A black-and-white photograph captures a group of migrants in a crowded post office in Dubai. A man holding a letter is in focus. Behind him, several other individuals are partially visible, including a man wearing glasses on the right side of the frame.
Migrant workers queue at a post office in Dubai. Letters sent between the Gulf and Kerala are not only an important archive of transnationality, but also offer a record of the changing nature of kinship in Kerala. And in building an archive of such cultural products, migrants can be recognised as agents of community building and change back home.IMAGO / UIG
Podcast

Mohamed Shafeeq Karinkurayil on the cultural archives of Gulf migration in Kerala: Southasia Review of Books podcast #19

A conversation on documenting the cultural imaginaries of Kerala and the Gulf through migrants’ literary and visual records of their transnational lives and aspirations
The Editors

Published on: 

Welcome to the Southasia Review of Books Podcast from Himal Southasian, where we speak to celebrated authors and emerging literary voices from across Southasia. In this episode, Shwetha Srikanthan speaks to Mohamed Shafeeq Karinkurayil about his new book The Gulf Migrant Archives in Kerala: Reading Borders and Belonging (Oxford University Press, June 2024).

The realities of Gulf migration from Kerala is not lost on anyone. But the discourse around the cultural dimension of labour migration remains invisible. In analysing the cultural records of Gulf migrants from Malayalam literature, music and visual culture, Mohamed Shafeeq Karinkurayil’s pioneering book is an effort to salvage the migrant archive in Kerala. 

The book draws from a variety of sources to re-centre migration as a lived experience that cannot be reduced to the economic role of the migrant alone or the passivity they have been accorded as victims of unjust labour conditions. In doing so, Karinkurayil highlights migrant creativity and narratives of migrants’ own condition as an attempt to factor them into the homeland from which they are away.

This episode is now available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and Youtube.

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Episode note: 

The Gulf Migrant Archives in Kerala: Reading Borders and Belonging by Mohamed Shafeeq Karinkurayil (Oxford University Press, June 2024)

How Benyamin’s fiction upended the illusions of Gulf migrant lives in Malayalam literature - Mohamed Shafeeq Karinkurayil (Himal Southasian, April 2024)


Where MT Vasudevan Nair leaves Malayalam literature - Anjana S (Himal Southasian, February 2025)


Back to the village: Life is so much better in the village; what are we doing sitting around here? Kedar Sharma (Himal Southasian, October 2010)


Far from home: A photo essay on Nepali women migrants in India - Sarita Ramamoorthy and Laxmi Murthy (Himal Southasian, January 2019)


Indian migrant labourers in Jordon and other West Asian countries have little to hope for unless there is considerable labour reform - Rina Mukherji (Himal Southasian, August 2016)

Graded invisibility: The plight of Southasian women migrant workers in the Arab Gulf - Namrata Raju (Himal Southasian, March 2022)

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