“One More Dirham”: Migration, Emotional Politics and Religion in the Home Films of Kerala

Bindu Menon; T T Sreekumar

doi:10.18357/mmd22201615029

Bindu Menon University of Delhi
T T Sreekumar MICA, The Institute of Ideas Shela, Ahmedabad, - 380 058, Gujarat, India,

DOI: https://doi.org/10.18357/mmd22201615029

Abstract

This article explores the Islamic home-film movement in Kerala, India, a video film movement by amateur filmmakers of the Muslim Community. These films circulate in VCD and DVD format in retail outlets in both Kerala and the Gulf Council Countries (GCC). These films are important for their supporting group, Jamaat-e-islami, one of the most powerful Islamist groups in the South Asian countries of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, as they try to gain hegemony among Kerala’s Sunni Muslims through an alternative Islamic public culture. Home-films now circulate beyond their original audience of Muslim women in Kerala, among Keralite migrants in the Arab Gulf, who organize public screenings in social gatherings and labour camps. Indeed, the large-scale migration of labor to the GCC has led to a re-imagination of the moral geography of Kerala Muslim households to account for changing gender norms and family structures. The films, concerned with social reform among the Muslim Community of Kerala, also refract the experience of migration to the GCC, particularly in narrating an emotional landscape characterized by precarious conditions of labour, racialised hierarchy and the kafala (the specific employment system in many GCCs, that is a combination of a contract and patronage) through specific tropes of precarity and philosophy of risk in these films.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

Author Biographies

Bindu Menon, University of Delhi

Bindu Menon Mannil is an Assistant professor in Journalism at Lady Shri Ram College, University of Delhi, New Delhi. She received her PhD in Cinema Studies from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi in 2014 and in her thesis she explored a Sensory history of Cinema in South India from 1920-1950.. Her research interests are in cinema studies, religion and media and Migration.

T T Sreekumar, MICA, The Institute of Ideas Shela, Ahmedabad, - 380 058, Gujarat, India,

T. T. Sreekumar holds an M.Phil. in Applied Economics from the Jawaharlal Nehru University (CDS/JNU) , New Delhi and is a PhD in STS (Science, Technology & Society) from the School of Humanities & Social Science, Hong Kong University of Science & Technology (HKUST), Hong Kong. Prior to joining MICA, he has taught at the Communication and New Media Department, National University of Singapore (NUS) and at the Division of Social Sciences, HKUST, Hong Kong.
He is the author of the book “ICTs & Development in India: Perspectives on the Rural Network Society” (Anthem Books, London, 2011). Widely published in national and international journals, Sreekumar has research experience in India, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam and Singapore and has presented research papers in major Communications and Social Science Conferences/Seminars held in Asia, USA, Europe, Africa, New Zealand, Canada and Latin America.
He is also the Editor of the Journal of Creative Communications (peer reviewed and an international journal, Sage Publications) and an editorial board member and manuscript reviewer for several other prominent journals.

References

Ahmad, Ali Nobil. 2009. “Bodies that (don’t) Matter: Desire, Eroticism and Melancholia in Pakistani Labour Migration.” Mobilities 4 (3): 309-327.

Ahmad, Irfan. 2009. Islamism and Democracy in India: The Transformation of Jamaat-e-Islami, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.

Ahmad, Irfan. 2014. “Kafka in India: Terrorism, Media, Muslims” In Being Muslim in South Asia: Diversity and Daily Life. ed Robin Jeffrey and RonojoySen, 329-345.:OUP: New Delhi

Althaus, E.Catharine 2005. “A Disciplinary Perspective on the Epistemological Status of Risk.” Risk Analysis 3 (25): 567-588.

Beck, Ulrich. 1992. Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. New York: Sage Publications.

Buckley, Michelle. 2012. “From Kerala to Dubai and back again: Construction Migrants and the Global Economic Crisis.” Geoforum 43 (2): 250-259.

Census of India. 2011. “Data on Languages.” www.censusindia.gov.in/Census_Data_2001/Census_Data_Online/Language/data_on_language.html. Accessed 27 May 2016.

Frase, Peter.2013. “The Precariat a Class or a Condition?.” New Labor Forum 22 (2): 11-14.

Gallo, Ester. 2015.”The Irony of Kinship Migration and the Control of Emotions among Malayalis.” Emotion, Space and Society 16: 108-115.

Gardner, Andrew M. 2010. “Engulfed: Indian Guest Workers, Bahraini Citizens and the Structural Violence of the kafala System.” In Nicholas De Genova and Nathalie Peutz. eds. The Deportation Regime: Sovereignty, Space, and Freedom of Movement, Durham, NC.: Duke University Press, 196-223.

Garland, David. 2003.“The rise of risk” in Risk and Morality. ed Richard V. Ericson and Aaron Doyle,48-86: University of Toronto Press.

Giddens, Antony. 1991. Modernity and Self-identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Redwood City, CA.: Stanford University Press.

Gill, Rosalind and Andy Pratt. 2008. “Precarity and Cultural Work in the Social Factory? Immaterial Labour, Precariousness and Cultural Work.” Theory Culture and Society 25 (7–8): 1–30.

Gulati, Leela.1993. In the Absence of their Men: The Impact of Male Migration on Women. New Delhi: Sage Publications.

Jackson, Shona N. 2014. “Risk, Blackness, and Postcolonial Studies: An Introduction.” Callaloo 37 (1): 63-68.

Kannan, K.P.1990. “Kerala Economy at the Cross Roads?” Economic and Political Weekly 30 (35-36): 1951-56.

Khan, Ajmal .2014. “Gulf Migration and Development of Malabar: Re-visiting the Development of Malabar and Muslims, Islam and Muslim Societies” The Social Science Journal 7 (2): 39-50.

Kodiyathoor, Salam. 2009. “Puzhuvarikkatha Drushyamadhyamangal” (Worm- free media) Prabodhanam Monthly, Kozhikkode, 3 (2): 9-11.

Kurien, Prema A. 2002. Kaleidoscopic Ethnicity: International Migration and the Reconstruction of Community Identities in India. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press.

Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Leon. S. Roudiez. trans. New York. Columbia University Press.

Lindberg, Anna. 2009. “Islamisation, Modernisation, or Globalisation? Changed Gender Relations among South Indian Muslims.” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 32 (1): 86-109.

Longva, Anh.1999. “Keeping Migrant Workers in Check: The kafalaSystem in the Gulf.” Middle East Report 211 (Summer): 20-22.

Marks, Laura U. 2003. “What Is That and Between Arab Women and Video? The Case of Beirut.” Camera Obscura 18 (3): 40-69.

Naficy, Hamid. 2001. An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Oommen, Ginu Zacharia. 2016. “Gulf Migration, Social Remittances and Religion: The Changing Dynamics of Kerala Christians.” New Delhi: India Centre for Migration, Ministry of External Affairs. www.mea.gov.in/images/pdf/GulfMigrationSocialRemittancesandReligion.pdf. Accessed July 15, 2016.

Osella, Caroline. 2012. “Desires under Reform: Contemporary Reconfigurations of Family, Marriage, Love and Gendering in a Transnational South Indian Matrilineal Muslim Community.” Culture and Religion 13 (2): 241-264.

Prakash, B.A. 1998. “Gulf migration and its Economic Impact: the Kerala Experience.” Economic and Political Weekly: 3209-3213.

Parayil,Govindan. ed. 2000. Kerala: The Development Experience. London: Zed Books.

Parayil, Govindan. & Sreekumar, T.T. 2003. “Kerala’s Experience of Development and Change.” Journal of Contemporary Asia 33 (4): 465-492.

Robertson, Craig. 2010. The Passport in America: The History of a Document. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Sreekumar, T.T. and Menon, Bindu. 2013. “Religious Politics and Visual Culture: The Making of Islamic Tele-film Movement in Kerala, South West India.” Presented at the American Anthropology Association Annual Conference, Chicago, November 18-22.

Sreekumar, T.T and Parayil, Govindan. 2002. Kerala: ein indisches Modell auf Abwegen Die Arbeitsmigration föderte eine fragwürdige Entwicklung. Der-Ueberblick (March): 47-50

Standing, Guy. 2011. The Precariat: A New Dangerous Class, New York: Bloomsbury Publishing.

Tharamangalam, Joseph.1998. “The Perils of Social Development without Economic Growth: The Development Debacle of Kerala, India.” Critical Asian Studies 30(1): 23-34

Tyler, Imogen. 2013.Revolting Subjects: Social Abjection and Resistance in Neoliberal Britain. London: Zed Books.

Vora, Neha. 2008. “Producing Diasporas and Globalization: Indian Middle-class Migrants in Dubai.” Anthropological Quarterly 81 (2): 377-406.

Vora, Neha. 2009. “The Precarious Existence of Dubai’s Indian Middle Class.” Middle East Report 252: 18-21.

Zacharia, K. C, K. P. Kannan and Sebastian Irudaya Rajan, 2002. Kerala’s Gulf Connection: CDS Studies on International Labour Migration from Kerala State in India. Thiruvananthapuram: Centre for Development Studies.

Zachariah, K. C, Elangikal Thomas Mathew, and Sebastian IrudayaRajan. 2003. Dynamics of Migration in Kerala: Dimensions, Differentials, and Consequences. Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan.

Zachariah, K. C, and Sebastian Irudaya Rajan. 2012. “Inflexion in Kerala’s Gulf Connection: Report on Kerala Migration Survey 2011.” Thiruvananthapuram: Centre for Development Studies.