 Okay, so I'd love to welcome everybody to our second week in our Global Fellows series on tradition and change in the Middle East and South Asia. Now in the medieval Islamic circles of learning that straddle India and the Near East, it was customary for scholars before they would get into any arguments or expositions that they first praised their courtly patrons and I would, in that vein, like to do that before introducing our distinguished international guest. Really thank the many programs, departments that helped make her visit a reality. The Center for International Education first off who helped us secure a very generous grant from the Endeavor Foundation. I'd also like to thank the Departments of Religion, the Departments of Anthropology and Sociology, the Women's Gender and Sexuality Studies Program, the Shepard Program in Poverty and Human Capability Studies, and of course the Middle East, South Asia, or MESA, Teacher-Scholar Cohort. I would also like to thank in particular my colleagues Shikha Silwal and Seth Canty and Mark Rush in putting the series together, Larry Bech for his time in thoughtful interviews as well as Sharon Kirk for her tireless administrative efforts. The MESA cohort has endeavored in this series to recover, reframe, and rethink the social, economic, political, and intellectual life of two vitally important and long interrelated regions which modern geographical categories have too often divorced from one another. The broader Arab world, which we have come to call the Middle East, and the Indian subcontinent taken together over a quarter of the world's population. Our visitor today, Dr. Caroline Osella, helps us deepen our understanding of just how entangled the connections between these two regions are. She is a reader in anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies or SOAS at the University of London where she teaches on topics relating to Islam, South Asia, gender, and sexuality, and has supervised a score of PhD candidates working on these issues there. Since 1989, Dr. Osella has conducted her ethnographic fieldwork in Kerala, South India, and with Kerala migrants in various parts of the United Arab Emirates. She is the author and co-author of numerous articles and books. Throughout her work, she frames Kerala in the context of the traffic and movement across the Indian Ocean, investigating the ways in which Kerala and the Persian Gulf are inescapably tied to one another. Dr. Osella's talk this evening is titled A Space of Possibilities, How Gulf Migration Impacts South Indian Muslim Family Life and Gendered Relationships. Please join me in welcoming her to WNL. Thank you. So Joel has done the thanks and all I have to do here is underscore my gratitude for being brought here. Yeah, it's been a very intense and exciting week and I'm very, very grateful to the university and those who made it happen. So the title of the talk suggests that I'll be focusing mostly on gender and family life. As I've been here this week I've been rewriting and rethinking what might be useful for people and I've tried to put something together that will do that but also give you some background if you haven't ever thought about this part of the world before. I don't usually use visuals at all in my presentations because death by PowerPoint is a very terrible thing for all concerned but I thought it might help just to have some visuals to help you imagine yourself into the place I'm talking about. So I've just got a rolling loop of visuals that'll play over there, over and over again for us on the thing. That's a family meet, I'll be talking about family meetups later and by the time I get to the end of the talk you'll know what all those visuals are, okay? So I'm not using them to direct the talk, they're just there for you to get a sense of where we are and who we're with today. So I begin by thinking that migration is often seen as a social problem in itself, right? Or as bringing problems for the families left behind. For host society, for the migrants, for families, for migrants on return, for everybody. We have social policy and law which attempts to regulate migration. We have NGOs and support systems that step in, families who make sacrifices and migrants who get painted as both victims and demons. And in my work I've been trying to challenge some of those representations and trying to add a bit of nuance to some of it by using ethnography from Kerala in South India, South West India. So I'm an anthropologist as you heard and what that means is that I conduct very long-term fine grained research with people and I try and understand social processes and situations from the inside out. So I've done a couple of very, very long stints of field work, two lots of two years residence in each case and then several shorter stints which go from six weeks to eight months. For one of the research periods, 2002-2004, I was resident in Kerala with my two small kids who went to school in the small town where I was doing my research. So since 1989 I've been backwards and forwards from Kerala and in the gulf with migrants from Kerala. In the gulf I've been in Oman and Qatar, but mostly around the UAE and especially in Abu Dhabi and in Ras Al Qaima. If anybody knows Ras Al Qaima it's a very interesting part of UAE. Back in Kerala I've worked in a small rural Panchayat which is dominated by Hindu and Christian population and in the north of Kerala I've worked in a bizarre coastal town where Muslims are the majority. So wherever there's migrants whose families that I know back in Kerala I will go and hunt out their gulf relations and friends who are out there. So I know by now because I've been doing this since 1989 I'm now very very old and so I know a few people out in the gulf who I first met as teenagers way back in Kerala in the early 90s and those people are themselves now migrants in the gulf with their own spouses, with their own children. We have second third generation migrants that I'm knowing now. So this cultivation of very long term relationships with our research respondents adds a very particular texture to the kind of primary data that an anthropologist works with, the ethnographic data, the field notes and that is what helps us sometimes nuance the big generalisations that we get from policy or from demography or disciplines which would work with models. It helps us flesh out those statistics and understand some nuance and of course it brings a whole host of ethical and representational problems that we also have to address and think about. So Kerala it's a great state for thinking about migration because it's a very high migration state. Statistics are very hard to collect and notoriously unreliable, not always helpful indicators of how intense a phenomenon is culturally but if you want some numbers I'm going to give you some so get your pen ready if you want to take down some numbers just to give you a sense of how important this is and the numbers come courtesy of Professor Zakariya and Irradiya Rajan at Kerala's Centre for Development Studies, CDS, which produces some excellent empirical and policy studies. So Keralites known as Malayalis, speakers of Malayalam, have been migrating all over India and beyond for long. In a recent survey by CDS of every 100 households in Kerala there were 29 migrants, 14 return migrants or people who had been migrants and come back and overall including internal migration within India, 44 non-resident Keralites so of every 100 households, 44 non-resident Keralites. So there's a lot of internal migration within India as I've said, much of the migration is overseas, USA, UK, Singapore, Malaysia but by far the largest single destination is the Gulf and the Gulf states have got a very strong influence in Kerala to the extent that as I've long been trying to argue Dubai is less foreign to a Malayali than is India's capital Delhi. So 2.5 million of Kerala's 33 million population live overseas and because of that we've obviously got some pockets of very high out migration and some trends that we can see about which communities migrate and where they go. So again, back to our 100 household, from Muslim households, every 100 Muslim households will have 60 migrants. Hindu households the figure is lower, 18 per hundred among Hindus, 29 per hundred for the Christian families. And you've got to remember as well that that's a snapshot, a household might only have one member migrant at the time of a survey but there might have been two or five people if we were looking at a five or ten year study because families and households make whole family migration decisions and strategies and they will often send people serially to keep somebody back home to run the business or look after property. Kerala is also, as you can imagine from these figures, a remittance economy. Kerala's remittances form 31 per cent of the state's domestic product and most of that is coming in from Gulf migration. 90 per cent, we nearly finished with the numbers, 90 per cent of Kerala migrants go to one or other of the Gulf countries and nearly 40 per cent of Kerala's migrants are in the UAE. Okay so that's the numbers done. So I've convinced you I hope that Kerala migration is interesting in its own right because this is a high migration state but also something else I would want to argue very strongly is that this is not an exceptional case. I'm against the kind of exceptionalism which would say Gulf migration is something absolutely in and of its own. I think looking at the history of connections between Kerala and the Gulf what we see is just a very extreme perhaps heightened example of dynamics that we can see playing out in other places, other spaces. Migrants coming from Kerala to the Gulf, they move into a stratified society with an ethnically differentiated workforce. We might see that particularly sharply there but that's nothing different from the general condition of migrants. They experience a lack of belonging which is to some degree enforced among migrants by the host society. Migrants engage in traffic back and forth with serial and circular migrations. That's something we sometimes forget. We think of migration as a movement from A to B but actually as Gulf migration really makes us realise migration is much more often a circular traffic. People will sometimes use the Gulf as a launch place for getting off then to UK or USA. I've written about, oh, there were the brides. You could see that's a jewellery shop advert, stereotypical Muslim, Christian and Hindu bride because we have those three communities there. I've written about some of the reasons why the different religious communities have different migration strategies and preferences and do go to different places. Part of the reason there, something interesting that we can think about is that Malayalis are working within what I've called a rhetorical difference triangle. So what they do is they think about the homeland, the sentimentalised nod, the Gulf, where we kind of generically put together everywhere from Saudi to Rasul Qaima and speak of the Gulf, and an imagined the West. So they work with this rhetorical difference triangle in which they make decisions about where to go when, who to send, what are the pros and cons of life in those three places. And that can help us reflect perhaps upon the kind of rhetorical spaces that we ourselves imagine, how we imagine space, how we put places into oppositions and contrasts and make an imagined world for ourselves. So one of the very strong inputs for us over the 19th and 20th centuries, of course, into our imagining of spaces is the idea of the nation-state and the border. And I think we can't remind ourselves enough of the fictional, contingent, and recent character of the nation. Very hard sometimes for us to remember that, isn't it? It's worth taking a pause just for that. But something we can do is that we can choose to do our academic work within frameworks which would refuse methodological nationalism and refuse to play into fictions of nation-state border. So this is where things like Indian Ocean Studies can be very helpful. It's very easy to forget that the history of humanity has been one of travel and connection. Not always smooth for sure, often abrasive, but for the most part peaceful and beneficial. So Kerala Gulf connections, which have been shaping Kerala and the Gulf since the 1970s oil boom, are not just a post-oil phenomenon. And when we situate them within Indian Ocean Studies and put a little bit of history in, we understand that. So Kerala and the Gulf, again, it's not exceptional. It's just a really helpful case study of how oceans have linked people in connections of trade, marriage, cultural and religious exchange. So we've got good records going back to the 10th century of prosperous maritime trade from Kerala to the Gulf region. Over the 12th and 13th centuries, it became a commercial hub between West Asia, South East Asia and South Asia. And there was a very large population in Kerala of visiting and resident merchants at any moment. We have merchants from China, Java, Ceylon, from Egypt, Yemen and Persia, as well as from other Indian regions, like Tamil Nadu or Gujarat. In 1342, Ibn Battuta came to visit Calicut, Kerala, and the chief merchant and harbour master there was an Ibrahim from Bahrain. The port town where I worked at that time in 1342 had an Arab quasi. In 1498, Vasco da Gama came here and tried to grab control of the pepper trade from the Arabian and Egyptian traders. By the end of the 17th century, the Dutch had ousted the Portuguese, but by 1792, the British had come in. So that's the Kerala side with a whole load of traffic. The states that we now know as the Gulf were in a quasi-colonial relationship. They were crucial states, and interestingly, they were administered not from London, but from colonial Bombay. So Indians were brought into the Gulf as police force, as customs officials and so on. So we begin to get a picture of a very long-standing, very dense set of entanglements and relationships. A long history of trans-oceanic trade, ebbs and flows in the commodities traded, the direction of the traffic, but a continual crossing of Arabs and Indians. Arab sailors would come to Kerala on the monsoon winds and have to stay until the wind was favourable to return. Sometimes they would marry local women. They would bring with them Arab foodstuffs, habits. So as I've said, in the 12th and 13th century, Calicut was a hub for the pepper trade, which went right around the Indian Ocean. In the 19th and 20th century, timber and textiles were important. Arab sailors and traders came looking for textiles. Mali-Ali's will sometimes say, we were their Gulf before the oil boom. They used to come here for the Indian commodities that they didn't have at home. From the 1950s, and there's some romantic stories here, gold smuggling with the trade that went across. Since the 1970s, people moving across in large numbers. So something else we have is not just Gulf migrants. We also have entrepreneurship and partnership between Gulf Arabs and Indian traders. I'll only mention one of many. Yousef Ali, you'll see one of his shops come up. You'll see Lulu hypermarket come. Yousef Ali is a Mali-Ali who began in Kerala with a very small butcher's shop. He then moved into frozen meat packaging and the export of frozen meat to the Gulf. In the 1970s, he shifted to Abu Dhabi and began to expand from small frozen meat business to supermarkets, the first supermarkets. He now runs a global hypermarket chain with a turnover of five and a half billion US dollars per annum. I've spent so much time on this background. I've rewritten the talk and made it not just about families and migration but to put some of that background in because I just want us all to remind ourselves I don't think we can remind ourselves enough of how mobile the world has been and that globalization isn't new. So we also have records of transnational families. James Onley, down at Exeter in UK, he's done some fascinating history work tracing Arab families who would have branches. They would deliberately settle different brothers of the family in Basra, Shiraz, Muscat, Sindh, Bombay. The brothers would speak the local language where local dress marry local women and run the family business from those places. Ensenghuil has charted the spread of Islam. I know some of the students here will know about this. Spread of Islam around the Indian Ocean by peaceful travel and settlement of Said Muslims coming from Hadramat in Yemen. In Kerala, successive waves of Sufi saints and leaders have come through and helped to shift the way in which Islam was practiced. Since the late 19th century, influences coming in from the Gulf have gone along with colonial modernity to pull Kerala's Muslims away from those original Hadramouthi Sufi-style practice and towards a more text-based reformist Islam. Now, something that we notice here is that non-Muslim commentators very often deplore the decline in Sufi and traditionalist Islam. This is especially true among anthropologists, I'm afraid. They will very often cite what they imagine as a foreign hand of Saudi money, Saudi influence in rebuilding mosques and supporting the establishment of schools and so on. And the picture is actually quite a lot more complex than that. I've not got time to go into it here, but I do find academic work, including my own work, that traces out the multiple threads of influence coming through within Islam, of which colonial modernity is one, which have encouraged this gradual drift towards a more sober, textual reformism. Meanwhile, Kerala's landscape is filled with institutions like Marzouk Women's College. That's a post-16 educational establishment set up specifically for young women to take post-16 educational qualifications. And it was founded by a Kuwaiti Arab family who had strong business and marriage ties with a Calicut family. So a little more nuanced and a little more complicated than a simple story of money being poured in post-70s. At Marzouk College, the relationship there goes back to the 1940s. On the cultural side, of course, we can look at influences. I've put some nice pictures of food up there for you to see that. You'll see that we have Calicut Muslims, there's Lulu's stores, the hypermarket. So Calicut Muslims are famed for biryani, which looks suspiciously like handy, meat and rice, Arab meat and rice, and biryani meal, you'll drink a cup of kawa. And kawa, of course, is the yemeni, a drink from Yemen, of sweet and spicy black coffee. So Kerala Muslims have been picking up a range of Gulf cultural items down the years, ranging, as I said, from food items to using perfume and bakur incense to burn in the house. Recently, a fashion for spit-roasted chicken, which has come in from the Gulf, and a fashion among younger women, one of the slides up there, you'll see, younger women in Kerala are preferring the more glamorous Gulf style, a Bayer Purda dress, over the dress that their mothers and grandmothers wore, which is a kind of less glamorous and floaty affair. I have met some older women who were married in the 1950s and 1960s to Arab men. But among both Indians and Arabs, we've seen over the 20th century an increasing politics of nationalism, an increasing politics of ethnic purification, and that has meant that intermarriage between Arabs and Indians has been dwindling. The oil boom also shifted Gulf Arabs away from diaspora, away from these multi-sided trading families of the 19th century, and gathered Arabs into new nation-states, settled residents, and a settled singular national identity, which absolutely was not the case in the 19th century. So although I've said we've had withdrawal on both Indian and Arab sides into a modernist ethnic purification and nationalism, we can still study an intense traffic. You can see here examples of just how much a part of Kerala landscape is the thought that you will take a job in the Gulf. So the Kerala migrant families that I'm working with, yeah, they're spread right across all kinds of states and jobs in the UAE, and also some of them will move on from there to UK, Singapore, Australia. So something I would like to do is to challenge the very high negativity that we get put by Hindu nationalist commentators and a lot of academic commentators on this Gulf Kerala connection. For sure, you will have heard about some mistreated house servants and some cruelly exploited construction workers. You will know about that. But you tend in public culture only to hear about those folks, don't you? You don't hear so much about the thousands of nurses, school teachers, shop assistants, journalists, engineers, hotel receptionists who make up that Gulf's overwhelmingly non-Arab working population. We also tend in media and academia alike to paint migration with caution if not outright negativity. A lot of the literature on the Gulf is redolent of moral panic and an analytic term, moral panic, let's just remind ourselves, that term picks apart for us the ways in which sensational media reports and public rumour amplify and even construct social problems. So one of the social problems that we've had constructed around Gulf migration is the idea of the Gulf wife and really that's a kind of moral panic about women headed households when males migrate. So academics here are not immune to the same kinds of push that media is subject to in public culture. Unfortunately academics are just a subject to some of the normative ideas about how a house should run, how a family should run, what's a proper kind of life, relations to nation, relations to place, relationships with other people. So one of the things that I want to challenge is the idea that migration necessarily brings problems, whether by family separation or rising expectations around living standards and consumer cultures or changed cultural identities on both sides. The kinds of anxieties that we see in public culture and often in academic culture around those things are absolutely rife with normative expectations and culturally specific expectations about a relationship to material goods, relationship to culture and identity, relationship to family. Members of migrants' families often put very high social and emotional value on migration. One of the things that migration does for people is that it opens up for them and allows them to cultivate some of the changes that they would like to see. And that's not just about money. Money's important, absolutely. Remittances, as we've seen, hold up Kerala State Infrastructure and Development. They also make many families viable in the face of high unemployment in India. Low wages, high educated unemployment. But migration also reshapes lives and social norms and it offers a space where people can manoeuvre. Women who get to the Gulf often tell me that they experience great relief in being able to wiggle free from the newsflash. And the newsflash is the gossip, the rumour and the censure that in small town conservative Kerala will attach to even the smallest transgressions like wearing jeans or taking your kids out to eat in a mall rather than cooking at home. Women who stay behind and whose husbands migrate as single males, they're also quite blunt sometimes about how much they enjoy the freedom that they gain when they get to be a woman-headed household running things on their own with their own mothers or their mothers-in-law without having to run everything by their husbands. Men too get painted in much literature as an abject, sad, single, gulf-dweller. The so-called bachelor migrants who are deprived of family and home they too talk about a range of benefits to living your family life in split shifts. On a two-year or three-year gulf stint several men have talked to me about the pleasure that they have in living simply and freely away from the endless round of weddings, visits, involvement in obligations, intrigue, requests from family and friends financial or other support, demands on their time and energy all of which back home in India as a fully socially embedded man you cannot escape. Typically men who are not at the margins as hard labourers paint their gulf moment as a fairly stress-free environment. Work, eat, sleep, go on the internet. Thursday night there's space for socialising and fun. When migrants do make a trip home between their temporary work contracts it will be for anything from a couple of months to even up to a year. And during those moments of the migration cycle the man is freed from work. He's able to spend some serious quality time with the family and get involved in sorting out all the things that need to be done back home. Many Kerala families have started to organise family meets, kudamba sanghams every five years or so. Up to 500 people, all the members of an extended family will come together with their spouses and kids to celebrate and meet. And you'll see up here folk art. There you go, there's Orpana, which is a wedding dance. So things like performances of some of the traditional Kerala folk arts would be a feature of those massive big family meet-ups. So another thing I want to mention here is the ways in which those kinds of arrangements, those long marital separations, they can help us reflect a bit upon our own normative expectations about love, marriage, domestic unit. Plenty of anthropologists and sociologists have pointed out for us that all marriage tends to be endogamous or within a social class language group and so on. In the end, the love marriage, arranged marriage, distinction absolutely breaks down. Studies show us whether in India or UK, USA, love and marriage, ideas about love and marriage and companionship are inextricably tied up with ideas about economic progress, status, individual development, personal development, aspiration for the future. Marriage is a very future-oriented and property-oriented institution wherever we see it, including gay marriage, our most recent form. So the reality of marriage often goes in the face of our self-presentation, the stories that we tell to ourselves about romance, desire, marriage coming out of pure love. Something else that we can reflect back on when we look at the Kerala split-site family, we can think about the way in which modern European marriage has been a shift towards putting more and more and more weight and baggage into a two-person hetero-monogamous unit. All kinds of things from domestic service, companionship, sexual desire, it's all come to be normatively thrown into a tight little two-person hetero unit. Looking at a different form of running family life can help us see the ways in which aspects of that can perhaps be separated out and run differently, spread in different ways. So one of the things that can make in Calicut Muslim family life even more flexible and mobile is the persistence in Calicut of large matrilineal joint family homes. You'll see one of them up, I'll point up when it comes around again on the loop. In these large matrilineally owned family properties, anything from 20 to 80 people share a two-story villa subdivided into rooms and kitchen spaces for subgroups of women. So women own the property, it's in women's name, women have rights in the property. Men shuttle between the wife's house and the house which belongs to their mothers and sisters because this is matrilineal. So from the evening after last mosque prayer men will stay with their wives and offspring in the wife's house. And then during daytime, men are of course at work, this is men who are not Gulf migrants who are here when men are in Kerala, men will be, oh, there's a tarowide, there's a matrilineal joint family home. So men will spend daytime at work and they'll take lunch in the mother and sisters' home. So they're keeping a relationship with their mother, with their sister and also building a relationship with the wife and with the kids. A key part of a young woman's marriage here in Calicut is the allocation to her of her own private space within the house. She's given her own bedroom with an en suite bathroom which is her private living room where she will be able to spend time with her husband and children in the evening. Calicut Muslim families take Meher from bridegrooms and offer dowry to their daughters. So at marriage, a woman will receive a mobile phone so she can phone her man, she'll get a mobile phone, she'll get clothes, jewellery from her husband as Meher and then she'll get a private bedroom furnished as lavishly as the family can afford from her own mother's house. So critics of this system, the people who are fed up with it, they often disparage it as being like living in a hostel. We're here with 80 people, I don't even know how I'm related to all of the people in this house. We're all coming and going. Supporters of the system point out the company, the support, the financial security, the emotional security that it offers to the people living and obviously there's considerable ambivalence and opinions on both sides, pros and cons, that's something I've written about. But yeah, something I'm coming towards the end now I guess, something I want us to think about when we think about that Gulf split site family and the matrilineal family in Kerala is the ways in which we ourselves make some very unexamined assumptions about the place of men in the home. Anthropologist Evelyn Blackwood has written a lot on matrilineal all around the Indian Ocean. It's been important in the Indian Ocean, it remains common around Indian Ocean families, matrilineal. And Evelyn Blackwood points out that the idea that you must have a man who is husband to the woman in a house and father of the children is not in any way a structural requirement for making family, kinship, a domestic unit. It's a modern ideological stance. So there's an anxiety for us about female headed households or households in which the man is an uncle or a brother rather than the husband, because of this way in which we've tied things up into that modern small monogamous hetero marriage unit. In a matrilineage in one of those houses there will of course be uncles, grandfathers, teenage male cousins and brothers, it's not that there's no men. And there'll be senior women as well. So between everybody the work gets done. The work of raising children, running a house, providing moral and social support, provisioning and tasks and attachments are distributed across various members of the household. There will be visiting men folk, there will be absent migrant Gulf men folk home on leave. They'll be present too sometimes, just not constantly. So what we have here is a mobile family style. It's not the nuclear settled patriarchal small house. It's a mobile shifting family. So that also enables some very creative solutions to some perennial family problems. You've got a young man in the house who's not studying and is getting into trouble. Send him to the Gulf to work. That'll sort him out. You've got young marids who've got no capital. They want to get out of the matrilineal set up and build their own small independent home. Guy can go to the Gulf for three years while wife stays home in her natal family. You've got a woman who's overeducated, got no job, not married, not marriageable. She can go to the Gulf as a school teacher in an Indian school. The Gulf reshapes Kerala families and households. Women in Gulf families are often very mobile, often more so than the men folk. There are a lot of women who will be travelling backwards and forwards, perhaps to be with the kids who are at home at college in Kerala, looked after by grandparents, and then to be with younger kids who are still at school out in the Gulf, back to spend some time visiting their own mothers. Back to the Gulf to look after the migrant husband for a bit. Back to look after the land and the house at home. Many women, like a lot of older retired people, spend their entire lives shuttling backwards and forwards between the Gulf and their house, looking after two houses, looking after a split family. And they find themselves quite happy with the variety and the freedom that that gives them. Migrants also, of course, stay very mindful of their obligations back home and the normative expectations. They're also very careful, of course, about critique in the wider community. Migrants make very delicate balancing acts. They make regular, often daily, Skype calls and phone calls. They send monthly cash remittances. When they visit, they will take gifts for absolutely everyone and send small gifts also via the constant stream of friends and family members who are also always, of course, travelling back and forth. When anybody in your network is due a trip home, you ask them to go and visit your house, give news about you, carry a letter, a bit of cash, maybe a tiny gift that's not going to eat too much into the luggage allowance. So concluding here, then. Without migration, Kerala State would for sure find itself absolutely unsupported financially, undeveloped in infrastructural terms. Without migration, Kerala families would be unable to finance the private schooling and healthcare that even the most modest Indian middle-class aspirations set for family life. Without migration, men-folk and women-folk alike would live lives much less textured. So rather than lonely single men and abandoned stay-back wives raising fatherless kids, I see the Kerala migrant family, from what people tell me about living it, as a complex set of multiple possibilities. And, of course, those Muslim families which have held on to the matrilineal joint house have been, through time, first with maritime trade and now with labor migration, very, very especially well-placed to make the most of those possibilities and to buffer family members against disadvantage. Thank you. Thanks. Okay, thank you very much for that talk. So, Caroline will take questions. I think we have time for a lot of questions. So maybe a student, maybe we'll start with some students first before we get the faculty. Jacob. That's a really interesting question. I think I might have just lost my mic. Yes, I've just unplugged the mic because I took my jumper off. That's a really interesting question. I'll wait for someone to come and fiddle with that for me. I'll just hold that while that does that. Something that's interesting is that, yeah, I've broken it. I took the jumper off because it's hot in here and I've broken it, sorry. Yes, so we have the... all the Kerala religious organizations, the Sufi Brotherhoods and Sufi NGOs, and the reformist organizations are like, they have chapters in the Gulf. So very often, it will be not back home in Kerala but actually while in the Gulf as a migrant, having a bit more spare time than you might have at home, that men might begin to meet people who belong to one of those particular orientations and talk to them and think about, yeah, when I go back, maybe I'm going to practice differently. Maybe I'll be a different kind of Muslim when I go back. So it doesn't, I would say it doesn't shape people's pre-migration choices and strategies, apart from the obvious thing of social networks and the way that people migrate through snowball chain migrations. So who you tend to know, who you're likely to help is more likely to be somebody from your own kind of orientation. But once out in the Gulf, yeah, people often find they're exposed to a much ranger-wide range of possibilities. Also with regard to religious practice. Yeah, good question. Maybe another student. Come on, I don't bite. They've been very bright in class. I've been really impressed with them. So I know that they can. You talked a lot about mobility that's available. You talked a lot about mobility that's available in terms of varietyations. To what extent has your research found that there is a class but has your research not allowed? Right. Another excellent question. So something that's interesting is the way in which migration has upset, to an extent, the existing class hierarchy and for sure the caste hierarchy in Kerala. South India was an extremely caste-conscious and conservative place. Caste is still quite a powerful reality in India. Let's take as an example the occupation of nursing. Nursing is in a traditionalist Hindu term a polluted occupation. You're dealing with Iq and Mark. You're dealing with people's bodies. It's not an occupation that Hindu communities early would go for and they certainly wouldn't want to send their women out to do this. Nursing was picked up by other communities, by Kerala Christian communities and by some of the lower caste ex-untouchable communities as something which yes, it's respectable. We're not going to worry about that pollution aspect. Our girls can go and work and raise the whole family. In that way, certain professions have got an over-predomination of non-high caste Hindus in. Generally, the chance to be able to raise loans or raise a little bit of capital and get out to the Gulf has enabled not the day labourer the absolute rock bottom day labourer extremely poor class but the class just above that who could raise just a little bit of loans and land to get out, make money, come back, build a good house, educate the kids and so on and so forth. There has been amazing social mobility, class mobility. Okay, we can open it. We'll have another student over here. So in these matrilineal alms is that also economically bound or is that... Is that economically? Yeah, economically. Are they economically are these matrilineals? Okay. The larger ones like the one that you saw there, that two story house you can imagine, that's a large thing that's taken a lot of money to build so the larger ones like this have come from families which made a lot of money from the timber trade in the 18th and 19th century so yeah families which prospered during that period would build really large barrowwards the really big matrilineal houses but then there are many smaller smaller smaller ones as well so it's not strictly bound yeah? Yeah, actually one student question in the back. Your experience has helped all of the consequences of this migration? No, you'd be crazy to say that. You'd be absolutely crazy to say that. It is a mixed bag because in both public imaginings policy work and academic work there seems to be a predisposition to look for the negative and to focus on it and to produce some of these moral panics as I said this whole thing about the gulf wife a lot of the stuff that has gone on in that discourse has been born really from just a kind of anxiety about a household in which there is not a man present running the house and when you unpick it and look and think about the fact that there may be grandmother there may be grandfather there may be other people around the degree of panic and anxiety and policy impetus to worry about it doesn't strictly correlate to the actual degree of problems expressed by women themselves so for sure there are problems I don't want to hide over those but it's just that the general impetus is over negative yeah been there and the other way around and the other way around and the other way around what happens in those gulf regions what issues are working and what we do yeah so this is a little bit of some of my research expertise but I think I can probably quite confidently say that the impact if anything is one way one directional I don't think that we can claim that gulf Arabs have been particularly influenced by Indian Muslims in terms of their style of doing Islam what I can say with confidence because I'm back on my own research territory here is that the reformism that we see in Kerala is absolutely inextricably tied up with colonial modernity with Indian post nationalist post independence modernity and that it goes back way beyond 1970s gulf migration moment it goes way back even to the 19th century people were reading things that were coming out of Egypt back in the 30s there was a very lively set of discussions and interest in the movements and currents that were coming out long before the boom in gulf migration so yeah yeah and it looks in many directions it looks to north India it looks to Aligarh it looks to the reform in north India the Deobandis the Tablighis it looks to all the north Indian reform movements of 19th and early 20th century it looks across to what's happening in Egypt and then it looks across to things like the Christian community who are perceived as economically successful highly educated rational systematic life all these kinds of stereotypes about how Christians run their lives and get ahead so it also looks across there and thinks what do we need to do how do we need to change a very very complex set of things playing in yeah Robin do you see any kind of effect particularly in the sort of second or I guess in my generation their kids in terms of they're thinking about marriage so these young women who they have seen and young women who work there are they yeah I think there's a sense in which really we have to stop talking about Gulf migrant families and think of Gulf Indians as a particular group themselves obviously the rhetoric of policy immigration policy visas permits residences is always that this is temporary migration you know people are here for three years and then they're going home the reality of course is that people roll contract on contract kids grow up in the Gulf going to Gulf schools and then search for work in the Gulf and get their own visas and residence permits and stay so there is actually now a group of Gulf Indians Gulf Carolites yeah who are really quite distinctive in their cultural habits educational attainments styles of life yeah Amy yeah totally yeah absolutely I know some women who are working as journalists school teachers I know a couple who are doing business entrepreneurs out there yeah no after generally after generally after you will marry and have your kids and then when your kids hit school age and are not quite so dependent you might feel able to leave them with your mother or your mother in law while you go work or you might manage if your husband also works in the Gulf you might be able to earn enough to have family visa status and shift the whole family out and have a strategy of everybody's getting out and moving up you have a sense of how many more women than men are doing this sort of migrant work in the Gulf no no overwhelmingly the migration is single male migration because you have to have a certain income level before you can have family visa status or before you even want to try and support the family in the Gulf it's obviously cheaper to have single male migration which is funding the household back home that's the cheapest way to do it the best way to save money so most of the migration is single male migration but there are plenty of women working yeah more and then yeah I'm going to ask you yeah yeah oh yeah yeah yeah yeah absolutely absolutely completely absolutely yeah yeah yeah of course yeah yeah yeah yeah well they visit yeah they will visit yeah they will visit grandparents will come out and visit as well grandparents are quite willing to come out and spend three months in the Gulf visiting their children and grandchildren so that happens a lot too but you're absolutely right we have a community now of people who are Gulf Indians who have been born and brought up and there's a tension there of course in rules about citizenship and settlement and relations and life projects but the tension might not be as bad as we might imagine there's a very interesting young scholar Neha Vora who did some research with these long standing Indian families in Dubai people have been there five generations who have gold businesses and things for example and what she finds is that she makes some very challenging arguments about citizenship and belonging and what she argues is that what people want is the right to come and go freely not necessarily a passport not necessarily residents not nationality they just want to be able to travel back and forth freely without a hassle they want to be able to do business and not have to be tied up in partnerships with Arab partners who own controlling amount of business and they yeah so the aspirations and the demands are not for nationality or citizenship they are for ease of movement and making money keeping your money being in the system yeah Elizabeth do you have a question yeah I think it was Professor Heinz I think it was Professor Heinz I think it was Professor Heinz I think it was Professor Heinz I think it was Professor Heinz I've been said women under husband sponsorship so I'm kind of wondering how much agency women have or is it only because their husband is allowed well I think one of the things that it can be hard to understand sometimes is the way in which people here not just women men too everybody here is absolutely understand themselves as connected with their family and as have being in relationships people support obligation and decision making so from from a Kerala point of view somebody who stamps their foot and says it's my life and I'll do what I want with it is acting like a kind of two year old really who hasn't actually understood yet that there is social being embedded in a family in relationships with other people in long term connections which might sometimes involve a bit of sacrifice a bit of waiting a bit of give and take and bargaining so it makes it very hard to speak in those kinds of liberal terms about agency or individual decision making because the whole way in which your personhood is lived is different and not framed in those terms How do you see the falling world crisis impacting you? Oh my goodness Yeah okay so I am way way way off my territory there something is of course that the Gulf states have for quite a long time now begun to diversify and in many cases are not dependent on oil but are now really there as tourism as import export retail shopping destinations shipping so there's all kinds of strands to what's happening there in the economy beyond oil I think oil is perhaps a distractor I'm going way off my expertise here Oil is a bit of a distractor perhaps the environmental crunch is the bigger question yeah the more pertinent urgent what will happen is this sustainable yeah So I have a question for you I know you've done some work on queer affect in Kerala and trans too I mean there's a whole history of same sex love and culture and you've also been tracking the way that it's shifted in this period too and I guess I would just be curious to hear you elaborate on that yeah absolutely so something that's happening is that there's there's both a certain kind of embarrassment about having these big matrilineal families in the face of other communities in the face of kind of how Europeans live their life how Arabs live their life there's a certain sense of these matrilineal joint families not really a great thing perhaps we ought to be shifting so a real ambivalence about them one of the things that's going on there I'm trying to tie too many things up together here is a desire among some people to move into a small nuclear neopatriarchal household that looks like what other families around us are doing and what we see people doing in Europe one of the results and effects of that of course is this intensification or expectation of intensification of a husband and wife bond and a letting go of some of the other bonds of emotional connection and desire that have previously been allowed to flourish within that wider system another thing that's happening is that we have the rise of ideas of romantic love love after marriage love within marriage and some ideas of a cultivation of a hetero normative hetero effective bond which is also then reshaping people's expectations of where you look for your companionship your connection your support your cuddles even you know where you look around and do those things so it's in some ways it's under threat and kind of perhaps being purged out with this new imperative towards this impeccably gendered impeccably heterosexual subjectivity but in other ways the facts of Gulf migration and the fact that reformism will always encourage more gender segregation and more time spent in your own single gender spaces means that I think those things will continue to be able to flourish it's very interesting so maybe can we take one, is there one last question or something that people can't let go before we leave yeah Pinara okay give us the last question what about divorce what about the rates of divorce what about the rates of divorce or adultery or okay okay so yeah so extending single long term single long term yeah what I would say is that the question itself perhaps is revealing of a set of particular expectations around what marriage is what you expect from marriage how much you give and take what kind of relationship it is yeah oh no I know that's why I wouldn't change other kind of things oh no I know that's why I wouldn't change other kind of things but we were just talking about because in addition we were just talking about questions about the question so does need for couple so does need for how is it and how is it that you can do that so is this a community that relationship that are formerly with our relationships or partners and we have other partners in the episodes it's not something that's that's not where we are we're not in a kind of yeah not in that kind of territory I think it's very hard to talk about this without a great degree of detail and nuance because this is really really sensitive and tricky territory and I probably don't want to go further than just trying to say that okay some of the recent queer work on hetero marriage in Europe and USA points out that people continue to invest in it and continue to go and do it despite the spectacular presence on TV of everything from Judge Judy, Jeremy Kyle, all these things everybody knows that this thing this kind of you're going to fall in love it's going to last forever, it's going to be amazing it will be there at that level of intensity for the rest of your life everybody knows that it doesn't work like that everybody knows that kind of five years down the line there's some negotiations some compromise, some adjustment and either you pack it all up and start again or you just keep working and saying well let's try and see how we can make that work so everywhere what we have is a kind of public image of what marriage is, family life this perfected thing and then a reality of how people make some very complicated negotiated personal adjustments within that public kind of image so exactly the same is happening here but the adjustments and situations may be slightly different from the ones that you might make or you might make or I might make yeah so I just want to say maybe before we conclude Caroline will be around after to kind of mingle and answer some more questions if you had some we also if you want to continue this conversation we have I think almost 10 spots in our lunch workshop tomorrow if you want to still enroll you can enroll or register for this lunch workshop that's taking place at the Chavis boardroom you can, the link is posted on our flashy new Twitter feed WLU underscore Mesa and you can just go to that Twitter feed and register from there if you have a WLU password you can do that and you can also find that Twitter feed on our web page which is connected to the big WLU website once again and then maybe the last announcement would be that the Mesa Global Fellow Series takes up again not next week but the week after when we have a scholar from Vienna coming to speak about the Islamic State he'll be here all week just like Dr. Osello is here all week long and we'll have two lunch workshops then and a big public lecture on Wednesday evening also in this space so keep an eye out for that and please join me again thank you excellent questions