Perspectives from Kerala, South India* Caroline Osella And
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View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by SOAS Research Online 146 Transnational South Asians 5 NUANCING THE ‘MIGRANT EXPERIENCE Perspectives from Kerala, South India* Caroline Osella and Filippo Osella† INTRODUCTION major problem in the existing literature on Kerala’s (and more Agenerally South Asian) Gulf migration is an aggregation of Gulf migrant experiences. This is born both of a reliance on statistical data and survey work and of the use of such generalizing glosses as ‘migrant’ or ‘Gulf’.1 In this essay, we are contributing to moves towards nuancing the picture of ‘the Gulf migrant’ and unpicking some of the different influences in play.2 We shall also think through some of the factors of difference involved in determining a family’s migration experience and the extent to which migration alters family culture, taking issue along the way with strong hypotheses proposing migration’s transformative or rupturing effects. In this high migration state of India, we also critique the commonly painted pictures of tragic ‘Gulf wives’ and dysfunctional ‘Gulf families’.3 In Kerala, migrants, would-be migrants and stay-behind families imagine and experience places very differently. Strongly articulating with this, we find, is the factor of migrants’ own community. Factors such as original social class and family status, own age and age of one’s children are equally influential in orienting decisions, experiences, and evaluations of Gulf migration. Both image and actuality of the homeland and the receiving state are important, as are perceived articulations with the migrant’s base cultural practices. Experience and knowledge which enable migrants to make sharp distinctions between places and links across places are overlooked in discourse in order to construct what we call a ‘rhetorical difference triangle’ in which Malayalis imagine and pit places against each other. Under discussion are not empirically existing locations so much as imaginary zones which exaggerate perceived negative and * This essay was commissioned for this volume. Nuancing the ‘Migrant Experience’ 147 positive characteristics. Thus, we have the nadu or ‘homeland’ of Kerala for migrants almost inevitably romanticized and supersaturated with positive cultural meaning even as it also becomes a subject of negative comparisons with destination states. The migration destination of West Asian Gulf states, actually very distinct and nuanced in migrant accounts of preferences and differences between these states is generalized into cultural imagining and when spoken of among migrants in opposition to Kerala as a generic Gulf. Europe and the USA is another zone which is understood by many to be highly differentiated but from which the difference is popularly elided in discourse to make it stand (as the West) at a third point of the rhetorical ‘cultural difference triangle,’ against the Gulf and Kerala. We will suggest that migrants themselves hold a folk notion akin to habitus, a conviction that children are strongly formed by their surroundings,4 and that this notion exerts pressure upon ideas about suitable migration destinations and decisions about whether or not family members should accompany the male migrant. We also find that female migrants have a great influence within the family and peer group, and a clear voice in family decisions about migration strategies, partly by virtue of their special responsibility as caretakers of children. In examining concerns about transnationalism or bifocality, we finally move to argue that migration’s outcome in terms of cultural identity cannot be predicted; that Kerala Gulf migration (partly by virtue of the nearness of the Gulf to Kerala), does not necessarily lead to significant rupture and is not most usefully theorized as transnational or as productive of bifocality; that migrant ambivalence about home need not be a product of migration, but pre-exists and may sometimes be a motivation towards migration; and that habitus predisposes migrants later in life towards certain strategies and evaluations of places within the ‘difference triangle’. TRANSNATIONALISM, R UPTURE, B IFOCALITY? In 2001, searching for trends and patterns to migrant experiences, Pries (following in particular the work of Glick Schiller) suggested that an additional category be added to sociology’s existing three.5 Pries delineates sociology’s classic emigrant, expected to leave home and integrate in a new society; the return migrant, who maintains the home country as base and referent and plans to return; and the diaspora migrant, characterized by suffering and a continued reference to the 148 Transnational South Asians motherland even in the face of long-term separation. He then turns to the latest to appear in the sociological record and the fastest-growing category—the transnational migrant, characterized by ambiguous relations to both home and host countries, and with no determined time-frame or location on movements. Pries suggests that transnational migrants are engaged in accumulating (economic, social, cultural) capital in more than one location and endorses arguments tracing shifts in identity consequent upon the pursuit of this multi-sited project of the self. However it is nuanced, a condition of transnationality among international migrants has by now become the most widely accepted first assumption in analysing migration data).6 Some, seeking to characterize this condition of transnationality more precisely, make reference to concepts such as Rouse’s ‘bifocality’ whereby a migrant learns to see the world through a ‘double habitus’, a set of impulses and unconscious motivations which are structured by both places.7 The most daring theorists dissolve doubleness into a hybrid, third space, where migrant identity becomes something more than the sum of its pluri-focused parts—an identity actually defined by the experience of movement and marginality, and the person’s consequent fluidity.8 Waldinger and Fitzgerald urge us to be careful to disentangle the international from the truly transnational—something which transcends and goes beyond the national.9 Studies of immigration, they point out, tend to reveal ‘highly particularistic attachments’ or ‘long distance particularism’, a ‘bi-localism’. They urge caution in any attempt to move towards generalization and point out that considerable variation exists between migrant experiences and shaping of identity politics, not least because of the range of different experiences in the receiving states, where public policies and popular viewpoints on migrant activity and bifocalism may be hostile or supportive. Even a cursory consideration of our data confirms that as soon as we make a statement, we find the need to qualify it many times. Among those Malayalis we know we find migrants drawn from several communities (including high- and low-caste Hindu; Syrian, Protestant, and Catholic Christian; high- and low-status Muslims) and class backgrounds (for example, highly educated professionals; big businessmen; petty traders; diploma-educated technicians; non- matriculate labourers).10 They are engaged in a vast range of legal and illegal activities in a wide variety of settings across different states. Migrants may also have more or less exposure to new cultural Nuancing the ‘Migrant Experience’ 149 patterns, in some social classes and situations moving overwhelmingly in Malayali-dominated work and living spaces. We also find that even specifically and authentically ‘Malayali’ culture breaks up at first analysis, as we find professional migrants in the Gulf choosing Hollywood movies rather than the Malayalam films beloved by almost all in Kerala and by labouring and middle-class Gulf migrants; meanwhile, a range of international Malayalam-language satellite television stations (Asianet, Jeevan, Kairali etc) cater to different segments of the Malayali home and migrant population (Christians, Leftists). ‘Kerala’ food culture is similarly segmented: idli-sambar is a typically Hindu and especially southern Kerala dish, while ghee rice and mussels fry are northern and Muslim specialities.11 And the degree to which migration entails rupture or change is certainly not stable: as one migrant (female professional, Protestant, in UAE) remarked: The labouring classes and the qualified workers are living more or less the same lives as we do back home: we have the same standard of living, mix in the same sorts of social circles, do the same sorts of things. The labourers are struggling and suffering here, their families are still not economically sound, they live in poor housing; while we people have nice houses and cars, but we are working, working, working all the time and worrying about our kids’ education and marriages. Only the middle groups—traders, self-employed, technicians—are seeing any difference in their lives. They are the ones whose lives are transformed. They can make more money, move up the ladder, make a difference for their family compared to life in Kerala. Considering all this, we find that the particularities of one’s positions in country of origin and destination are more salient in shaping experience and evaluation than any commonly shared features of migration. Rather than lead us to paralysis, all this confirms the conclusions made by Gardner and Osella in their introduction to a recent volume on migration in South Asia. They insist that ‘the hallmark of migration is ambiguity’.12 In answer to questions about migration’s characteristics and