At home in the Gulf
By Shashi Tharoor
"The Hindu", Online edition of India's National Newspaper
December 19, 2004

RAMESH KURUP S.

At Kozhikode airport -- off to West Asia to seek a fortune.

"OH, you'll feel right at home," a friend from Delhi said when she learned I was travelling to the Gulf for the first time. "The place is crawling with Indians. And most of them aren't just Indians, they're Keralites like you."

This didn't entirely surprise me. My home state of Kerala, with its long sliver of coastline, had long been known for its intrepid travellers. Keralites had plied the waters of the Arabian Sea for millennia, taking cloth and spices to the Arab world, and returning with dates — and gold. Jews from Jerusalem, if legend is to be believed, sought refuge in Kerala after the destruction of their first Temple by the Babylonians, and again after the destruction of the second by the Romans. When the apostle Thomas — Jesus' "doubting" disciple — landed on the coast of Kerala in 52 A.D. to bring his new faith to the people, legend has it that he was welcomed on shore by a flute-playing Jewish girl.

Harsh economic reality

In turn, Keralites sailed to the Gulf as if it were an outpost of their own land. They brought back wealth and ideas. Islam came to Kerala on the lips of traders and travellers, not by the sword. A society evolved in Kerala of Hindus, Muslims, Christians and Jews living amicably side by side, open to the influences of the rest of the world. The Chinese came, and either acquired or left behind their fabled fishing-nets. Keralite sailors went to China, and returned with the favourite cooking-pot of the Kerala housewife, a wok known in Malayalam as a cheen-chetti: literally, a "Chinese pot". Xenophobia is as unknown to the Keralite as snow to a Bedouin.

As a result Keralites are all too willing to travel to make their fortunes. And harsh economic reality makes travel necessary: Kerala is an overcrowded place with little industry, so many Keralites have no choice but to seek employment elsewhere. Under the British, the route to advancement for hard-working Kerala men was to learn to type in English and take up clerical work in cities across the subcontinent. The State produced so many itinerant stenographers that a popular joke said that "Remington" was the name of a Kerala sub-caste.

The `Gulf boom'

So it was entirely in keeping with the Kerala spirit that, when oil-fuelled prosperity caused a boom in the Gulf countries in the 1970s, the people of my home state leapt at the opportunities that arose there. There was far more work available than there were locals to do it, and so Keralites flocked to the Gulf in droves. They took every job going, from sales-clerks in shops to schoolteachers and yes, stenographers. Perhaps a million Keralites have worked in the Gulf at one time or another: it is estimated that they account for a quarter of all the expatriate workers who have lent their sweat to the Gulf sheikhdoms. At one point in the late 1970s it was reliably reported that the most populous ethnic group in the Gulf state of Bahrain was not Bahrainis but Keralites.

Of course, a generation later, this is no longer true. Economies were not the only things that boomed in the Gulf: demography did too, and many of the Gulf states doubled and even trebled their populations, leaving less openings for foreigners to fill. War and terrorism have not diminished the attractiveness of Gulf salaries, but the first Gulf war witnessed the expulsions of Keralite labour from Kuwait and some of its neighbours, and though many returned, the numbers just aren't the same. No longer does every other Kerala family boast of at least one member who is remitting part of a Gulf salary home every month. The Malabar coast is dotted with incongruously fancy abodes rising amongst thatched-roof dwellings, built on the proceeds of employment in the "Gelf" (as Keralites pronounce it). But today there are fewer garish new mansions being built in Kerala's villages. So I wasn't as sanguine as my Delhiite friend. "I'll believe it," I replied, "when I see it."

In Doha

Indeed, when I landed in Doha, the capital of the Emirate of Qatar, to be greeted by a young Arab in flowing robes and driven to my hotel by a chauffeur who spoke only Arabic, I made a mental note to tell my friend how out of date her information was. And there seemed to be more Romanians than Indians on the staff of my five-star hotel. But then, for my first dinner in the country, my host invited me to a fancy restaurant on the water's edge, and I realised I should have stowed my scepticism. The maitre d' who greeted us bore a common Muslim name — but he had only to utter a few words to give his identity away. The accent was unmistakeable: he was a Keralite. It was the same story with the waiter who took our order and the busboy who cleared the dishes. "Where are you from?" I asked each of them in Malayalam as soon as I heard their accent, each time earning an enthusiastic response and terrific service.

The next day I visited the offices of Qatar's leading English-language newspaper, the Gulf Times. I was formally received by the Editor-in-Chief, a distinguished Arab gentleman in robes whose modest conversational English suggested he served as the paper's presiding deity rather than as the wielder of the blue pencil. That role clearly belonged to his Vice-Editor, an experienced Englishman from Liverpool, who duly suggested that I might wish to pay a visit to the newsroom. I gladly shook hands with each of the journalists on duty. And then it struck me: every single one of them, without exception, was from my home state.

"Isn't there anyone here who isn't from Kerala?" I rather crassly asked the News Editor, K.T. Chacko, who was taking me around.

"Oh, there's Ramesh Mathew," came the reply. "He's from Bombay." A sheepish look came over the News Editor's face. "But his parents were from Kerala."

Clearly my Delhi friend was absolutely right. Even Doubting Thomas would have felt right at home.