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

1907, 2019

Results & Trends VIII: gender discrimination in India

By Caroline Osella|July 19, 2019|project outputs, project results and findings, Uncategorized|4 comments

A project always builds on previous work. One of the intriguing findings that had come up in my research over 2015 (funded by Zayed University) was this: while interviewing Malayali respondents, and chatting with long-time Gulf Malayali friends, I began to discern an unexpected discourse. I kept hearing that ‘The Gulf is good for women’. Finding out more about this, and unpicking what ‘good for women’ might mean, was one

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

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

2804, 2019

Instagram Chronicle of Gulf migration and memories

By Caroline Osella|April 28, 2019|Media|2 comments

Here is an extraordinarily rich and well-curated account of Gulf – South Asia connections from Ayesha, who has been working for some time now on this. What’s especially exciting about this project is that it is coming from people who themselves have been part of this history; that it takes us back to some of the earliest photographically-recorded moments and memories; and that it acknowledges the two-way nature of these

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

2004, 2019

Results and Trends III: The Gulf has lost its appeal

By Caroline Osella|April 20, 2019|project outputs, project results and findings, Uncategorized|0 comments

My last post spoke about the continuities in Kerala-Gulf relationships. But there is another story, too. Statistical evidence and ethnographic narrative alike are showing that, for Malayalis, the turndown in the Gulf economies is impacting people’s plans for migration and for return. I’ve been finding that it’s also true that ‘cultures of migration’ which made a period in the Gulf practically a normalised part of masculine life-cycles in many parts

Caroline Osella REALM project blog 2017-2019

Tag Archives: Gulf migration