City of Strangers : Gulf Migration and the Indian Community in Bahrain

Abstract

In anthropological parlance, "key informants" are those individuals native to the communities we study who emerge as integral to the anthropologist's inquiry. Although I found many individuals willing to share their time and thoughts with me, I hesitate to call them "informants," for that title somehow seems too formal and oddly traitorous to stand for these relationships. There were many individuals whose contributions were essential to the writing of this book, but those who proved most key were foremost my friends, and our afternoons and evenings spent drinking coffee, carousing through the nightlife of Bahrain, sharing a meal, walking along the corniche, or smoking sheesha yielded a lively intellectual atmosphere that made my time on the island all the more enjoyable. With that caveat in mind, I foremost thank S.K. for taking me under his wing. A pharmacist by training, he was born with a seemingly boundless desire to make the world a better place, a trait readily apparent in his unyielding penchant for service to those less fortunate. This book would not have been possible without his help. I also thank Ashish Gorde and Dhafi al-Mannai, both good friends, and Naman Arora, a student at the Indian School who somehow found the time to serve as my fi eld assistant. Many others helped me along the way:

Circular Migration and the Gulf States

“…Sustained analysis of this migration system suggests the relationships it structures are prone to abuse and exploitation (Gardner 2010a ;Longva 1997Longva , 1999Human Rights Watch 2006, 2009. By locking migrants to a particular sponsor and job, the kafala prevents migrants from escaping exploitative situations.…”

“…Nonetheless, of the hundreds of labor migrants the authors of this chapter have interviewed and/or encountered over the years, there is nothing particularly extraordinary about Vinod's experiences in Arabia. Readers seeking a more comprehensive portrait of labor migrants' lives in the Gulf States are encouraged to consult the growing ethnographic literature concerned with this mobile population (Longva 1997 ;Gardner 2010aGardner , b , 2011Gardner , 2012Nagy 1998 ;Bruslé 2008 ;Gamburd 2000 ). Vinod 8 was born and raised in a village just beyond the outskirts of a minor city on the low Terai plain of southern Nepal.…”

Gendering pastoral power: masculinity, affective labour and competitive bonds of solidarity among Filipino migrant men in Saudi Arabia

“…Many live in the Kingdom for long periods as part of an incipient diaspora (Weiner 1986) without permanent residency or citizenship rights. As elsewhere in the region, migrant Filipinos in Saudi Arabia are subject to a visa sponsorship system that grants citizen-employers substantial power over migrant employees and ensures that the host government shoulders minimal responsibility for their welfare (A. Gardner 2010). The consequences of that sponsorship system vary significantly according to race, class and gender positions.…”

Urban margins in Kuwait and Bahrain: Decay, dispossession and politicization

“…Gardner (2010aGardner ( , 2010b studied the labor camps and compounds housing foreign laborers on temporary contracts isolated on the edges of the communities in Bahrain and Qatar. Academic attention was also directed at old city centers, which have fallen prey to different processes of destruction and rebuilding, erasing both the pre-oil architecture and the immediate post-oil landmarks in a process of 'destructive development' analyzed by Al-Nakib (2011) around Sahat al-Safa and historical Kuwait.…”