Photographer Sohail Karmani, “Photographic Essay: The Fishing Harbour”, Mina Zayed, Abu Dhabi, 2016, via https://karmani.photography/mina-zayed
Meet the Student Curator
Hi! I’m Rachel, a third-year English and Related Literature student. I’m particularly interested in migrant literature and decolonial practice within academic spaces. Today, I am excited to announce that I will be working with the University Library to curate a collection titled In/visible Lives: On South Asian Residents in the Gulf. Through this curation I hope to cultivate the diversity of the University Library collections while creating a space which foregrounds the experiences of the various South Asian communities in the region.
Why South Asian-Gulf Migration?
Most literature and scholarship around South Asian diasporas tends to be oriented around South-North migration. While incredibly important in their own right, I found that these accounts were quite different from and rarely captured the particular transience of growing up as an immigrant in the Gulf—a place I would never legally belong to. The Gulf’s citizenship laws which prevent naturalisation, produce longstanding migrant communities, often three or four generations old, who remain unrecognised as citizens and who must return to their home countries upon retirement.
As a third-generation migrant myself, while I’ve lived my whole life in the UAE, I remain an Indian citizen. Resultantly, after coming to the UK, I often found myself struggling with introductions. When asked where I was from, I was careful to distinguish that I only grew up in the UAE, never feeling like I could claim the country as my own. Deepak Unnikishnan, award winning author of Temporary People, incisively articulates the feeling in his piece with The Common:
“I started putting Abu Dhabi in my bio in the early aughts. It was an act of resistance, which nobody, except me, cared about. I needed people to know I had roots in the Arabian Peninsula. That people like me—children of the transient diaspora the Gulf cultivated—nonchalant about allegiance and flags, counted and existed”.
It is these complexities around citizenship, migration, and identity that felt both personal and wider-reaching, that are in some ways unique to the Gulf and in others reflective of a process of neoliberal globalisation that produces and unevenly disadvantages a global working class, that fostered my interest in curating around South Asian residents in the Gulf.
South Asian Migration to the Gulf: A Brief Background
Often referred to as the Gulf countries, the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) comprises 6 countries, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. The population of most Gulf countries tend to be heavily skewed towards expatriates who outnumber the national population in 4 out of the 6 GCC countries. South Asian migrants in particular form the largest expatriate population in the Gulf, with the South Asian-Gulf migration corridor being one of the largest in the world.
Most popular accounts of South Asian migration to the Gulf tend to focus on low wage male migrant labourers, particularly looking at the construction workers behind the skyscrapers, luxury malls and theme parks that cemented the global renown of modern metropolises like Dubai and Doha. However this belies the diversity of the South Asian resident communities in the Gulf; from low wage and domestic workers, to middle class doctors, lawyers and various white collar workers and wealthy upper class business executives, South Asian residents occupy a range of professions. Additionally, although migration to the Gulf is often understood within the context of the 1970’s oil boom that attracted an enormous influx of migrant labour from South Asian countries, South Asian-Gulf migration has an extensive pre-oil history and can be traced to pre-Islamic eras as far back as the 7th century, when Indo-Arab trade was flourishing.
Maritime Museum of Kuwait. Azhar Munir Din, 2021, Unsplash (https://unsplash.com/photos/grayscale-photo-of-boat-on-dock-EfcB5iAKV5M).
What are the Aims of my Curation?
As an international student in the UK I’ve noticed how people’s reactions towards the Gulf tend to reflect very different conceptions about the place than my own. More often than not, reactions followed one of two narratives: the first conjured up an image of immense wealth and consumerism as seen in the likes of Dubai Bling—a glimmering mirage of a city often condemned as a tourist trap, superficial and inauthentic—while the second was based on humanitarian reports about gendered and sexual or migrant labour rights violations, like the recent 2022 Qatar World Cup controversy. The extremes of the wealthy and exploitative that these narratives swivel between create what Neha Vora calls “a place of fantasy”(1). Often, they reflect orientalizing and exceptionalist conceptions of Gulf societies as illiberal and backwards—in comparison with their supposedly liberal and progressive Western counterparts (2) . In both instances, South Asian residents are made selectively visible, occupying the unseen peripheries of the glamorous city, or understood only as passive victims.
In light of this, my aims for the curation are threefold. Firstly, it is my intention that this curation will move beyond such reductive narratives, by illustrating the richness and diversity of the experiences of South Asian resident communities in the Gulf—who, as Nadeen Dakkak has observed, often simultaneously occupy positions of marginality and power (3).
Secondly, drawing on a range of economic, historical, sociological, literary and artistic materials this curation will strive to be attentive to how mutually constitutive networks of migration, gender, sexuality, race and class shape migrant experiences, including the often underrepresented experiences of queer and female South Asian residents.
Thirdly, through the curation I aim to both highlight the structural disadvantages endured by South Asian resident communities while also celebrating their too often unrecognised impact on their various countries of residence in the Gulf. In particular, the scholarly and artistic works within the collection unveil alternative modes of citizenship and belonging that are enacted by South Asian resident communities on the ground even while they are refused legal citizenship.
Doha. Unsplash (https://unsplash.com/photos/the-bright-sun-shining-over-a-skyscraper-in-doha-qatar-p_qrO1Ygnzo).
Why Now?
In a recent article in the Guardian Jhumpa Lahiri suggests that “our global ‘obsession” with what is original or authentic is ‘very problematic’ and is partly responsible for ‘the fallout we’re seeing now’ in Gaza and in the three countries she has connections with: India, Italy and the US”. In light of ongoing issues around migration where laws around citizenship and national borders dictate who gets to belong to or reside in a place, often at great cost to human life, I hope that this curation will resonate with global matters of migration, citizenship and belonging while also filling in gaps in understanding about the Gulf and the South Asian diasporic communities it has long been home to.
- Neha Vora, Impossible Citizens.
- Vora and Koch, Everyday Inclusions.
- Nadeen Dakkak, Contesting Narratives of Victimization in Migration to the Arab Gulf States: A Reading of Mia Alvar’s ‘In the Country’.
This blog was updated with a change terminology from ‘immigrant(s)’ to ‘resident(s)’ (July 2024)