If you grew up in coastal Malabar in the early 2000s, like I did, you too would have been hard-pressed to find a family without a loved one in “the Gulf”.
The “suffering rich” is what Kerala’s Gulf migrants are often called. It is a reference to the endeavour’s nature as simultaneously aspirational, a status symbol, a ladder to social mobility, yet a necessary evil. The overwhelming narrative of sacrifice associated with Gulf migration has a long memory – one that has not quite moved on from the notions of separation and distance that coloured the early migrant experiences of the 70s. It persists in popular imagination as the sacrificial voyage to the promised land of prosperity. In the span of time when I went from having friends’ fathers working in the Gulf to childhood friends working in the Gulf, the more things have changed, the more they have remained the same.
Take, for instance, Blessy’s Aadujeevitham – The Goat Life, an adaptation of the popular 2008 Malayalam novel by Benyamin. It narrates the real-life story of Najeeb Mohammad of Haripad, Kerala, who has to leave behind his mother and pregnant wife to work at a company in Saudi Arabia. Upon arrival in Riyadh, he is abducted by an Arab man he believes to be his work sponsor and ends up a bonded labourer at a livestock farm in the desert. Over 3 years, Najeeb is held captive at gunpoint and the threat of physical abuse, tending to the goats, increasingly becoming one among them in his isolation and dehumanisation. Tracing Najeeb’s arduous journey to freedom, the movie is a lasting testament to the promise of migration—and an ode to the thousands who have fallen through the cracks of the systems governing international migration.
