Transnational Labour Migration and the Renegotiation of Masculinity by Left-Behind Men in Kerala

Abstract

This article explores an understudied aspect of women’s transnational labour migration, namely how left-behind men negotiate the changes in their status in the domestic and public spheres when their daughters or wives migrate for work and become primary earners in the family. A case study of Syrian Christians in a village in Central Kerala with a long history of women’s transnational labour migration demonstrates how left-behind men refashion their masculine identities by reasserting their role as family protectors when they lose their traditional role as family providers. The article illustrates how left-behind men employ diverse social and discursive practices in domestic and community spheres to reconstruct their gendered sense of self and resist the social stigma of failed masculinity. It also demonstrates how the Church, which continues to be a dominant institution influencing the personal and political lives of Syrian Christians, has become an arena for left-behind men to reassert their patriarchal status at home and in the community.

Introduction

Women’s transnational labour migration compels left-behind households to reorganise their structure, gender relations and workings to cope with the absence of female members, as Hoang (2016) and Hoang and Yeoh (2011) have shown in detail for Vietnamese transnational families. In South Asia, too, women’s increasing engagement as transnational migrant workers challenges normative notions of female domesticity, as they assume the role of family breadwinners, traditionally assigned to men (Pattadath, 2020). When triggered by women’s migration, destabilisation of traditional gender regimes within households demands new kinds of negotiations and refashioning of gender identities (Elmhirst, 2007; Kodoth, 2014). While the various socio-economic and cultural transformations that migrant women undergo through labour migration have been addressed in contemporary migration scholarship, the implications of women’s labour migration on the gendered experiences of left-behind men remain largely underexplored (Hoang & Yeoh, 2011). Scholarship on female migration from India has also mostly focused on the experiences of migrant women and their various negotiations in their host and home countries (Kodoth, 2014; Kodoth & Jacob, 2013; Nair, 2011; Percot, 2006; Walton-Roberts, 2015).

This article focuses on how left-behind men respond to the loss of their status and identity as breadwinners, researching how they renegotiate their standing at home and in the community. Unpacking this gendered challenge (Connell, 1987) requires investigating how gender structures intersect with other contested structures of power like race, ethnicity, class, caste, and sexuality (Kimmel & Wade, 2018; Thomas, 2018). As more and more women are taking on greater economic roles by engaging in paid work and labour migration, neat categorisations of men and women into providers and dependants are no longer possible. More specifically, the rising prominence of female transnational labour migration compels both men and women to take on new roles and to renegotiate their status and identities within different social institutions. This article offers a nuanced analysis of the impact of women’s transnational labour migration on left-behind men by paying attention to how masculinities are reworked and renegotiated in complex and sometimes contradictory ways in particular cultural contexts.

Using the case study of the Syrian Christian community in Kerala, which has a long history of female transnational labour migration, and based on the data collected using mixed methods technique on 53 Syrian Christian families left behind by transnational migrant women from a village in Central Kerala in 2016, the article explores how changes in gender negotiations in the home sphere can reconfigure gender relations also in the local communal sphere. More specifically, the attempt is to throw light on the diverse ways in which left-behind men employ various social and discursive practices in the domestic and community spheres to reconstruct their gendered sense of self and resist the social stigma of failed masculinity, at a time when migrant women’s economic contributions towards the household and the community have expanded significantly.

Masculinity Negotiations and Gendered Arenas

According to Bradley (1996), normative conceptualisations of masculinities and femininities put constraints on social practices through social institutions. Connell (1987: 92) showed that three structures of gender, namely labour, power and cathexis (related to emotions and sexuality) are at play to regulate social practices. I borrow the analytical approach used by George (2005) in her study on the impact of women-led transnational labour migration on gender relations in immigrant Malayali families and the immigrant Malayali Christian community in the USA. Here, I focus only on gendered division of labour and gendered structure of power to understand the implications of female migration for left-behind men and masculinities. The gendered structure of labour assigns different work to men and women and uses gender as a dominant logic to design the nature of work, its organisation and determination of its value. Gendered structures of power relate to how gender legitimises use of authority and control to discipline individuals and maintain hierarchies. These structures and their workings are fluid and transform with space and time. Connell (1987) also proposed that gender regimes in different institutions may complement each other, weaken each other in conflictual relations, or move in tandem towards a common goal. The exact nature of these multiple interactions can only be ascertained through empirical research (Connell, 1987) and is influenced by interactions between socio-cultural, political and economic processes in any given context (George, 2005; Maycock, 2017), which tends to be locally shaped (Lusher & Robins, 2009).

Demonstrating the value of Connell’s theoretical framework, George (2005: 197) explores how transnational labour migration of nurses from Kerala has transformed gender relations in and across the spheres of work, home and community in their immigrant households in the USA. Her perceptive ethnographic work shows men renegotiating their lost status as breadwinners within their household and identifies the stigma they face in the community as ‘nurse-husbands’. She categorises immigrant families in which women are breadwinners into four types: traditional households, where women continue to carry out reproductive duties and the men control financial decision-making; forced-participation households, where men who earn very little or are unemployed are forced to share housework; partnership households, where both spouses share all the household responsibilities; and female-led households, in which the working women ‘shoulder almost all the labour in the household, including the financial decision making’ (George, 2005: 17). Further, she demonstrates how immigrant men use church politics as an arena where they reassert masculine dominance and renegotiate their diminished status both within the family and the community.

Using the insights from George’s seminal work on the implications of female-led family migration on masculine negotiations within the immigrant community in the USA, this article focuses on a less-studied aspect of women’s transnational migration, namely how left-behind men negotiate the changes in their status in the domestic and public spheres when women migrate for work and become primary earners for the family. Structural changes in the global market and the emergence of new transnational circuits of capital and labour have facilitated the entry of large numbers of women into skilled and unskilled paid work (Sassen, 2000). Many South Asian nations are witnessing a spurt in women’s transnational labour migration as a result of gendered transformations in the global labour market, setting off processes of feminisation of labour, especially in the global health and care sectors (Lutz, 2011). Such gendered changes have undoubtedly affected the individual lives of South Asian migrant women and their interactions with their families (Gallo, 2005; Kodoth, 2014; Nair, 2011; Percot, 2006). This article uses the case study of Syrian Christian transnational families in a village in Kerala to research firstly how left-behind men respond to the changes in their status within the household when women migrants take on the role of breadwinners. Second, it scrutinises in what ways these changes in men’s role and status within the domestic sphere influence their negotiations in the communal sphere.

Syrian Christians and Women’s Transnational Labour Migration

This section briefly maps the historical trajectory that spawned opportunities specifically for Christian women in Kerala to access opportunities in the global labour market since the 1950s. As a well-organised community, with the Church at its apex and a capacity to develop diverse strategies and manipulate circumstances effectively to mobilise different kinds of resources in varied circumstances, the Syrian Christian community in Kerala has always had an advantage over other communities (Thomas, 2018; Varghese, 2009; Zachariah, 2006). They claim to be one of the earliest Christian communities in the world and believe that their ancestors were upper-caste Hindus in Kerala who were inspired by the teachings of St. Thomas and converted to Christianity. Such claims to Brahmanical roots have allowed Syrian Christians to maintain upper-casteness and retain socio-economic and political privileges at all times, despite being a minority within a minority (Devika & Varghese, 2011; Thomas, 2018). Since 1653, when they declared the complete separation of the Church of the St. Thomas Christians from the Church in Rome, the Syrian Christian community has undergone many factional splits (Thomas, 2018; Visvanathan, 1987).

Over time, Syrian Christians emerged as experts in spice cultivation and were employed as supervisors and workers in plantations owned by Europeans, who mostly cultivated tea and rubber. Demonstrating enterprise to learn new skills and diversifying as cultivators, by the early twentieth century the community emerged as the most successful rubber cultivators, even outperforming the European plantation owners (Varghese, 2009). Syrian Christians migrated in large numbers to different parts of the Travancore state and to Malabar to promote plantation cultivation. They bought land from Namboothiris, Nairs and European landlords who were badly affected economically by the Great Depression during the 1930s. They could do this as a community because of their control over and access to financial resources like chit funds and even banks (Varghese, 2009). For marginal cultivators who did not have the social and economic capital to migrate or purchase land, the Church stepped in, buying large tracts of forest and uncultivated land from local landlords in the Malabar and South Kanara region and transferring them to smaller peasant-cultivators (Vadakkan, 2015). Thus, migration became an important livelihood strategy for Syrian Christians in Kerala by the early twentieth century.

Churches in central Kerala emerged as powerful community organisations that influenced not just the religious beliefs and practices of parishioners but also their domestic and public lives. The missionaries achieved significant success in proselytising among the oppressed castes, especially Ezhavas and Dalits, during the early twentieth century. This was primarily done through modern education using textbooks that combined Christian religious values and modern values like dignity, equality and mobility (Jeffrey, 1992; Thomas, 2018). Inspired by the educational activities of the European missionaries, native Syrian Christian churches began to open schools that provided modern education to subaltern groups like Dalits and Ezhavas.

This growth of education, along with the rise of print media, allowed the propagation of modern ideas and ‘implanted new notions of individual dignity and appropriate conduct’ (Jeffrey, 1992: 55), which then became the catalyst for community reformisms in Kerala. The missionary-run schools and specific congregations worked as ‘subaltern counter publics’ for the oppressed castes, especially Dalits, to engage with new emancipatory ideas and social practices that challenged the Brahmanical caste order (Mohan, 2019). By the early twentieth century, the resourceful Syrian Christians controlled most government-aided privately managed schools, especially in Central Kerala where the community had a significant presence (Jeffrey, 1992). Instead of a caste-based order, the missionaries believed that the body is the ‘raw material’ that an individual is born with and therefore the roles, rights and responsibilities of individuals must be determined by the ‘natural’ or biological capacities and internalised characteristics (Devika, 2006).

Development came to be seen as a modernising process through which individuals were enabled to convert their biological capacities into full-fledged individual capabilities (Devika, 2010). While educating girls was central to the modernisation project, the meanings attributed to education and the expected outcomes of educating men and women were shaped by gender ideologies (Devika, 2010; Thomas, 2018). Women’s access to education was facilitated through transformative training, developing their biological predispositions into skills and capabilities that moulded them into modern housewives (Devika, 2010). Informal and formal training spaces and women’s groups were set up in churches and other community organisations where women were taught household management, thrift and prudent consumption, so that husbands were not burdened by household concerns like children’s education or household expenditure (Antony, 2013).

Gender discourses and practices within the community, however, underwent significant changes during the Great Depression, which in Travancore state put huge financial pressures on landed and farming households (Prakash, 1987). During this period of crisis, educated women entered the workforce to contribute to family income. However, the nature of work that ‘respectable’ women could do was mediated not only by gender restraints but also by intersecting discourses of social differentiation. Drawing attention to the symbolic capital of fair skin, Thomas (2018: 84) highlights how any jobs that entailed working in the sun for long periods were ‘extremely frowned upon for “fair” Syrian Christian women’. Educated women could only engage in ‘feminine’ paid work like teaching, which involved ‘gentle feminine power’ like caring and disciplining (Devika & Thampi, 2007). Consequently, educated Nair and Syrian Christian women entered professional jobs to contribute to the family income.

Interestingly, Savarna groups like the Nairs and Syrian Christians at the time viewed nursing as a ‘dirty job’, because it required the woman worker to be in close proximity with men and clean wounded bodies, which were seen as impure (Percot & Rajan, 2007). Among Christians, as Thomas (2018: 83) traces back to earlier phases of history when Syrian Christian men were employed as purifiers by Hindus, nursing was looked down upon by many in the community. However, Syrian Christians gradually accepted nursing as a charitable and godly duty. That this change of mind had economic reasons is pinpointed by an intriguing reference in an endnote to the pioneering work of George (2005), who observed that ‘only Syrian Christian families that struggled financially would send their daughters to nursing school’ (Thomas, 2018, p. 170, n.61). Since the 1930s, local Christian nuns were enrolled in charitable institutions and hospitals run by European missionaries and were trained as nurses. By the 1950s, nursing schools were established by the Church and Christian-run educational institutions in Kerala. A large majority of women who enrolled were Christians.

Tracing the history of transnational migration of Malayali women as nurses, George (2005: 51) provides accounts of how recruiters from different Gulf countries that faced a shortage of healthcare workers conducted interviews in India to recruit nurses and even provided travel and relocation allowances to the selected candidates. Malayali women nurses also began to migrate to Europe, especially Germany and Italy, in significant numbers since the 1960s (Gallo, 2005; Kodoth & Jacob, 2013). Recently, this particular movement has been explosively increasing, as Middle Eastern nations deny Indians permanent residence rights, whereas many European countries offer such rights as part of the ‘deal’ between migrants and a state that does not really want these people as citizens, but needs them as workers, not unlike the German ‘guest worker’ model. Overall, this trend has resulted in permanent settlement of substantial Indian migrant communities across the world. It is presently undergoing a new phase of expansion, again with prominent female participation.

Thus, since the 1950s, countries with a shortage of nursing staff began to recruit many women, especially from the Christian community in Kerala. Hospitals and care centres in the USA began to employ women from India and the Philippines. Catholic regions like Vienna, Rome and the Vatican used transnational church networks to recruit women nurses from Kerala. Many Church-run educational institutions started professional nursing colleges in response to this growing global demand for healthcare workers. This led to a dramatic rise in the number of Christian women transnational workers from Kerala since the 1990s (Percot, 2006; Percot & Rajan, 2007). Malayali Christian women have thus attained a respectable position in the global labour market, especially in the healthcare sector, indicating a gender-turn in Kerala’s labour migration history.

Female Migration from a Central Kerala Village

Palikkunnu (pseudonym), a village in central Kerala, has a large Syrian Christian population and has historically been one of the major centres for missionary activities and commercial agriculture in the region. Right from opening the first schools that imparted modern primary school education in the early twentieth century, this gave entry to boys and girls from across communities in the region. The village became a pioneer by leading the formation of a community-based registered charitable organisation, called the Rural Education Society, which in 1976 facilitated the opening of higher educational institutions and colleges in the village. The Church played a central role in this transformation.

The centrality of education in people’s lives was evident from their investments and achievements in education. A household survey was conducted in 300 households in Pallikunnu, collecting education, migration and employment details of all family members. It found a low illiteracy rate among both men and women with 3.67 and 4.67% respectively. A significant proportion (39.94%) of women in Pallikunnu between the age of 15 and 65 had completed more than 10 years of formal education and 17.06% were college-educated (Ajay, 2020). In 2016, apart from numerous primary and secondary educational institutions, the village had three high schools, one vocational higher secondary school, one Teachers’ Training Institute, two tutorial colleges, a government Arts and Science College, a private nursing college and a private engineering college, making it a rural education hub in the region.

Around 33% of the 300 surveyed households reported that they received remittances from their migrant daughters/wives at least once in the year between 2015 and 2016, indicating that the proportion of families that depended on female migrants was substantial. Using the results from this larger survey, I identified 53 left-behind Syrian Christian men in Pallikunnu who were financially dependent on their migrant wives or daughters. The following sections are based on the data collected using a questionnaire survey and qualitative interviews with these 53 left-behind fathers/husbands and local Church authorities in 2016 and detailed field notes that I maintained between 2015 and 2016 when I lived in the village for my research.

Interestingly, most education-led initiatives were born out of concerted efforts by the Church, local communities and the state. The Church-run colleges offered courses catering to demands from the global labour market, especially for skilled nurses in the Gulf and OECD countries. Taking advantage of this rising demand, a nursing institute was established under the aegis of the Church in Pallikunnu in 1995. Young Christian women studying in this nursing college narrated how the Church also facilitated their interactions with migrant nurses or return migrants, who passed on information about work and migration opportunities. Families felt more at ease to send their daughters to destinations where someone from their family or the parish had already migrated. By tapping into the transnational Church network, churches were able to create safer migration pathways for young Christian women.

For the above reasons, transnational labour migration from Pallikunnu was female-dominated. In 2016, the gender ratio of emigrant workers was 109 females to 100 male workers. A large majority of women who migrated from the village for work were Christians (77%) and skilled healthcare workers (75%). Only 3.7% of women from the village had migrated for less-skilled domestic work. Clear caste and class differences existed in the nature of work women chose. While women from oppressed castes were restricted to stigmatised jobs like paid domestic/care work, those belonging to more resourceful Savarna families gained entry into better-paying skilled jobs in the health and education sectors. Evidence also suggests that the experiences of less-skilled migrant workers in destination countries can be more disempowering than those in professional jobs (Kodoth & Jacob, 2013).

Left-Behind Men and Masculinity Negotiations in the Domestic Sphere

In Palikkunnu, by the 1990s young women gained access to all levels of education, especially higher education, while the structural changes in the global labour market created new work opportunities for them. Syrian Christians, who have a long history of using migration as a key livelihood strategy, were quick to respond to these global changes and encouraged women to migrate for work. Young, educated and unmarried women were no longer viewed as a family burden. Families learnt to see daughters as ‘resources’ to ensure the family’s upward mobility. Especially young Syrian Christian women who completed college education were keen to explore opportunities, took initiatives to gather information on job opportunities through migrant friends/relatives or private ‘immigration consultants’ and planned their future, acquiring skills also as increasingly autonomous agents. They successfully negotiated with their families, promising to be ‘dutiful daughters’ after migration, by taking on financial responsibilities for the family, regularly sending remittances and self-regulating their sexual conduct.

All 53 left-behind male interviewees reported that the transnational migrant women workers send remittances regularly to their left-behind families, which changed their status from being ‘dependent’ wives/daughters to that of providers. Some families received remittances to meet monthly household expenses; others received support during emergencies or to meet large family expenditures. 71.7% of the 53 left-behind men reported that their main economic activity was rubber cultivation, while others had diversified into non-farm activities like running small businesses or real estate brokers. Especially due to huge fluctuations in rubber prices since the 2000s, income uncertainties affected the entire village economy, often putting pressure on families to meet rising consumer aspirations and pressures associated with status production. Often it was only after the migration of young daughters that the left-behind families were able to build bigger houses, engage in consumption of luxurious goods and services, invest in land and have significant savings.

These young unmarried migrant women emerged as more successful economic contributors than their fathers. This meant that left-behind fathers, who earlier derived their hegemonic position and respectability within the domestic sphere and in the public domain as primary providers, were now forced to renegotiate their position and identity as protectors of family interests. To understand whether the reduction of financial burdens on the left-behind father resulted in any changes in the division of housework, time-use surveys were used to collect data on how the left-behind father and mother divided household responsibilities. It was found that men’s loss of status as main breadwinners had very little impact on the gendered division of housework, as they spent negligible time, less than half an hour a day, on household chores.

Although the dependent fathers resisted any possibility of changing the gendered division of household labour, it was evident that they experienced masculinity anxieties. Fearing loss of status in the family, dependent fathers justified their economic dependence on migrant daughters by reminding their daughters of the struggles and costs they bore to invest in their education to provide a comfortable life to the family, displaying a kind of payback syndrome. Jose (56 years), a rubber cultivator whose daughter was working as a nurse in a hospital in Italy run by Christian missionaries, repeatedly spoke about the difficulties he faced to educate his daughter and to save up for her marriage and dowry. As someone who aspired for upward mobility and wanted to marry his daughter to a ‘respectable’ family, he emphasised the need to improve their material conditions. He believed that this would be possible only if his daughter also contributed to the family income. Beginning from the 1990s, as demand for Malayali nurses grew globally, middle-class families were willing to take loans to finance their daughters’ education. This was a major shift from the earlier phases of Kerala’s development that had limited women to the domestic space through a systematic process of housewifisation, so that especially Syrian Christian women ‘retreated to the domestic sphere’ (Thomas, 2018: 83), while lower-caste women experienced the pressures differently, continued to be employed and showed higher work-participation rates than affluent women (Thomas, 2018: 83).

As access to publicly funded higher education in Kerala is limited and private institutions are unaffordable, many families send their daughters to Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh for nursing education. Jose mortgaged a portion of his landholding to take a loan and fund his daughter’s education in Karnataka. Within a year of completing her course, his daughter found a job in Italy with the help of her senior in college who had migrated to Rome two years earlier. Jose was certain to evoke a sense of gratitude in his daughter by repeatedly reminding her about the hardships he endured to finance her higher education. Ever since she migrated to Italy, his daughter began to send a significant proportion of her salary as remittances to her parents, mainly her father. A large portion of this money was first used to renovate Jose’s tile-roofed home into a two-floored concrete house with modern household equipment, gadgets and fittings. Jose then began to save money for his daughter’s dowry and some money was donated to the Church. Jose rationalised his dependence on his daughter’s income by arguing that the remittances were his daughter’s way of showing her gratitude towards the father who provided her access to higher education and that he is more capable of protecting the income by investing it in the family’s upward mobility.

Young educated women were thus expected to pay back and show their gratitude to their parents. Justifying the economic dependence in these terms, men like Jose renegotiated their diminished economic role in the family by reasserting their control over the daughter’s income and retaining the power to decide how the remittances should be used. In most cases, migrant daughters sent remittances to their fathers’ bank accounts and made gifts to their mothers, in cash or in kind, only during personal visits.

While most women who migrated from Pallikunnu were either unmarried women or were accompanied by their husband, in a small proportion of families married women had migrated as workers, leaving behind their husbands and children. I interviewed 17 such left-behind husbands. Strikingly, in 13 cases, women were found to have migrated to compensate for the inability or unwillingness of men to perform the role of the breadwinner. In five families, migration was the last resort for the woman to escape domestic violence. When married migrant women left behind their young children and husbands, new arrangements had to be made to organise household labour and childcare. To compensate for their absence, the household responsibilities were handed over to an elderly female member, like the migrant woman’s mother or mother-in-law.

Through the interviews, it became clear that the anxieties experienced by left-behind husbands were more complex than the troubles experienced by left-behind fathers. In modern Kerala, the dominant form of family structure is still the conjugal nuclear family, which strictly abides by the modern patriarchal norm of the ‘breadwinning husband and housewife’ model. The worth of the husband is entirely linked to his ability to earn and provide for his family. In Pallikkunnu, men’s failure to provide for the family and their dependence on the migrant wife’s income made them less respectable both within the household and outside. For instance, it was common for men and women in the neighbourhood to comment upon the left-behind husbands’ failure as breadwinners. These men faced stigmas of being unproductive or lacking character, and such men’s participation in household work was interpreted as effeminisation. It is for this reason that many left-behind husbands were reluctant to even share that their wives had migrated for work to a researcher like me. Though these men were fully dependent on their wives’ remittances, they blamed the women for leaving their families behind and giving up their primary role as wives and mothers. They highlighted the woman’s failure to follow normative ideals associated with marriage and motherhood. In one case, a young husband who had been out of work for more than a year due to health issues undermined his wife’s economic role in the family by portraying her as a failed mother and someone who prioritised her aspirations over family interests:

My wife has a nursing degree. Last year one of her friends told her that there is a vacancy to work as a home nurse for an elderly couple in Italy. Ever since she heard that life there is very comfortable and that the salary is good, she started telling me that she does not want to waste her degree sitting at home and taking care of the child, as she can earn enough money for us to renovate our old house and for me to start a car workshop. I was reluctant because I would have to live there as her dependant. She kept insisting to a point where we ended up fighting every day. Finally, I gave her permission, but refused to go myself. I told her that she has to ensure that the family, especially our son, does not suffer because of her don’t-care attitude. She promised that she will work there only for two years so that she can make enough money for the family to live comfortably. She convinced my mother who was living with my elder brother to come and take care of the children. I don’t get into these matters. Women should prioritise the family.

A major condition put on emigrating women was to identify a ‘substitute woman’ who would replace the primary caregiver and fulfil domestic responsibilities on her behalf (Ajay, 2022). In this context, the family structure became important. Married women could migrate for work only if there was another woman, ready to step into her shoes. By resisting housework in the absence of the wife and insisting on the presence of a substitute caregiver, men attempted to reassert their masculine power, even though this patriarchal reassertion by the husbands is weakened by the fact that their everyday survival depends on the wife’s income.

Renegotiating Masculinity in the Community

The Syrian Christian Church is a prominent transnational institution that influences the intimate, social, economic and political lives of its community members. Specifically, in the last three decades, the Church has played both direct and indirect roles in facilitating women’s transnational labour migration from Kerala. Consequently, the families of migrant women considered it important to contribute to the growth of the Church. Some of these women found their network to migrate through the Church, while others studied nursing from the Church-run nursing college in the village. Consequently, these families had a deep sense of gratitude, while the Church also proactively requests these families to make contributions as a way of thanking God. Among the transnational Syrian Christian families in Pallikkunnu, 93% reported that women migrants made annual donations and contributions to their churches.

Oommen (2015: 2) confirms that ‘[s]ince the late 1960s, remittances from the Gulf have been a major source of income for Syrian churches in Kerala and notably, all the Syrian churches now have separate Gulf diocese/diocesan bishops’. He also notes the religious revivalism among Syrian Christian migrants in Kuwait since the First Gulf War in 1990–91, which triggered major changes in religious practices and observes the rise of radical religious groups among Malayali Christian immigrants who faced worker expulsions and socio-economic insecurities during the war. Oommen (2015: 4) argues that ‘[f]or Syrian Christian immigrants, the transnational religious institutions are operating as one of the viable networks connecting sending and receiving countries’. To maintain and strengthen their bonds with the local church back home, migrant Syrian Christian women contribute large sums of money for the construction of new chapels in the neighbourhood, for the expansion of facilities of the churches, for conducting festivals, and as sponsors of the church’s philanthropic activities.

In my interviews, the Church management authorities mentioned that contributions from migrant community members were a major source of Church income. Interestingly, women did not make direct transfers of remittances to the Church, instead they would send the money to their family members, mostly fathers/husbands, who would then hand over the money to the Church. Though these men were mere mediators in this exchange, the money was always treated as the family’s contribution and not as the woman’s personal contribution. The Church management authorities also often used the name of the family or that of the male household head while talking about donations made to the Church. The ability to make huge contributions and having one’s family name mentioned as one of the sponsors of a new chapel in the locality were seen with great pride as a symbol of upward mobility for men within the local community. Thus, the middle-class men who lost their status as family breadwinners used remittance-based donations supplied by the migrant women to renegotiate their position within the community and gain public respectability.

By the 1990s, the Syrian Christian churches in the village had become the largest owners of land and educational and health institutions (Ajay, 2020). Consequently, occupying a leadership role in the Church committee was not just seen as a matter of social respectability but also provided individuals and families with the power to take economic and political decisions related to the Church. As churches became more prosperous, new middle-class families, which gained upward mobility through capitalist farming and transnational migration began to demand greater space in Church management. As more families aspired for positions in the Church committee, internal tensions arose. These internal splits resulted in the re-ignition of the centuries-old conflict between two Syrian Christian factions, namely the Jacobite Syrian group and the Malankara Orthodox Syrian group (Orthodox Sabha) in the village. Until the 1990s, the Syrian Christian community in the village was dominated by the Jacobite faction and only a handful of families were affiliated to the Orthodox Sabha. Given this equation, the old Jacobite-Orthodox conflict concerning the question of who controls the administrative and ecclesiastical authority over Syrian Christian churches in Kerala had not really been a major issue in Pallikunnu. However, in the early 2000s, many families who gained immense success through rubber cultivation and transnational migration began to join the Orthodox faction to assert control over the churches, which until then were controlled entirely by large landholding Jacobite families, considered the traditional elites. Such factional splits and inter-congregational fights created more avenues for men to actively participate in the community sphere.

In her study on the impact of female emigration from Kerala to America on the nature of the Syrian Christian community in the USA, George (2005) finds that husbands in immigrant families who were financially dependent on breadwinning female nursing professionals, were more active in Church politics to regain their lost status in the community. A similar dynamic was unravelling in Pallikunnu. As men began to lose their status and power as breadwinners, they were increasingly found to turn to the community sphere to redeem power. Factional splits and creation of new congregations increased the number of avenues where many of my interlocutors were visibly active in factional Church politics. While earlier, control over Church administration was restricted to traditionally elite men, the past three decades of local development and economic growth facilitated by international migration enabled more families to enter Church politics more actively through the financial contributions they made.

For instance, Kuriakose was a 62-year-old Jacobite Syrian Christian farmer whose daughter was a nurse in Italy. Due to serious health problems, Kuriakose was unable to continue as a rubber cultivator and decided to lease out his land. Ever since, he was dependent on the remittances sent by his nurse daughter. A pious woman, his daughter also made regular contributions to the Jacobites-run Church. Following a Supreme Court decision that recognised the administrative authority of the Malankara Orthodox Sabha over all Syrian Christian churches, Kuriakose was one of the most active Jacobite-Sabha members who spearheaded the protests. For Kuriakose, this was an opportunity to perform his role as the ‘protector’ of his family’s property and a loyal community member. He said: ‘I have never in the past taken part in Church politics, but this was a matter of my family and my community. I had to do something to show that our church and our property cannot be played with’. Transnational migrant women and their families have played a huge role in building the church’s assets and for this reason, family heads like Kuriakose were willing to go to any extent to retain their control over the church. He believed that, as the head of the family, it was his responsibility to join the fight in ‘protecting’ the Church property towards which his family had made huge contributions. Participating in public meetings and protests gave men like Kuriakose huge visibility in village church politics. It also provided them an arena to claim social respectability and political power as donors and contributors within the community space, even though these donations were often earned by women migrant workers.

Concluding Analysis

This article contributes to the broader literature that explores the impact of transnational migration on local subjectivities and identity projects in home societies since the 1990s. Specifically, this article explores a less-studied aspect of female transnational migration, the experiences of the left-behind men, showing how female labour migration compels such men to renegotiate their roles and status in the domestic and community spheres. The study demonstrated three key aspects of this process while agreeing with Kodoth (2014) that despite a surge of women’s participation in paid work and transnational labour migration from Kerala, especially since the 1990s, the female caregiver and male breadwinner norm continues to persist. Men’s respectability and status both within the household and the community remain linked to their ability to provide for the family and participate actively in the customary community activities revolving around churches. Consequently, left-behind men who lost their status and identity as primary breadwinners to the migrant women were found to experience a crisis of masculinity. Left-behind men compensated for their loss of breadwinner status within the household by strictly adhering to traditional gender ideologies and resisting any possibility of altering masculinity ideals, or indeed personal practice, with regard to childcare or housework. This, my research shows, is used as a strategy by the left-behind men to avoid the social stigma against men who are economically dependent on their migrant wives or daughters and who face pressure to take on domestic responsibilities like household chores and childcare in the absence of women. Moreover, the article also demonstrates how left-behind men compensated for their weakened status at home by asserting their presence in other social spheres. In the case of Syrian Christian men, the Church has become an important arena where men renegotiated their masculine identities, as also observed by George (2005).

This article therefore reaffirms the arguments made in feminist scholarship that labour migration of women triggers changes in identity negotiations in the home societies in significant ways. Due to the rising consumerist aspirations in post-reform Kerala, international migration has become an important family strategy to secure upward mobility. The expanding opportunities for women as migrant workers have made more families economically dependent on women now than ever before. The article shows that, as women workers assume the role of primary breadwinners and forgo their role as the physically present everyday family caregiver, left-behind men are forced to use various strategies to redeem their diminished status within the household.

This research also throws light on the impact of female worker migration on the gendered workings of religious institutions. Migrant women have become a major source of income for religious institutions, sending large sums of money and make other financial contributions that lead to visible changes in the villages that confirm women’s contribution to the expansion of the Church’s assets. As these assets grow, the competition for leadership positions within the Church has become even more prestigious and attractive. The article shows how factional conflicts within and between churches and the creation of new congregations at the local level have become very common in Kerala in the last three decades. The left-behind men, mostly belonging to middle-class families, are found to play a more active role in Church politics, which were earlier restricted to men from large elite families. These left-behind men participate in these conflicts by claiming that their families, too, have a stake in the Church administration, because of the contributions their families have made to the growth of the Church’s assets, while keeping quiet about the fact that such resources come from hard-working daughters and wives.

The snippets of interviews with such left-behind men also subtly indicate reluctance of men to live as dependants of the family’s women. Maybe the time has come for several strands of new research, aware of the gender-related problems identified in this article, to investigate further how the highly diverse current new generation of Kerala’s worker migrants may seek remedies to such predicaments. Intriguing questions will also arise over where is ‘home’, since transnational families have room for navigation also in this regard. One related strategy, of course, may be to ensure that men migrate, too. After all, there are already many Malayali male nurses and health professionals who have moved abroad. Additional questions need to be asked also about their social status and backgrounds. For example, as Kodoth (2014) indicates, Dalits, Adivasis, and fisher communities are increasingly present among such migrants. Thus, to what extent are such developments ‘colourised’, taking cues from Thomas (2018: 83–4)? And to what extent are we dealing with family migration strategies, rather than more or less autonomous decisions? Clearly, several exciting new research agenda are opening up in this field and studies such as Walton-Roberts (2015) have already shown the path.