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Aadujeevitham: The Danger of a Single Migrant Story

By turning a blind eye to the many connections that the Gulf migrant has to the life back in Kerala, we turn them into a victim, while they were actually the pioneers in forging a new Kerala.
A poster for 'Aadujeevitham'.

As I write this, the Malayalam film Aadujeevitham (The Goat Life), directed by Blessy, is continuing its run in the theatres. The film is another addition to the exceptionally great phase that Malayalam cinema is going through at the moment, with other films like Manjummel Boys, Premalu and most recently Aavesham, signalling further strengthening of new energies that it has been witnessing in the past decade and a half. The new energy included the arrival of new actors, displacement of the narratives to newer social locations as well as the arrival of a new audio-visual aesthetic.

Aadujeevitham is the story of a deceived Malayali migrant in the deserts of Saudi Arabia under a cruel and monstrous Arab. It is a survival story, something like The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. The analogy is a considered one. Robinson Crusoe is studied, by Nancy Armstrong for instance, as a proto-bourgeois novel – as an archive of the emerging new order of individualism and nation-state. Aadujeevitham, originally a hugely successful Malayalam novel by Benyamin, is another example of the biographical mode of speaking about migration that has saturated the discourse on Gulf migrants in Malayalam literary field.

Beginning the trend was Babu Bharadwaj’s Pravasiyude Kurippukal in the late 1990s. Bharadwaj, who was an established writer in Malayalam, drew out profiles of individual migrants and their stories for a weekly column that he wrote for Madhyamam. Each profile included the reasons why an individual left for the Gulf and their usually pathetic working conditions there. This profile-form stuck as a way of speaking about the conditions of life in the Gulf, whether it be in memoirs like that by Muzafer Ahmed Kudiyettakkarante Veedu, or fiction, like Vijayan Puravur’s Salalah Salalah and Nisamudheen Ravuthar’s Arebyayile Atima.

Even as these novels and memoirs could show collective life of migrants in the Gulf, and even the history of mass migration through an individual lens, such as in Krishnadas’s Dubai Puzha, the danger of an individual-focused migrant story is two-fold — one, that it denies the active and collective connection that the migrants had with Kerala, and two, precisely because of its framing in such an individualising manner, it turns the migrant protagonist into a victim.

It is well established now that the backbone of the celebrated Kerala model of development lie in its foreign remittance, the bulk of which come from the its migrants employed in the Gulf. This remittance does not have an individual dimension alone, such as building houses or buying gadgets or consumables. The remittance also took the form of collective contributions to the setting up of orphanages, schools, colleges, hospitals and funds for medical care for those in need, etc. Yet, all these collective efforts of the Gulf migrant have become subjects for the (may I add, cold) social sciences alone, while the literary migrant is hungry and thirsty and ruing his bad fate jealous of those enjoying good life back in Kerala at his expense. Kerala is absent in these writings except as the staging of a deep personal injury, whether it be of a deceiving visa agent, a longing spouse or an opportunist ‘friend.’

Literary Malayalam has cast out the Gulf migrant in a double sense, physically as well as practically. It is, as far as my reading goes, only in Sadiq Kavil’s Outpass that we see the migrant returning to collective life in Kerala as he decides to take part in a protest against endosulfan in Kasaragode. Otherwise, all migrant stories end in the loneliness of memories and to a darkened and non-existent world outside oneself.

By turning a blind eye to the many connections that the migrant has to the life back in Kerala, we turn them into a victim, while they were actually the pioneers in forging a new Kerala. This is the danger of a single migrant story.

Mohamed Shafeeq Karinkurayil is Associate Professor at Manipal Centre for Humanities. He is the author of The Gulf Migrant Archives of Kerala: Reading Borders and Belonging (Oxford University Press, 2024)

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