0608, 2019

Results & Trends IX: Religious Discrimination in India

By Caroline Osella|August 6, 2019|project outputs, project results and findings, Uncategorized|327 comments

3 periods of Kerala fieldwork over 2 years. 84 respondents. Mixed ages, provenance, community and class, different migration destinations. Special focus on Mavelikkara, Calicut & Mattancherry. Respondents split by gender. A mix of retired, returned, current migrants. In the free-flow of participant observation and 84 unstructured interviews, I heard some frightened voices and many despairing ones, when respondents spoke about India. One of the themes that came up in many

1006, 2019

Results & Trends VII: Infrastructure (as predicted)

By Caroline Osella|June 10, 2019|project outputs, project results and findings, Uncategorised, Uncategorized|16 comments

3 periods of Kerala fieldwork over 2 years. 84 respondents. Mixed ages, provenance, community and class, different migration destinations. A straight 50/50 split between those who felt that Gulf migration was “only for the money” and those who felt that lifestyle and other factors were also important in their decision to go and to stay. The next few posts will pull out the major factors which emerged from the 84 free-form

0806, 2019

Results & Trends VI: Life in the Gulf – good, bad, ambivalent?

By Caroline Osella|June 8, 2019|project outputs, project results and findings, Uncategorised, Uncategorized|0 comments

3 periods of Kerala fieldwork over 2 years. 84 respondents. Mixed ages, provenance, community and class, different migration destinations. Here’s some quotes from interviews in which respondents explained or justified their evaluation of Gulf life as positive, negative or ambivalent and often compared it to life in Kerala. ‘There’s no communal problem in the Gulf. I’m the only Hindu in my team, but we all get on and we never

0606, 2019

Results & Trends V: Is It All About the Money?

By Caroline Osella|June 6, 2019|project outputs, project results and findings, Uncategorized|0 comments

3 periods of Kerala fieldwork over 2 years. 84 respondents. Mixed ages, provenance, community and class, different migration destinations. Special focus on Mavelikkara, Calicut & Mattancherry Respondents split by gender A mix of retired, returned, current migrants Their response to my key question: is Gulf migration only about the money? You’ll be thinking I’ve made this up – such a neat result. Split straight down

0506, 2019

All Data Is In. We Have Interesting News.

By Caroline Osella|June 5, 2019|project results and findings, Uncategorized|2 comments

I’ve been closing my part of the REALM project over the past month. Now I will be posting highlights from the results. Anyone who works in migration can approach me if they need more details, and you can see the bigger REALM website for details of other projects on this collaborative initiative. My project – ‘The Paradox of the Gulf as a Space of Freedom and Aspiration’, grew out of

0206, 2019

Another Report on longstanding India-Khaleeji connections

By Caroline Osella|June 2, 2019|Media, project results and findings, Uncategorized|0 comments

I recently posted about some human stories which remind us of the longstanding travel connections between the Gulf and India and about an instagram project gathering images of Gulf Indians. Now I’ve received (thanks to the amazing Ala group) a link to another interesting blogpost tracking these connections. It contains some interview words from Dr Neha Vora, whose book about Dubai Indians challenges narratives of purity and separation. As I

2805, 2019

Abu Dhabi – God’s Own Country

By Caroline Osella|May 28, 2019|Media, project results and findings, Uncategorized|7 comments

An important question for my part of the REALM research has been about following up on my earlier work, which strongly suggested that Gulf migration, for Malayalis, is not “just about the money”. I’ve been asking people to identify what other aspects are important to them. Now, UK project assistant Helen Underhill and I have been sifting over 100 free-form qualitative interviews and putting some of our findings into a

2304, 2019

Results and Trends IV: The difference that Religious Community Can Make?

By Caroline Osella|April 23, 2019|project outputs, project results and findings, Uncategorized|1 comments

Mavelikkara is a Hindu and Christian area; I met almost none of Alappuzha district’s 10% population who are Muslims during my 1990s fieldworks. (To round this out, I am beginning to make connections in the nearby market town of Kayamkulam, as I continue my return visits to Travancore). Calicut is a town with a strong Muslim community (40%) and it borders onto the district of Malappuram, where Muslims make up

1604, 2019

Results and Trends II: the Gulf as continuing aspiration

By Caroline Osella|April 16, 2019|project outputs, project results and findings, Uncategorized|0 comments

In Calicut, many people describe Gulf migration as continuing to be a normalised part of life, expecting it to continue, although the benefits are not as strong as they once were. Gulf wages have dipped relative to Kerala; costs of living have soared in the Gulf. The older generation recount spectacular gains and startling differences between Kerala and the Gulf which the post 1990s generation have not seen. But because

Caroline Osella REALM project blog 2017-2019

Tag Archives: culture of migration