When the Indian novelist Benny Daniel, known by the pen name Benyamin, published “Goat Days” (titled “Aadujeevitham” in Malayalam) in 2008, it was hailed as a window into the living conditions of Malayali migrants from the Indian state of Kerala in the Arab Gulf region. The novel’s protagonist, Najeeb, is a migrant laborer who goes to Saudi Arabia to work in the construction sector but ends up in horrific conditions, herding goats in a remote desert.
Benyamin called the novel a literary realization of many generations’ need to speak about life in the Gulf. In an afterword not included in the English translation, he wrote that the Greek writer Nikos Kazantzakis “has said that Christ is not the son of a dawn but the result of the prayers and anticipation of hundreds of generations. I also imagine that it is all the dreams of a society that gives birth to one. … I like to believe that ‘Aadujeevitham’ is the result of the age-long desire of the literature-loving Gulf mind. Or, that is the social context of the birth of ‘Aadujeevitham.’”
Benyamin suggested that Malayali writers had long shied away from sharing their lived experiences in the Gulf, often settling for narratives of homesickness. What was required was a searing account of the wounds that the region had inflicted on the workers. Benyamin’s novel finally shattered the illusion that life in the Gulf was luxurious.
“Goat Days” marked a turning point in Malayalam literature, introducing a new way of speaking about the Gulf in Malayali society. It was the first time that any significant writing on the region had cast an Arab as a villain. Previously, migrant memoirs had hardly featured Arab natives, with migrants often exploited by other migrants, most of whom were Malayalis themselves.
Before the book’s release, the Gulf had been pervasive in the consciousness of the ordinary Malayali, but in nonrealist, almost fantastic registers. From the late 1970s, the photos migrants took on cheap cameras depicted the region as a place of high-rises, top-end cars and landscaped gardens — a consumerist paradise. In this portrayal, the “opposite shore” (on the other side of the Arabian Sea) was a land of wonders.
This balanced another representation, which was based on mere hearsay, as migrants often returned with exaggerated tales of Arabs favoring certain migrants because of a single good deed or fluke, Arabs getting rid of employees in the desert, leaving them to their destinies, or condemning them to immediate death after an illicit affair with a native woman, and so on.
In Malayalam literature, of which migrant literature had not been a significant component until the late 1990s, writing often revolved around memories of home and was published in annual magazines called “souvenirs” brought out by cultural associations of Malayalis in the Gulf. Novels were often self-published or released by obscure publishers.
This changed after the critical and commercial success of “Goat Days” — one of the most-sold novels in the history of Malayalam literature — which finally pushed established publishing houses to take note of Malayalam writers in the Gulf.
A series of novels followed that were either set in the desert or featured Arab natives as villains, such as Rasheed Parakkal’s “The Dreams of a Tomato Farmer” (“Oru Thakkali Krishikkarante Swapnangal”) in 2009, which tells the story of a migrant worker who lives in the desert with a tomato garden and the skeleton of a long-dead camel as the only companion to listen to his stories and thoughts. Another was Nisamudheen Ravuthar’s 2013 novel “The Slave of Arabia” (“Arabyayile Adima”), which depicts the escape of Unni — who has lost his language as well as his memory — from various desolate locations, including a long stint in the desert.
Several novels about migrant experiences in the Gulf that were published earlier and had gone unnoticed were also republished in the wake of the success of “Goat Days.” One was Vijayan Puravur’s “Salalah Salalah,” set in the early years of the oil boom and revolving around a group of Malayalis who had migrated to the Salalah region of Oman.
While its success was spectacular, and its points of departure from an earlier tradition quite stark, “Goat Days” did not happen in a vacuum. Several writers had written about the Gulf, including in ways critical of its policies and politics, before the novel’s release. However, their reach had been limited.
The trendsetting work had been Babu Bharadwaj’s “Notes of an Emigre” (“Pravasiyude Kurippukal”; the work is untranslated), which began as a memoir but acquired features of a travelogue in its final chapters.
Initially serialized in a newspaper and later published as a book in 2000, Bharadwaj’s work introduced readers to different people working in the Gulf — Keralans, Saudis, Palestinians, Sudanese, a Yemeni and an Englishman, who worked as either drivers, doctors, painters, plantation workers or engineers — and portrayed his own Arab sponsor. The environs in the book ranged from the cool hills of Abha to the bylanes of Dammam.
Yet Bharadwaj did not depict the Gulf as a place of labor or modernity and its mechanizations alone. The writing carried echoes of Arabia in a more spiritual register — as the land of prophets and apostles, despite the frenzied state of transformation following the oil boom. The sheer number of times Bharadwaj alluded to the Bible suffused contemporary Saudi Arabia with a mythical past.
While narrating his journey through the desert, at one point he writes: “I felt like I was walking through a biblical story. Our minds were those of the lovers getting up early to see if the pomegranates were in flower. I walked around with the heart of the yearning lover of Jerusalem inviting his love to lodge in the villages in this season of blossoming figs.”
A known activist, Bharadwaj had played a pioneering role in shedding light on migrants’ issues, such as “kafeels” (employers or other local visa sponsors) confiscating passports and the exploitation that ensues, blocked wages, unsafe working conditions and exploitations of migrants by fellow migrants — issues that featured in his later memoirs, “The Sojourns of the Migrant” (“Pravasiyude Vazhiyambalangal”) and “The Wounds of Emigration” (“Pravasathinte Murivukal”), published in 2011 and 2012, respectively.
In the process, Bharadwaj set the template for writing about the Gulf, by centering the story of an individual migrant to reveal the “real” conditions of life there. Memoirs and journalistic pieces that followed sought to capture not the lives of the many millions of migrants living in the region but the typical isolation of one migrant, thereby creating a Gulf memoir genre in Malayalam literature.
These tales were often sordid and sought to counter the image of the wondrous Gulf built up over decades by migrants’ stories and photographs. In “Goat Days,” Benyamin channeled these sentiments and energies of exaggerated tales and combined the memoir with elements of a survival thriller. Later on, Sadiq Kavil narrated the memories of a migrant waiting in a queue outside an embassy to obtain an exit permit in the novel “Outpass” (2014). And P.M. Jabir’s memoir “Experiences Without a Preface” (“Aamukhamillatha Anubhavangal”), published in 2017, recalled harsh days of work and strife in Muscat, Oman.
The realist tone of these works — depicting labor, heat, dust, grime, overcrowded rooms and fly-infested resting places — aimed to make the Gulf “real.”
Krishnadas (R. Valsan), the founder of Green Books — which published the original Malayalam version of “Goat Days” — had written a memoir himself, “Dubai Puzha,” in 2001. Translated into English, it too kept the experience of the migrant central while dealing with the political history of the Gulf in broad brushstrokes.
It begins in Khor Fakkan — a town in the emirate of Sharjah, on the eastern coast of the United Arab Emirates, where most undocumented Keralans made their landings from the dhows, the sailing boats primarily found in the Red Sea and Indian Ocean regions. “Alien landscape, alien people, alien language, alien smells,” the narrator recounts.
And it ends, too, in Khor Fakkan, decades later, as the narrator realizes it looks exactly like Kerala with its hills of greenery, prompting the reader to wonder whether the migration had been as much a transformational experience for the natives as for the migrants: “We drive through the mountain roads. Village farmers have set up roadside shops to sell their produce. In these fertile green valleys where tomato, tapioca, pomegranate, watermelon and cucumber flourish we wander with a sense of loss, not quite sure what exactly did we lose.”
In a flash, it appears as if it was the natives who had lost their land, while the migrant had made the strange land his own. Migration, the memoir asserts, was after all a process of becoming. In the end, it is to the roads that one belongs.
In “Gulfumpadi PO” (2001) — a comic strip series that initially featured in a popular weekly and was later published as a collection — the writer and illustrator who goes by the name Artist Sageer explored the effects of Gulf migration on a fictional Keralan village. He made it a theater in which to show the overnight transformations that migration to the Gulf was bringing to the state, such as rampant, conspicuous consumerism, loosened communal ties, alienation among family members and the sheer weight of dependency on this new lifestyle.
For instance, the protagonist Abu’s father used to be a cowherd but is now dependent on packed milk. His mother is always glued to the television and his son is constantly pressing for more and more consumer goods, such as a motorbike and a cellphone. (This was the early 2000s, when owning a cellphone was a big deal.)
Even though a template had been set, which looked at the Gulf only as a space of labor and migrant hardship, there were also books that explored other ways of speaking about the region. For instance, in “Camels in the Sky: Travels in Arabia,” V. Muzafer Ahamed cast a curious traveler’s gaze — rather than a homesick migrant’s — on Saudi Arabia, crisscrossing its length and breadth in search of ancient lores and landscapes.
In his prose, the desert is not a space of death but of life, not of silence but of tales and dramatic performances and, as in Bharadwaj’s work, permeated by the glow of a spiritual presence: “The desert holds sands that remind you of gold and silver. When they glisten in the moonlight, it mimics the ever-fresh, ever-present gleam of the universe itself. What a lot of light the universe must have drunk to shine like this!”
Ravuthar’s aforementioned 2015 novel “A Slave in Arabia” was also notable because it brought to the fore places like dumping grounds in Saudi Arabia and the job of scavenging, which had never been imagined in migrant writing before.
There had often been hearsay of people living in the Gulf acquiring false identities or faking qualifications to move ahead in life, but in this novel, people acquired new identities through complete serendipity, only to remain in their deplorable state with no possibility of escape — not just from their station in life but from Saudi Arabia itself.
In the last few years, authors in India with Keralan roots have also started writing in English about the migrant experience in the Gulf. For instance, Deepak Unnikrishnan’s 2017 novel “Temporary People,” which was later translated into Malayalam by Benyamin, was noted for its use of rejection of realism. In the novel, migrant workers grew on trees, or fell from great heights only to get back to work with stitched-up bodies. It was a stark departure from the style that had previously characterized migrant fiction.
It was followed by Sabin Iqbal’s “Shamal Days” (2021), a novel with a retired Malayali migrant laborer at its center, reminiscing about his days working for a news channel in the Gulf. It, too, revolved around the alienation of the migrant, as well as the servility of the Gulf states to Western powers.
Meanwhile, the journalist Rejimon Kuttappan’s “Undocumented: Stories of Indian Migrants in the Arab Gulf” (2021) became one of the first nonfiction books to document stories about migrants’ hapless and tragic living conditions, not just in the Gulf but also in Kerala.
One of the stories Kuttappan told was that of Appunni, who, despite slaving away in the Gulf during the prime of his life for the well-being of his kin in Kerala, found himself living in a car after he returned home — because, for his family members, his worth was limited to the income he could remit from abroad.
Over the last few years, migrant writing in Malayalam literature — which now holds the attention of the mainstream press in Kerala — has uncovered stories from the Gulf that were absent in the old migrants’ photographs.
There is also now an active network of literary institutions that have made publication and visibility of writers in the region possible. For instance, the Sharjah International Book Fair has become a major event in the calendar of Malayali publishing houses at which to release new books and hold book talks.
Perhaps one can now foresee a time when the Gulf will become an unremarkable setting for Malayali stories and newer stories will emerge from the region.
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