India Migration Report 2016

Gulf migration

S. Irudaya Rajan

• Editorial: Routledge India
• Año: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315443386
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Sozialwissenschaften
• Categoría: Demographie

India Migration Report 2016 discusses migration to the Persian Gulf region. This volume:

• looks at contemporary labour recruitment and policy, both in India and in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries;
• explores gender issues in migration to Gulf countries; and
• brings together the latest field data on migrants across states in India.

Part of the prestigious annual series, this volume will interest scholars and researchers of economics, development studies, migration and diaspora studies, labour studies, and sociology. It will also be useful to policymakers and government institutions working in the area.

1 Deterritorialisation of Keralam

Economy, society and polity

K.N. Harilal and C.S. Akhil

With the head placed on the green quilt covering Sahyan

And the feet rested on the beaches of the calm sea

As you lay down, oh Mother, both your sides are guarded by

Kumari and Gokarnesan

Malayalam poem ‘Mathruvandanam’

The lines of renowned Malayalam poet Vallathol Narayana Menon reproduced here represent an attempt to imagine Keralam territorially. It is not difficult to identify more such texts that endeavoured to do the same at different stages of the history of the region. The Keralolpathy legend perhaps is the best known among them, according to which the land known as Keralam was recovered from the seas by Lord Parasurama by throwing his axe from Gokarnam (belonging to the state of Karnataka now) to Kanyakumari (in Tamil Nadu at present). The geographical boundaries of the present Kerala State were defined in 1956, when states in India were reorganised, and united Keralam formed. The political boundaries of the state do not correspond well with the imagined Keralams or with the distribution of Malayalam-speaking people. The main disjuncture is Kanyakumari district of Tamil Nadu, which was part of the erstwhile Travancore, with a sizeable number of Malayalam-speaking people. It is doubtful whether political borders ever matched the imagined territory of Keralam. Yet the idea of Keralam is quite old, at least as old as the Mahabali fable. Obviously, the idea of Keralam always had an element that went beyond political boundaries.

Territory was and continues to be problematic in understanding Keralam. A view of Keralam confined to the geographical boundaries of Kerala State is grossly inadequate. Global disbursal of Keralites in the aftermath of the formation of united Keralam in 1956, especially since the 1970s when migration to the Middle East picked momentum, has transformed Keralam into an archetypical deterritorialised society. There is a large mass of Keralites living beyond its territory, in rest of India and abroad. Keralam is located and lives both within and outside the state. Even though migration from Kerala has of late attracted a lot of attention, underlying deterritorialisation of Keralam is not yet widely discussed or understood. This chapter attempts to fill in this void.

Globalisation is making people much more mobile than in the past across territories and nations. But disbursal of people belonging to a nation or a territory across wider geographies is not something new. Diasporas of the past and present are not the same; they differ a lot in many ways. Compared to the past, contemporary migratory movements are much more voluntary and free at least in the formal sense. Earlier diaspora was far removed in distance and connectivity from home, whereas now, because of technology, distances have narrowed and real-time and simultaneous participation in life at home and host regions has become a possibility. Life for many people is becoming transnational and multi-local. Obviously, therefore, territory is losing importance in the life and times of deterritorialised societies. A deterritorialised society produces and reproduces its common culture both within and off the territory and together. Nonetheless, what is to be highlighted here is the intransigence of the polity; polity remains stubbornly territory centric even in highly deterritorialised societies. In the design and functioning of polity, those at home are privileged over those off home. What we see is ‘home rule’ of both home and off home!

The territory-centric nature of the polity is reflected even in the case of the making of the diaspora policy. Until recently, the diaspora policy in most cases was made and implemented by home. This is not to overlook recent efforts made almost everywhere to involve diaspora in diaspora policy. But what about the larger question of the polity in general? What about the participation of people off the territory in the governance of the processes shaping the common future of deterritorialised societies? The question may sound too futuristic, but not when raised in the context of societies that are moving onto advanced stages of deterritorialisation, such as Keralam. The process of deterritorialisation is quite advanced in Keralam, not only because of the big size of the diaspora or its contribution to the economy but also because of its role in producing and reproducing the society and culture. A Keralite inside the territory cannot claim any superiority over a Keralite off the territory in building Keralam in its various dimensions. Diaspora participation in the production of literature, music, cinema, festivals, media, charity, corruption, scams, scandals, religion, communal and community activities, politics is in no way inferior to those at home. It is also fast acquiring features such as contemporaneity and synchronicity. Still the rein of home Keralam over off Keralam continues unabated. However, in our view, change in polity cannot wait for long.

This chapter is divided into four sections. In the first section, we introduce some concepts, and certain possible ways in which they are interrelated, that are useful in understanding deterritorialised societies. In the second section, we present a picture of the Kerala diaspora focusing on geography and composition. In the third section, we take up an analysis of the role of diaspora in building Keralam in terms of selected important dimensions. The fourth section is devoted to a discussion of the polity to underline the need for as well as possible modes of change.

Concepts and connections

It is global disbursal of Keralites that prompts us to think about deterritorialisation of Keralam. Certainly, augmented flow of people across territories is one of the central reasons for the origin of the idea of deterritorialisation. But, as a perusal of the literature shows, it has wider connotations. Flows of capital, labour, technology, knowledge and so on across boundaries challenge existing territories and push for reterritorialisation (Appadurai, 1990; Tsagarousianou, 2004). Viewed in a broad sense, deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation processes are spatial manifestations of contemporary changes in the relationship between social life and its territorial moorings.¹

Territory and territoriality are fundamental for any system of organisation of social relations. Globalisation is leading to major changes in territorial organisation of social life. Such reorganisation is inevitable because social relations are becoming less confined to given political boundaries. Defined generally, ‘territory’ refers to a portion of space that is claimed or occupied by a person or a social group or an institution (Storey, 2001; Passi, 2003). The definition of territory as a portion of space implies the existence of boundaries; a territory is a bounded space (Storey, 2001). Territoriality is the process in which individuals or groups lay claim on territory. It is a spatial strategy to affect, influence and control resources and people by controlling area (Sack, 1986: 1). Territory therefore is socially created. Territory and territoriality bring together ideas of power and space. Power is required to influence and control social relations within the territory. Political power, particularly in modern nation-states, is organised territorially in bounded portions of space. Sovereignty of nation-states is an expression of such concentrated power over the territory.

With the emergence of nation-states political organisation of the world became nation-state centric. The whole world, except regions such as Antarctica, is divided into nation-states. The interstate system is composed of nation-states, with clearly demarcated territories bounded within rigidly defined and guarded borders. As many theorists have observed, the boundaries were not so rigid before the advent of the modern nation-states (Popescu, 2006). They interpenetrated and were much more porous. The ebbs and flows of social relations were not compressed into the ‘container’ of the nation-state. But the nation-states and the interstate system evolved into an arrangement that demanded confinement of social relations within the bounded territory of the nation-state. Hence, boundaries became far more rigid than in the past. Nation-states are vested with the power to monitor, ban, control and regulate flows – of goods, services, capital, labour, images, ideas and so on – across borders and to govern almost everything that happens within the national territory. It is this nation-state-centric territorial organisation of political power that is being challenged now because of the growth of flows across national boundaries. The nation-state container of social relations is spilling out and leaking all over. As we shall see subsequently, the same problem of worsening mismatch between spatial organisation of political power and the spatiality of a lot of other aspects of social relations can be conceptualised also at the sub-national/provincial level.

Although all flows are important for a discussion on deterritorialisation, the focus of this chapter is on the mobility of people. The nature of migratory flows has changed a lot in recent times, on account of globalis...

Índice

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of contributors
• 1 Deterritorialisation of Keralam: economy, society and polity
• 2 Resettlement of Indian transnational labour migrant families of Gulf: questions of income, neoliberal subjectivity and oikonomia
• 3 The need for systemic reform in migrant labour recruitment
• 4 Institutional strengthening of the offices of labour attachés of India in Gulf: field experiences from the United Arab Emirates and Qatar
• 5 Contemporary Indian labour migration in the GCC region: emerging challenges and opportunities
• 6 Working and living conditions of migrant workers in the GCC
• 7 Are India’s policies increasing the vulnerability of its female migrants in the Arab Gulf countries?
• 8 Coming to Qatar: a snapshot of the experience of Indian labour migrants
• 9 Tamil emigrants in the United Arab Emirates
• 10 Protection of labour migrants at destination countries: a note on the Indian Community Welfare Fund
• 11 A profile of second-generation Indian high school students in Kuwait
• 12 Gulf migration in a time of regulation: do migration controls and labour market restrictions in Saudi Arabia produce irregularity?
• 13 The micropolitics of Indian recruitment agencies: India-Gulf migration from a local Indian perspective
• 14 Gulf migration beyond the economic lens: configuring the neoliberal self
• 15 Evaluating population estimates for migrants in the United Arab Emirates: a demographic analysis of a migration-driven population
• 16 Emigration and remittances: results from the sixth Kerala migration survey
• 17 Contested urban landscapes: development-induced displacement, involuntary resettlement and state violence in Kochi, Kerala
• 18 Cross-border migration and conflicts in Assam
• 19 Appraisal of MGNREGP on distress migration in Andhra Pradesh
• 20 Factors associated with long-distance labour migration: a study on Bengali construction workers in Kerala
• Index