Representing the Arabian gulf in Malayalam migration narratives

The largescale circular migration of labour from Kerala to the countries that form the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) is more than half a century old. By the late twentieth century, when migration had become a regular phenomenon in Kerala, many writers felt that the Gulf had not been accurately represented in Malayali writing. This crisis in representation stemmed from various factors: the generational shift in migration from Kerala, drastic economic and social changes in the Gulf and in Kerala, and the persistence of the image of an old Arabia and the contemporary Gulf in an idiom of sacrality and wonder respectively. Reading Babu Bharadwaj's Pravasiyude Kurippukal (2000) as an exemplary Gulf memoir from the early twenty-first century, this chapter illustrates the strategies adopted by the memoirist to imagine the Gulf as a space of lived labour, depicting on the one hand the continued oceanic collective memory of ongoing transactions between the Arabian Gulf and Kerala, and, on the other, portraying the Gulf as a space of strangeness that each labourer has to individually live through in an embodied manner.