The elsewhere people

The stories of eight Indian migrant workers employed in the Persian Gulf region.

There was a story doing the rounds when I was a child growing up in Ramanathapuram in the deep south of Tamil Nadu, far away from my “native” Kottayam. When Neil Armstrong became the first human to walk on the moon in 1969 during the Apollo 11 mission, the story goes, he found a Malayali selling chai in a shop on the moon. Probably apocryphal, but, then again, probably not. I am yet to come across a story that does more justice to the expatriate, and always provisional, Malayali spirit of will-go-anywhere and will-do-anything on a normal course of day at work as long as it is outside the State and as long as there are rupees, dirhams, or riyals involved.

Undocumented: Stories of Indian Migrants in the Arab Gulf

Rejimon Kuttappan

Penguin India

Pages: 284

Price: Rs.399

There is nothing apocryphal about Rejimon Kuttappan’s Undocumented: Stories of Indian Migrants in the Arab Gulf. I wish it were, though. These are the stories, if stodgily told, of Manikuttan, Altaf, Appunni, Jumaila, Majeed, Sushmitha, Praseedha, and Valsala, with each of them “leaving their homelands to seek a fortune, but life taking a turn, making some of them ‘illegals’ but giving them probably their ‘only chance at escaping poverty’” (page 1).

Sometimes one gets the feeling that the writer got buried under the mountains of data he was dealing with and that he could have shaped them better as narratives. For a writer who is also a journalist, the book lacks the sense of a narrative in particular, perhaps because writing a book is more complex than writing a 600-word story. One does not expect a racy potboiler, but the storytelling could have been a lot better. The book could also have done with better editing. In spite of these “deficiencies”, these are stories that need to be told.

The earliest of these stories, that of Manikuttan, is from the early 1960s while that of Valsala, stranded in Iran with COVID-19 ravaging the world, is from April 2020: together, these stories span about 60 years. Sixty years during which man went to the moon, empires were formed and disbanded, entire countries got their freedoms, and the world shrunk to the size of a six-inch screen in the palm of your hand. The one thing that has remained unchanged through all this is the labour market in West Asia, soldiering on, apparently caught and kept there in a time warp.

The labour market in the Gulf, consisting mainly of Keralites and Filipinos, is “regulated” by what is known as the kafala system, where a migrant worker is “sponsored” by a citizen of the Gulf countries known as the kafeel. The migrant worker is required to deposit his passport with the kafeel as soon as he lands in the country and is at the mercy of the kafeel for the duration of his stay.

The kafala system

The basis of the system is that the migrant worker is a “temporary contract labour” and as such has no rights to speak of. As Kuttappan says: “...a migrant worker’s immigration status is legally bound to an individual employer or sponsor (kafeel) throughout their contract period.... The migrant worker cannot enter the country, transfer employment, nor leave the country for any reason, without first obtaining an explicit written permission from the kafeel...” (page 19). And a little later on: “The power that the kafala system delegates to the sponsor over the migrant worker, has been likened to a contemporary form of slavery” (page 20).

Kuttappan is largely correct in his observation of how the kafala system works but for one minor but important detail. Most often, it is not the kafeel but the Indian/expatriate “owner” of the business or establishment who actually wields such enormous power over the migrant worker.

For a kafeel does not often know the intricacies of running a transnational business, nor does he care enough. He is more than content to be a figurehead and receive his monthly kafalat (the monthly fees given to the kafeel by the real owner for keeping the business legally under the kafeel’s name) in exchange for the “official” duties expected of him, such as signing import/export papers and other such legal paperwork.

If, one fine day, the kafeel decides to take over the business establishment for real, there is nothing that can prevent him from doing so. While such instances are rare, though not unheard of, it is not really in the kafeel’s interest to kill off a long-term promising business with a lifelong “guaranteed” income without doing much work for short-term gain. So most of the key players are content not to rock the boat.

At Sonapur camp, a collection of tenements that houses over 1,50,000 migrant workers, mostly Indians and Pakistanis, on the outskirts of Dubai.  | Photo Credit: RABIH MOGHRABI

The other side of the coin is that the system is run and maintained by Indian/expatriate “owners”. If it is exploitative—a “contemporary form of slavery”, as Kuttappan says—the blame should be laid as much at the doors of the Indian “owners” as the kafeel. That little point does not come through in Kuttappan’s elaborate analysis of the kafala system.

Which brings us to a question that Kuttappan raises only cursorily in all his stories. There are as many stories of the horrors of life in the Gulf as there are stories of “Arabi ponnu” (Arabic gold) in the public domain, especially in Kerala, so why do people bother to go there, often selling everything they possess and risking it all?

Why go to the Gulf?

The answer, I think, is more complex than just “escaping poverty”. Indian society, in theory, is supposed to be open. There are apparently no barriers to anyone from any strata of society, if you are ambitious, want to make a better life for yourself, or if it is that important to you. The reality is, of course, very different. There are gatekeepers everywhere, guarding zealously all the portals of possibilities in education, the job market, and so on.

This is equally true of the other El Dorado, the United States, that opened up after the boom in the IT sector in the 1990s. In 2020, California’s Department of Fair Employment and Housing brought a suit against Cisco and two of its Indian employees after one of its Dalit employees alleged harassment based on caste.

A report in Bloomberg says: “The case inspired a flood of tech workers to tell their own stories. A US-based Dalit advocacy group, Equality Labs, told TheWashington Post in October that more than 250 tech workers had come forward in the wake of the Cisco suit to report incidents of caste-based harassment. Thirty Dalit engineers, all women, also shared a joint statement with the Post that said they’d experienced caste bias in the US tech sector.”

Of course, employment in the Gulf definitely affords one a way out of poverty, to break through to the surface economically, and breathe. But I think the answer may have more to do with the fact that for the first time ever, the blue-collar worker has access to a space and society that, in spite of the harsh and often inhuman working conditions, is intrinsically based on an equal footing of fellow human beings and on shared brotherhood (make no mistake, it is a brotherhood).

As Kuttappan says: “In the Arab Gulf, workers are workers. Their country of origin is not a barrier to sharing love and respect. And irrespective of nationality, everybody faces the same kind of exploitation” (page 54). Not just the country of origin, but their caste, religion, regional identity, previous station in life, all dissolve through the common sweat and dignity of labour and the often elusive second chance at life. And that is more than worth going through life with the label of being “undocumented”.

The Crux

• The book, which spans about 60 years, documents the stories of Manikuttan, Altaf, Appunni, Jumaila, Majeed, Sushmitha, Praseedha, and Valsala, each of whom leaves Kerala to seek jobs in the Persian Gulf.
• The labour market in the Gulf is “regulated” by the kafala system
• Migrant workers are sponsored by kafeels (citizens of the Gulf) who have the custody of the workers’ passports for the duration of their stay.
• Most often, though, it is not the kafeel but the Indian/expatriate “owner” of the business who wields enormous power over the migrant worker.
• There are as many stories of the horrors of life in the Gulf as there are stories of Arabic gold in Kerala, so why do people go there, risking it all?
• For the first time ever, the blue-collar worker has access to a space and society that, in spite of the harsh and often inhuman working conditions, is intrinsically based on an equal footing of fellow human beings and on shared brotherhood