Abstract
Recent years have seen consistent scholarly engagement with the historical circulation of personalities, texts, and trade within the Indian Ocean Region (IOR) (examples include: Bishara, 2017; Ilias, 2018; Jacob, 2019; Kooria and Ravensbergen, 2022; Pearson, 2015; Prange, 2018; Ricci, 2011; Yasser Arafath, 2020). Kerala (in south India) and the Gulf states of the Arabian Peninsula have been in contact through trade and travel since the first century AD (Ilias, 2018). More recent engagement in trade between the two sides of the Arabian Sea has occurred since the mid- to late twentieth century when socioeconomic ties became particularly strong as more Keralans emigrated to Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates for work. Up until a decade ago, the single largest block of migrants in the Gulf countries were of Keralan origin (Breeding, 2017: 194). This more recent migration from the south Indian state of Kerala to the various states that now constitute the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) is therefore almost five decades old, finding its genesis in the labour crunch of the 1970s in the Arabian Gulf as part of the massive economic growth the region was experiencing at the time as a result of the oil boom. Whilst there has been migration to the Gulf routed via British agencies right from the early days of oil, it was really only in the late 1960s that the Gulf began to appear on the horizon of the Keralan popular imaginary through its promise of well-paid employment (although often challenging working conditions). Early migrants passed on the baton of the idea of the Gulf dream to the next generation who in most cases were better educated and had by then a keener eye for the Gulf labour market.
Though there is an ever-growing body of scholarly literature on the economic and social impact of Gulf migration on Kerala, the cultural impact of this now five-decade old pattern of migration remains an under-researched topic. Clearly, cultural aspects of Keralan-living in the Gulf states are enmeshed with Neha Vora’s (2013) notion of “neoliberal citizenship” — a type of belonging that exists when “legal citizenship” is not made available to long-term residents of a country — and we suggest here, in this symposium, that in focusing on “Gulf–Kerala literary publics”, the notion of Vora’s “neoliberal citizenship” might be extended and engaged with in new, yet intersecting ways.
Fiction in Malayalam (and English) and, more generally, the Keralan literary public sphere has been enriched by the travels of their celebrated authors which have found their way into literature through travel writing or in refracted forms. Indeed, the space of Malayalam literature has found within its universe the Agoras of Egypt, the sacrificial grounds of the Aztecs (Ramakrishnan, 2009), or the battlefields of Stalingrad (Madhavan, 2022), not to mention those cities in India marked by a linguistic foreignness (for the Malayalam tongue), such as Delhi, Kolkata, or Hyderabad.
Texts and genres are integral to the constitution of a public sphere. The question of a literary public, however, must go beyond one of representation to take into account the question of interpellation. As Michael Warner tells us, “publics do not exist apart from the discourse that addresses them” (2002: 72). He also reminds us that “[t]he making of a public requires conditions that range from the very general — such as the organization of media, ideologies of reading, institutions of circulation, text genres — to the particular rhetorics of texts” (Warner, 2002: 14). For our purposes, literary public refers to a public that is constituted by virtue of being addressed or imagined as such by acts of literature in their specific rhetoric and belonging to specific genres, and by institutions of literature such as publication houses, literary fora, awards, and so on. The Gulf–Kerala literary public refers to a public that traverses the regions of the south Indian state of Kerala and the states of the Arab Gulf, imagined as an audience, addressed as such, or referred to as a public by literary texts and institutions. The Gulf–Kerala literary public does not assume a connecting link between two publics existing simultaneously, but one public empirically distributed across two land masses and constituted as such by acts and institutions of literary activity. We suggest that the hyphenation of “Gulf–Kerala” is crucial in expressing a conjoined nature, allowing us to explore the functions that this (mutual) tethering serves. Since such a public within its domain of hegemony affords the possibilities of many other publics, such as intimate publics or counterpublics formed along their distinctive trajectories of self-definition and in differing relations to the former (and from each other), we have pluralized the public — literary publics — to bring to attention such spheres of intimacy, opposition, and communication within the generally constituted literary public.
However, an immediate crisis seems to confront such a definition — the public in Kerala is often constituted by these Malayalam migrant literary works as ignorant of the conditions of the migrant worker from among them in the Gulf. Gulf migrant texts are determined to correct the mistaken pictures of comfort and luxury with which the Gulf migrant is associated (Karinkurayil, 2022). Rather than see this as evidence for the non-existence of a public sphere, we take this opacity between the two landmasses as one of the rhetorical acts through which the Gulf–Kerala public is defined as being one kind of a public. As the essays in this symposium indicate, this imagined opacity is in itself generative of forms of rhetoric, whether as a language of dissent that escapes the repressive state, or as the premise of exploring intimate lives as a repository of bygone times.
Historically, the migrant to the Arabian Gulf was mostly bracketed as an economic agent. They (and it has been, for the most part, “he”) did not enjoy any sort of “cultural existence”, although the Gulf has proved to be a regular “performance” destination for littérateurs and artists, and for cinema. While the Gulf is also a fertile ground for mobilizing resources for developmental activities back home in Kerala, including the establishment of educational and cultural institutions, for many Keralans it has remained a space of cultural consumption, rather than one of cultural production. Up until the late 1990s, migrant writers were often restricted to little known publishing houses or they relied on self-publishing to get their works into circulation. This invisibility was just one factor that contributed to the inexistence of a literary public in those times, but there were other contributing issues, such as that the early migrants to the Gulf were low-skilled labourers who might “lack the time and liberty to engage in creative endeavours” (Vinai and Prasuna, 2015: 123), and a perceived hierarchy within the literary publics of Kerala between the “native” writers of Kerala and the “expatriate” Keralan writers.
In this symposium, we suggest a recuperative reading of the lives and experiences of the early migrants. If petrofiction is — as Amitav Ghosh observes in his review of Abdul Rahman Munif’s Cities of Salt — the territory of Babel, where many tongues fuse beyond the intelligibility of traditional literary criticism, then it demands that we change the protocols of reading (Ghosh, 2002). The papers in this symposium consider the relation of words and silence, of anticipation and memories, of condensation and displacement that we suggest are embedded within the emergence of these Gulf–Kerala literary publics, literary publics that are indelibly marked by cyclical migration. We contend that these concerns remain central to the study of Gulf–Kerala literary publics despite the significant shifts in socioeconomic conditions of the last two decades.
Recent years have seen the material possibilities of conjuring a Gulf–Kerala literary public into existence. Technological advancements have no doubt made possible not only a reconfiguration of the locality, of the here and now (Appadurai, 1996), but also a corresponding reconfiguration in the literary imagination (Adelson, 2005). The arrival of cable television in India in the 1990s with channels accessible across the globe (the first Malayalam private television channel Asianet began airing in 1993) was essential in fostering a sense of simultaneity between the two sides of the Arabian Sea and thereby materializing the possibility of a hyphenated public between Kerala and the Gulf. The establishment of the Malayalam newspaper Gulf Madhyamam in Bahrain in 1998 was another step in providing this simultaneity. Furthermore, a landmark in the constitution of the Gulf–Kerala public was the airing of the television programme Pravasalokam [The World of expatriates] in 2001 on the newly established (2000) Malayalam channel Kairali. Initially a phone-in programme where close family members of migrants missing in the Gulf would make an appeal to the Malayali public living in the Gulf to help locate their loved ones, this programme in effect replaced the imaginary of migrants being disparate individuals, resulting in a Gulf–Kerala public as part of a mainstream Malayali imagination. 1
Recent literary explorations of Gulf–Kerala relations, notably the post-millennial novels of Benyamin and Deepak Unnikrishnan, highlight the importance of depicting (imagined) realities and memories of a working life in the Gulf against a backdrop of immense sociocultural change (for many of the Gulf states as well as for India). The unprecedented success of debut novelist Benyamin’s Aatujeevitham (2008), published by a new entrant in the Malayalam publishing industry, Green Books (and translated into English by Joseph Koyippally under the title Goat Days), resulted in Malayali migrant literature from the Gulf finding a respectable place in mainstream publishing. Benyamin is now an established writer of the Malayalam literary scene and has subsequently published two more novels thematizing the Gulf. Meanwhile, a film based on Goat Days is in the post-production stage. Whilst Green Books has expanded its catalogue of Gulf migrant writing, respected publishing houses such as DC Books and Mathrubhumi Books have published numerous titles on Keralan Gulf experiences. Benyamin’s exclamation in Jasmine Days (2018) that the Gulf turns even a philistine into a writer, though exaggerated, is an indication of the newly won visibility of Gulf migrant writing in Kerala’s literary sphere, and a further realization of something we might recognise as Gulf–Kerala literary publics. The institution of awards in the Gulf by migrant organizations for Malayalam writers, such as the Abu Dhabi Shakti award, has further consolidated this transnational literary public. Meanwhile, Sharjah International Book Fair at Sharjah, UAE, is fast becoming a major event in the calendar of the Malayalam publishing industry with an increasing number of Malayalam titles launched there each year. Deepak Unnikrishnan’s Temporary People (2017) marked the first literary work by a member of the Keralan Gulf diaspora, and has gained much attention since. In 2019, Keralite creator K. S. Manu and illustrator Deepak S. Raj launched their graphic novel, Battle of the Winds: The Legend of Ahmad Ibn Majid, the Epic Sailor, which recounts tales of the spice trade and the spirit of seafaring navigation in the Arabian Sea in the fifteenth century.
The shifting of literary landscapes, the emergence of Gulf–Kerala literary publics, and ways of reading (newly) visible Gulf migrant literature for what it can tell us about the previous decades of silence are the overarching concerns of this symposium. Examining Benyamin’s body of work, Nadeen Dakkak draws attention to the literary space as a transnational space, arguing that Benyamin’s fiction moves away from the notion of the Gulf as a depoliticized economic zone and the figure of the apolitical migrant. Bringing politics to the fore, Benyamin’s works evaluate the role of migrants in sustaining the political order of the Gulf states. He suggests that the region’s marginalized migrants and religious (in this case Shia) minority citizens, treated as second-class citizens, are products of the same system, even though they face each other from opposing camps. Dakkak illustrates that in Benyamin’s fiction, Malayalam is transformed into a language of transnational dissent. The translation and circulation of texts become the crucial link that articulates these opposing bodies into a new relation of solidarity, to be realized translocally as much as interlingually.
In the absence of authoritative histories, migrant memoirs become a space in which to keep alive the history of the early journeys of those who travelled to work in the Gulf states. Astrid Erll writes about what she calls “transcultural memory”, asserting that “[m]ost recently, memory studies has begun to turn away from its prevailing methodological nationalism and become interested in forms of remembering across nations and cultures” (2011: 2). As the collection of articles here demonstrates, many of the narratives are involved in a remembering of sorts, with various portrayals of Keralan lives, lived in the Gulf states over the last fifty years (see also Karinkurayil, 2020, 2021). Heba Varghese’s article “Telling translocal histories” takes Gulf migrant memoirs as its primary material. The memoirs Kudiyettakkaarante Veedu [The house of the migrant] by V. Musafar Ahammed (2014), Kudiyettam: Pravasathinte Malayalivazhikal [Migration: The Malayali routes of emigration] by Benyamin (2016), and Kuwait Indian Kudiyetta Charitram: Kuwaitile Indian Pravasavum Malayali Sanidhyavum [A history of Indian migration to Kuwait: India’s emigration to and Malayali presence in Kuwait] by Sam Pynummoodu (2016) all offer rich material to think through the transnationality of memory. Varghese reads memoirs as microhistories that base themselves on experiences and encounters which defy and complicate linear histories of migration. Additionally, the memoirs become sites of transnational solidarity as they recollect microhistories not only of those from Kerala but also of those from other regions of the global south. As P. T. Yadukrishnan points out in his article, the memories of travel that precede the regimes of passports and nation states also infuse the region with an affective cosmopolitanism which lends itself to an understanding of other migrants, albeit within a frame drawn from one’s own experiences. His piece “Labour migration, the Arabian Gulf, and the expanding territorial imagination in Malayalam cinema” looks at the shift in contemporary Malayalam cinema from an early, mostly negative representation of the Gulf migrant, to the present, when the collective experience of migration plays a crucial orienting role in channelling the meanings and affects of contemporary Malayalam cinema towards deterritorialization in its mores and aesthetics.
Gayathri Prabhu’s article on Priya Kuriyan’s 2017 graphic short story “Ebony and Ivory”, entitled “A gulf of secrets”, touches upon the underside of the public rhetoric of riches, plenitude, and success which has historically characterized the “Gulf Dream”. Prabhu investigates the affective link between those who travel and those who are left behind. Illustrating that the gulf between those who migrate and those who do not extends into the domestic space as well as existing between the nations, Prabhu shows how the opening up of this particular emotive space leads to an intimate reading of Gulf experiences.
In all, this symposium on Gulf–Kerala literary publics looks to acknowledge a nascent body of research-orientated enquiry and to demonstrate a move to read Gulf–Kerala literary connections in new ways. It examines the celebrated novels of Benyamin that circulate globally, notably through translation in the past decade, whilst bringing lesser-known works to our attention. In doing so, the symposium recalibrates the idea of “literary publics” despite the (often restrictive) issues of translation, production costs, or assumed provinciality.