these early migrants usually accompanied by photographs from a later period.

2 McCluggage (1972) had this to say on the documentary evidence of photo albums: ‘Future anthropologists, if they studied our culture from home photo albums alone, would probably conclude that this breed of man lived mostly at Christmas, indulged in a ritual with coloured eggs at Easter, graduated from institutions frequently, celebrated birthdays mostly while young, and had lots of small animals.’ (quot. in Chalfen 1987, 170–171).

3 Typically, Muslim households do not hang portraits of deceased members of the family on the wall. This is not the case with other communities in Kerala. Sagar (2018), with reference to the Syrian Christian community in Kerala, observes portraits on the wall to be coded constructions of genealogy.

4 For discussions on the rule of modesty and how it affects the ordering of public gaze in the context of Iranian cinema, see Mottahedeh (2008), Naficy (2012). In the south Asian context, for a discussion of purdah (veiling) as strategy of managing visibility of themselves by Bangladeshi actresses, see Hoek (2014). See also the classic study The Colonial Harem by Malek Alloula (1986) for a discussion on colonial fantasies in the breaching of the veil in photography, and Singha (2013) for the British colonial negotiations over the veil in the case of female Hajj pilgrims. For the ideological underpinnings of modesty in a local film practice in Kerala dealing with Gulf migration, see Karinkurayil (2019).

5 I am speaking of the time of the photographs in question. The photograph of husband placing his hand over the shoulders of the wife is an almost mandatory post-nuptial photograph now. On the question of how video technology affects religious rituals such as wedding in north Kerala, see Abraham (2010).

6 All names are pseudonyms.

7 Chambers (2018) notes that the shared spaces of intimacy and banter which are characterized by ties that are carried over from elsewhere and are therefore continuities is an important and overlooked feature of migration.

8 I thank Monishankar Prasad for the information on the car model.

9 The community he belongs to is notified as ‘backward’, and poor educational indicators is one of the criteria for this classification.