This story was first published on September 8, 2018 and is being republished in light of Benyamin’s novel Jasmine Days being awarded the JCB Prize for Literature.
Novelist and short story writer Benyamin’s Aadujeevitham (Goat Days) was a huge success that has been reprinted more than a hundred times and has sold over two lakh copies. It has been translated into many languages and it won him the Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award. Jasmine Days is the second novel by Benyamin that is set in the Middle East and looks at the life of South Asian migrants in the region. Here is an excerpt.
The ‘long dream of home’ lies dormant inside every migrant who has to leave behind their native land, whether as a job-seeker, refugee, or traveller.
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A few years ago, migrant workers could easily obtain citizenship in the countries they migrated to. But of late, nations treat them as contract workers and send them back once they have outlived their tenure, keeping in line with the new global capitalist formula of use and throw. This is also a consequence of companies not taking responsibility for their workers post retirement, neo-capitalism having ejected the welfare state concept globally.
Jasmine Days by Benyamin (Juggernaut, June 2018)
This has created a huge amount of insecurity among migrant workers, who realize that they would have to eventually return home. Those who had migrated in the yesteryears had a strong sense of belonging to their adopted land, with the certainty that their subsequent generations too would continue to live there. However, it is not possible for the present generation of migrants to foresee a stable future in their adopted land. They know and feel that they are ‘aliens’ there.
Maniza Naqvi, a Pakistani writer and resident of Washington for over twenty years, characterized her American life as ‘spent suffering incessant blame for an incident that happened fourteen years ago,’ referring to 9/11. That a whole community gets blamed for an individual’s crime is a constant feature of migrant life. This is an age where even names evoke suspicion.
Violence against immigrants in Australia make headlines frequently. The former president of France, Nicolas Sarkozy, recently said, ‘in France the only community that matters is the French community.’ The Arabs have always kept migrant Malayalis beyond their ‘pollution radius’. I have heard of harrowing first-person accounts of the racial hatred faced by immigrants in Ireland.
In today’s world, immigrants are considered the source of all problems. Immigrants who are forced out of their homes because of war or poverty or other difficult circumstances have to live through open revulsion in a place they had hoped to make a second home in.
Fear of migrants taking over economic opportunities and leading better lives than the citizens fuels this antipathy, alongside religious and cultural differences.
This attitude extends to domestic migrants as well. In India, political groups like Shiv Sena foster this antipathy towards migrants. Every day, hundreds of people move from one place to another within the country and each of these migrations reveals a fraught path. Though all communities are familiar with the problems faced by migrants, they are still reluctant to open up to migrants in their own home. For instance, a Malayalam poem titled ‘Assam Workers,’ talks of the travails faced by Malayali labourers who went to Assam for railway work during World War II. Half a century later, the workers from Odisha, Assam, Bihar, Bengal and Jharkhand who have migrated to Kerala are collectively called ‘Bengalis’, a homogenous group of ‘outsiders’ and nothing more.
Under these circumstances, it is no surprise if migrants from relatively peaceful areas think about returning to their homeland after earning their livelihood rather than suffer ignominy.
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Migration is largely seen as migration of labour class and refugees from third-world countries to first-world countries. But this is also the age of reverse migrations. With the entry of multinational companies and factories in third-world countries, people from the developed world are posted in third-world countries as managers and supervisors. Many Japanese companies have been setting up shop in India, while others are headed to China. Silicon Valley companies are not only moving to Bengaluru but also to smaller cities Thiruvananthapuram. An Indian living in India could be working for a German, Japanese, or American company. Along with globalization, this reverse migration has led to the availability of first-world amenities in countries like India.
But despite all this, as of 2017, India has the highest number of emigrants, overtaking Mexico. Of the 258 million migrants around the world, 17 million are persons born in India.
Immigrants overcome the various complexities of their lives by building an ‘imaginary homeland’, as Salman Rushdie put it. In many a Gulf street, one can see shop names in Malayalam. Many restaurants are named after villages back home. This is the creation of an imaginary village.
Technological changes in communication have played a role in bringing the migrants virtually close to their homeland, beyond their make-believe world. During the days of snail mail and telegrams, the migrant’s language and land were a distant, inaccessible dream. But now, updates on homeland can reach a migrant round the clock.
Earlier, those who had migrated had to return home to savour the food they had grown up with. Till their return, it remained a nostalgia-filled craving. Today, everything is available in the city of their residence—be it masala dosa in Melbourne or idli in Houston.
Despite the second-citizen treatment in other countries, this virtual closeness of a homeland could be a reason for the huge jump in migrations from India since 2005. There is no major increase in the emigration of any particular minority group from India (like how the Sikhs emigrated in droves in the eighties), and hence this cannot be a reaction to the prevailing political scenario.
Despite the tightening of immigration and labour laws in many countries, the Indian immigrant story persists.
Excerpted with permission from Jasmine Days by Benyamin (Juggernaut, June 2018).