South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies

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‘Pravasi Really Means Absence’: Gulf-Pravasis

as Spectral Figures in Deepak Unnikrishnan’s
Temporary People

Priya Menon

To cite this article: Priya Menon (2020): ‘Pravasi Really Means Absence’: Gulf-Pravasis as
Spectral Figures in Deepak Unnikrishnan’s Temporary�People, South Asia: Journal of South Asian
Studies, DOI: 10.1080/00856401.2020.1719628

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2020.1719628

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SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES
https://doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2020.1719628

ARTICLE

‘Pravasi Really Means Absence’: Gulf-Pravasis as Spectral

Figures in Deepak Unnikrishnan’s Temporary People
Priya Menon
Department of English, Troy University, Troy, AL, USA

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
Deepak Unnikrishnan’s debut text, Temporary People, attempts to Absence; Deepak
explore certain vulnerabilities and anxieties of transience that Unnikrishnan; emigrant
accompany emigrants to the Gulf Cooperation Council countries, literature from Gulf
Cooperation Council
where citizenship is not an option. By representing one of the countries; Gulf diaspora;
largest Gulf diaspora in contemporary history—the Keralan emi- Kerala; pravasi;
grants or pravasis—as spectral figures and as absence-presences temporary people
that signal a non-present presence in the Gulf, Unnikrishnan’s
book attempts to retrieve and register their occulted histories on
the Gulf landscape. In particular, this article explores how, by cre-
ating a Keralan Gulf-pravasi spectre, Unnikrishnan critically
engages with a more varied version of Gulf diasporic experience
and, therefore, a more complex definition of emigration itself.

There exists this city built by labor, mostly men, who disappear after their respective
buildings are made. Once the last brick is laid, the glass spotless, the elevators
functional, the plumbing operational, the laborers, every single one of them, begin to
fade, before disappearing completely. Some believe the men become ghosts, haunting the
façade they helped build. When visiting, take note. If you are outside, and there are
buildings nearby, ghosts may already be falling, may even have landed on your person.
Deepak Unnikrishnan, Temporary People1
The bordered themes of displacement and repatriation echo in many works of contem-
porary global diasporic literature. For example, Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss,
Sunjeev Sahota’s The Year of the Runaways, Helena Viramontes’ Under the Feet of Jesus
and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth have all attempted to explore issues of immigration in
various contexts, producing characters that shape and reshape their own identities in
foreign lands. However, Deepak Unnikrishnan’s debut work, Temporary People, exam-
ines an important thread in the fabric of emigration discourse because it focuses on
those euphemistically called ‘guest workers’ who go to the Gulf Cooperation Council
countries (hereafter referred to as the Gulf) for employment.2 Building on works such

CONTACT Priya Menon pmenon@troy.edu

1. Deepak Unnikrishnan, Temporary People (New York: Restless Books, 2017) p. 3.
2. Generally referred to as the Gulf, the GCC states consist of all the Arabian Gulf countries except Yemen (i.e.
Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates).

ß 2020 South Asian Studies Association of Australia

2 P. MENON

as Saud Al Sanaousi’s The Bamboo Stalk and Mia Alvar’s In the Country, which empha-
sise the marginalisation of first- and second-generation Filipino migrants in the Gulf,
Unnikrishnan follows the lives of Keralan emigrant workers and their families in the
Gulf. In a loosely connected thread of 28 genre-defying texts (short stories, poems,
plays, reflections, lists, sketches), Temporary People counts the cost of emigration and
registers its lost promises and possibilities.
Emerging primarily from the South Indian state of Kerala, the economic emigrants,
called Gulf-pravasis (Malayalam for emigrants to the Gulf), are bound by the Kafala
system of contractual labour, which requires them to leave the Gulf after a set period.
Renewal of these contracts is possible, in fact often the norm, and now new second and
third generations of Gulf-pravasis live in these Arabian cities of the Gulf, but on
dependent or work visas—on perpetual transience, programmed to leave. Unlike some
diasporic communities in the West, emigration to the Gulf does not offer the security
of citizenship (civil, political or social), nor venues for social and cultural assimilation.
Although this Kafala contract-based emigration has no doubt offered economic viabil-
ity and related agency to Gulf emigrants and their progeny, both in the Gulf and in
Kerala, it is the impossibility of their permanence in the country they have laboured to
raise that inflicts on them certain vulnerabilities which permeate their identification,
cultural production and sense of (un)belonging.
For Unnikrishnan, the primary differences between other emigrants and Gulf-
pravasis are the perpetual anxieties of transience and temporality that accompany the
latter. This difference is also what sets Unnikrishnan’s text apart from other—though
few—works by Keralan writers such as Benyamin’s Goat Days3 or Joy C. Raphael’s
Slaves of Saudis.4 They focus on marginalisation and abuse of the Kafala system of
labour exploitation, rather than the nuances of displacement represented in the quotid-
ian lives of Gulf emigrants. Part of the force of Unnikrishnan’s book is the author’s
capacity to document new epistemologies of a diaspora that at once seem obvious. His
ultimate objective, however, is to take what is the sine qua non of emigration—
absence—and make it the central perspective from which all other accompaniments to
this emigration proceed. From its haunting preface that alludes to the many ghostly
presences in the form of Gulf-pravasis to the pithy definition provided by a grand-
mother that being a pravasi ‘always meant absence’,5 Temporary People is an attempt
to make visible the presence of a spectral absence in the capital city of the United Arab
Emirates, Abu Dhabi. Jacques Derrida claims that ‘the Specter, as its name indicates, is
the frequency of a certain visibility. But the visibility of the invisible’.6 The frequency
here not only applies to the recurrent omission of Gulf-pravasis from state/national
narratives of both home and host countries, but also to the vulnerabilities associated
with the frequency with which they can each be replaced or repatriated. Using
Derrida’s concept of spectrality, I argue that Unnikrishnan’s Gulf-pravasis are spectral
figures, non-present presences who represent the intersection of popular tales of Gulf
emigration history and the abject realities of a harsh non-citizenry life. This results in

3. Benyamin, Goat Days, Joseph Koyippally (trans.) (New Delhi: Penguin, 2008).
4. Joy C. Raphael, Slaves of Saudis: Terrorisation of Foreign Workers (Mumbai: Zen, 2013).
5. Unnikrishnan, Temporary People, p. 186.
6. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, Peggy
Kamuf (trans.) (New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 100.
 SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES 3

the predicament of (un)belonging, thereby establishing a relationship between place,

history and memory. Unnikrishnan attempts to recover occulted histories by creating a
Gulf-pravasi spectre through the narrative device of uncanny repetitions to recreate a
more inclusive version of Gulf diasporic experience and, therefore, a more complex
definition of emigration itself.
When Unnikrishnan’s characters in the Gulf confront terror, violence or indif-
ference because of the passports they carry and the imported tongues they speak,
they implore us to examine and reinterpret the ethico-political practices of a land
that is paradoxically inhabited primarily by people from elsewhere. Non-citizens
are a significant part of the Gulf’s population: for instance, over 90 percent of the
population of the UAE and Qatar are immigrants.7 More specifically, a recent sur-
vey estimates that more than 2.28 million Keralan pravasis live in the
Arab world.8 Such mass migration has not only allowed for the rapid economic
expansion of the Gulf countries, but has also produced a number of cultural and
socio-economic consequences for Kerala: while Kerala boasts an exceptionally high
economic remittance rate from the Gulf, it also registers an alarming suicide rate
among Gulf expatriates and their immediate families. Some Keralan newspapers
have reported instances of exploitation of emigrant workers that range from mis-
treatment in the workplace to trafficking into forced labour, and even death while
trying to escape. Reports reveal that migrant workers in the Gulf are often sub-
jected to extremely long working hours without overtime pay or rest days, incom-
plete and irregular payment of wages, physical and sexual abuse, poor living
conditions, inability to practise their religion, and even restrictions on their free-
dom of movement leading to physical and psychological trauma.9
How do these emigrants disseminate information about their lives in the Gulf? How
are their experiences registered in the socio-political, cultural and literary fabric of
Kerala? How are or, even, are their voices represented in the wider academic literature
of global literary studies? Currently, much of the existing scholarship on migration to
the Gulf resides in social sciences and film studies.10 Gulf emigration has also produced
some Malayalam literature in the form of memoirs, folk songs, television series and
movies in Kerala, chiefly in Malayalam.11 However, despite the above-mentioned
exceptions that primarily deal with abuse and exploitation of migrant workers in the
Gulf, a substantial academic analysis within the humanities that is attentive to the het-
erogeneity of the experiences of one of the largest migrant groups to the Gulf—‘where

7. Attiya Ahmad, ‘Beyond Labor: Foreign Residents in the Gulf States’, in Mehran Kamrava and Zahra Babar (eds),
Migrant Labor in the Gulf (Doha: Center for International and Regional Studies, Georgetown School of Foreign
Service Qatar, 2011), pp. 21–40.
8. A. Didar Singh and S. Irudaya Rajan, ‘The Political Economy of Migration in Indian States’, in Politics of Migration
(New York: Routledge, 2016), p. 133.
9. See, for instance, ‘Qatar Migrant Workers Are Still Being Exploited, Says Amnesty Report’, The Guardian (26 Sept.
2018) [https://www.theguardian.com/football/2018/sep/26/qatar-world-cup-workers-still-exploited-says-amnesty-
report, accessed 25 Jan. 2019].
10. Scholars in the social sciences such as S. Irudaya Rajan, K.C. Zachariah and Neha Vora have contributed
immensely to this field. For film studies, see D.S. Mini, ‘Public Interest Television and Social Responsibility: The
Search for the Missing Person in Indian Television’, in International Journal of Digital Television, Vol. 7, no. 2
(2016), pp. 173–91.
11. Examples of movies are Arabikadha, Gaddhama and Pathemari.
4 P. MENON

joy gets as much scrutiny as pain’12—and its resultant cultural representations and its
consequences are largely absent. How might one unearth the histories of an area that
does not encourage, let alone allow, expression of dissent? More importantly, how can
occulted aspects of the everyday lived experiences of its population be made evident
and preserved for a larger audience? Unnikrishnan writes: ‘When I started reading his-
tory and reportage [of the UAE], I realised that my experience of home wasn’t being
documented. That made me mad because something was being erased … . I couldn’t
find my mother and father. I felt that it mattered’.13 Temporary People examines this
absence, together with the ensuing anxieties of transience associated with the predica-
ment of (un)belonging, providing Unnikrishnan with a fertile space to aid artistic rep-
resentations of a heterogeneous Gulf identity.
Unnikrishnan, however, is wary of the use of transactional jargon that could conceal
issues within, as he claimed in an interview about his Gulf characters: ‘It’s interesting
that you call the people who populate my book transnational. I am not sure what they
are but transnational feels like a stretch, or some form of happy lie’.14 Thus existing
scholarship that explicitly relies on demographic facts and economic structures only
provides a singular and controlling privileging of a Gulf history of economic and finan-
cial politics; this in turn both justifies the many gross injustices of institutionalised dis-
crimination based on race and nationality, and also makes visible a significant lacuna—
that of the pitfalls of not humanising the Gulf-pravasi experience. Unnikrishnan is crit-
ical of such an approach, as he discusses in the chapter ‘In Mussafah Grew People’: a
team of scientists harvests canned Malayali (Keralan) men who have been ‘cerebrally
customized’ on secret farms in industrial-size greenhouses for labour, for their
‘hardiness’.15 Such an outlook—one that focuses on mass production and consumption
or on supply and demand—grossly oversimplifies and misrepresents Gulf-pravasi iden-
tity construction and limits its historiography. Unnikrishnan also illustrates this in
Book 1, Chapter 9, entitled ‘Akbaar: Exodus’, which he begins with dry statistical data:
‘41,282 brown men and women in their sixties, pravasis, every single one of them will
leave the United Arab Emirates in the middle of June. 65 percent of them have lived in
the Emirates for over two decades, 18,964 of them will board planes from Abu Dhabi
International Airport’.16 The fact that the central character, Vasudevan, obtains an
extension and so does not leave on the said date (but will eventually have to leave, of
course) derides and dismantles the exactitude of the quoted 41,282 people who were to
leave, thereby challenging assertions received simply by quantitative data mining.
Recently, scholars in the social sciences focusing on migrant labour in the Gulf have
implored us to move away from the rhetoric of labour exploitation that overlooks the
positive experiences of expatriates in the Gulf. Filippo and Caroline Osella have created
the conceptual category of the ‘gulfan’ and his many incarnations. The gulfan moves
from being a naïve payyan to an imagined state of wealthy maturity through Gulf

12. Unnikrishnan, email communication, 27 Dec. 2018.

13. Whitney Curry Wimbish, ‘Deepak Unnikrishnan: We Didn’t Talk About Pain’, in Guernica (30 Oct. 2017) [https://
www.guernicamag.com, accessed 3 Jan. 2018], para. 23.
14. Veronica Scott Esposito, ‘Four Questions for Deepak Unnikrishnan on Temporary People’, in Conversational
Reading (4 April 2017), para. 5.
15. Unnikrishnan, Temporary People, p. 51.
16. Ibid., p. 83.
 SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES 5

emigration, connoting a positive experience through financial success.17 The Osellas

explore the complexity and ambiguity of treating Gulf migrants as transnational labour
migrants who are outside the sphere of Gulf national identity (citizenship), but who
are very much inside its open market economy.
Similarly, in Impossible Citizens: Dubai’s Indian Diaspora,18 Neha Vora makes
migrant communities in the Gulf visible with her argument that though they can never
be formal citizens, Indians are in fact the ‘quintessential citizens of Dubai through their
informal modes of being’. Vora claims that though citizenship is considered as confer-
ring the right to participate in the public sphere, Gulf migrants who are denied formal
citizenship do nevertheless participate in the public sphere through their negotiations
of the city as a space of consumption. In fact, when Vora cites Agamben to examine
citizenship for Indians and their consequent exclusionary mode of existence as an
exception, she conjures up the spectral absent presence of the vulnerabilities associated
with temporariness that Unnikrishnan ascribes to Gulf-pravasis.19 Gulf migrants may
have an exclusive mode of existence, as Vora claims, but Unnikrishnan’s focus is on
the disconcerting homelessness ensuing from the absence of a formal recognition of
citizenry they deserve for their labour, which creates anxieties of transience.
Andrew Gardner’s research is more in line with what Unnikrishnan sets out to
explore in his fiction.20 In ‘Why Do They Keep Coming?’, he infers that the only posi-
tive feature of Gulf migration for South Asians is their escape from economic pov-
erty.21 According to Gardner, emigration to the Gulf is a form of structural violence
that reveals South Asian workers’ lack of agency because even the very decision to emi-
grate is made for them at the insistence of their families.22 Gardner elaborates the
machinery of structural violence as including ‘pre-established debts with which most
transmigrants arrive, the sponsor’s control of the worker’s passport, the linguistic and
cultural barriers maintained by citizens and state, and the governance of workers’
movement on the island [of Bahrain]’.23 The repressive and comprehensive dominance
of this systemic violence no doubt capitalises on foreign labour in the Gulf.
Praveena Kodoth points to the Kafala system, together with the migrant labourers’
own civil society compatriots, as the cause for the mistreatment of Gulf-pravasis,
emphasising that along with ‘informal recruiting agents that charge substantial fees’ for
a visa, the Kafala system of sponsorship ‘endows sponsors-employers with extraordin-
ary powers over immigrant workers, [and] the lack of support from Indian embassies
reinforces structural violence’.24 The violence provides a conceptual framework that

17. Filippo and Caroline Osella, ‘Migration, Money, and Masculinity in Kerala’, in Journal of the Royal Anthropological
Institute, Vol. 6, no. 1 (2000), p. 118.
18. Neha Vora, Impossible Citizens: Dubai’s Indian Diaspora (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), p. 17.
19. Ibid., p. 16.
20. Andrew Gardner, City of Strangers: Gulf Migration and the Indian Community in Bahrain (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 2010).
21. Ibid.; and Andrew Gardner, ‘Why Do They Keep Coming? Labor Migrants in the Persian Gulf States’, in Mehran
Kamrava and Zahra Babar (eds), Migrant Labor in the Persian Gulf (Doha: Center for International and Regional
Studies, Georgetown School of Foreign Service Qatar, 2011), p. 45.
22. Gardner, ‘Why Do They Keep Coming?’, p. 48.
23. Gardner, City of Strangers, p. 7.
24. Praveena Kodoth, ‘Structural Violence against Emigrant Domestic Workers and Survival in the Middle East: The
Effects of Indian Emigration Policy’, in Journal of Interdisciplinary Economics, Vol. 28, no. 1 (2015), pp. 1–24.
6 P. MENON

analyses power as a ‘set of forces orchestrating relations between foreigners and citi-
zens’ that produces inequality and suffering.25
The comprehensive and repressive dominance of the Kafala system finds literary
representation in Unnikrishnan’s character, Anna Varghese:
Back in her hometown, she assumed if she ever went to the gulf she would be
responsible for someone’s child or would put her nursing skills to use at the hospital,
but the middlemen pimping work visas wanted money—money she didn’t have, but
borrowed … . Cousin Thracy pawned her gold earrings. ‘I expect gains from this invest-
ment’ [she said].26
On reaching Abu Dhabi, Anna is shocked to discover that she has been manipulated
and must depend on her sponsor-employer even to return to Kerala. What sets
Unnikrishnan’s text apart is his ability to put into context the everyday narrative that
humanises these pravasis and their associates—the middleman, cousin Thracy, Anna’s
sponsor-employer, all of whom he enmeshes in the plasma of the Kafala system and
the structural violence it causes. While global media rhetoric on Gulf states such as
the UAE has often focused on extremes—from the tallest free-standing structure in the
world to the biggest luxury hotels on the planet—the everyday lived experiences of the
foreign nationals who constitute roughly four-fifths of the UAE’s population have
received hardly any visibility. Unnikrishnan challenges this omission while struggling
to record the polyphonic voices, imaginaries, myths and vocabularies of ‘a nation built
by people who are eventually required to leave’.27
Gulf-pravasis are unlike any other diasporic group, not only because of the distinct
registers that fall on either side of the hyphen, but also because of their ability to regis-
ter an absence-presence through a spectral comingling of the spatial and temporal
because they can never acquire a legal sense of belonging in the Gulf through formal
citizenship. The hyphenation of Gulf-pravasis not only links the various sites of the
Gulf with migrants from Kerala, but also suggests the split in the hyphenated subjects
themselves, expressed in the sense of (un)belonging at home and abroad simultan-
eously. This split occurs during the continual search for what Rosemary Marangoly
George defines as home, which is ‘the learned (or taught) sense of a kinship in a com-
munity that is extended to those who are perceived as sharing the same blood, geog-
raphy, race, class, gender, or religion’.28 Here the notion of home functions as a
marker which includes categories such as race, class and gender. Thus, home assumes
exclusive defining features that essentialise it as an absolute category that functions as
the familiar norm or referent for the emigrant. While any expatriate from Kerala is
referred to as a pravasi, the Gulf-pravasi is unique to the Keralan diaspora because for
the Gulf-pravasi, the idea of home is marked by a spectre that distorts the temporal
and the spatial. Within the heterogeneity of the rich interior lives of this emigrant

25. Gardner, City of Strangers, p. 7.

26. Unnikrishnan, Temporary People, p. 10.
27. Ilana Masad, ‘Unnikrishnan’s “Temporary People” Captures the Plight of Workers in the UAE’, The Washington
Post (13 Mar. 2017) [https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/unnikrishnans-temporary-people-
captures-the-plight-of-workers-in-the-uae/2017/03/13/55c931d2-ff8b-11e6-8ebe-6e0dbe4f2bca_story.html,
accessed 17 Mar. 2017], para. 1.
28. Rosemary Marangoly George, The Politics of Home: Postcolonial Relocations and Twentieth-Century Fiction (San
Diego: University of California Press, 1999), p. 9.
 SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES 7

group, the signal element that unites them and marks them as a unique diaspora is the
anxiety of transience, made evident through a spectral comingling of the spatial and
temporal associated with the lack of an option for legal citizenship:
unlike in the US, where the H-1B work visas offer the possibility of a pathway towards
permanent residency, no long-term option exists in the UAE for non-citizens. If a for-
eign worker loses his or her job or reaches retirement age (60 in most companies), they
need to leave, irrespective of how long they’ve lived in the country—or even if they were
born there.29
For Unnikrishnan, the American system offers expatriates ‘hope’, but the migrant polit-
ics of the Gulf are more ‘blunt [come, do your job and leave] and very transactional’.30
Gulf migrants are offered a complex set of experiences that sets them apart as an anx-
ious diaspora, one that is constantly trying to grapple with its temporariness manifested
via their many vulnerabilities: ‘psyches, families, memories, fables, and language(s)’.31
The Gulf-pravasi is always aware of a future shaped by temporality. In an interview
with Veronica Scott Esposito, Unnikrishnan discussed the unique position of being a
guest worker in the UAE:
These men and women … are people who are conscious of time, all the time. And that
state, where they are always thinking of their futures, does something to them,
something visceral. Because you see, they are not forced to leave. They just have to
leave. There’s a difference between those two scenarios. I suppose when you know you
have to leave, often you’re just wondering about how to leave. And that can break some
people. Others thrive.32
Unnikrishnan attempts to find a word that fully captures this characteristic state and the
related susceptibilities of this group; he adopts the Malayalam word ‘pravasi’: ‘Recently I
have thought that we need a word to encapsulate the lives of voluntary and involuntary
transients—to help express why their memories matter to cities long after they’ve gone’.33
Central to Unnikrishnan’s text, then, is the construction of multiple identities of this
group of guest workers that he refers to as pravasis, and through this framework, he cri-
tiques the notion of genealogical and geographical citizenry by a spectral comingling of
the spatial and temporal. The Gulf-pravasi knows ‘what it [is] like to feel temporary, to
keep your eye on the clock, to normalise the inevitability of departure so completely that
[s/he] didn’t think about it, even though [s/he] always thought about it’.34 This dislocates
our notion of linear temporality. This disjunction of time—not thinking about it, though
always thinking about it—grapples with Gulf-pravasi identity-formation, creating a
spectre—making visible the invisible—that disturbs the distinction between future, past

29. Deepak Unnikrishnan, ‘Abu Dhabi: The City Where Citizenship Is Not an Option’, The Guardian (13 Dec. 2017)
[https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/dec/13/abu-dhabi-citizenship-uae-foreigner-visa-india, accessed 4 Jan.
2018], para. 8.
30. DC books online, ‘New Immigrant Writing Literature and Exile’, Kerala Literature Festival 2018 online video (24
Mar. 2018) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A50Zv7kJATU, accessed 26 Mar. 2018].
31. Terry Hong, ‘Temporary People Depicts the Lives of Guest Workers in the UAE’, The Christian Science Monitor (14
Mar. 2017) [https://www.csmonitor.com/Books/Book-Reviews/2017/0314/Temporary-People-depicts-the-lives-of-
guest-workers-in-the-UAE, accessed 21 Mar. 2017], para. 7.
32. Esposito, ‘Four Questions for Deepak Unnikrishnan’, para. 4.
33. Unnikrishnan, ‘Abu Dhabi’, para. 15.
34. Ibid., para. 11.
8 P. MENON

and present. The distinctive feature of this emigrant life, then, is in the Gulf-pravasis’
awareness of their temporariness, marked by anxiety and vulnerability.
In an interview in Guernica, Unnikrishnan said: ‘we were afraid to love the city
because everything seems precious: not because it was fantastic, but because we knew
we were not there for long. We were hyper aware of time, all the time’.35 This temporal
awareness serves to define a group that is at once within the ethical rubric of belonging
in the Gulf, but that, at the same time, does not have any of the privileges of formal
citizenship. The spectre of temporality works to distort the ontology of being and non-
being. Unnikrishnan states that Gulf-pravasis are ‘those who have never even imagined
being part of a city, because they never knew they could be—even though, paradoxic-
ally, they have been’.36 Thus, the Gulf-pravasi in a state of being inside, yet outside, of
being and non-being,37 allows Unnikrishnan to destabilise a common rendering of a
singular historic and homogenous Gulf identity. For Derrida, the spectre not only
defies identification, but also ‘blurs the distinction between being and non-being and
transgresses the boundary between future, past and present’.38 The spectre of tempor-
ariness marks the Gulf-pravasi as an exteriority that is at once central to the existence
and functioning of these Gulf countries, and at the same time functions as a denial and
disturbance of the idea of a singular Gulf national citizenry—the Gulf-pravasi is an
absence-presence that signals a non-present presence and that lacks a physical place.
Unnikrishnan’s text ensures a complex continuity of Gulf-pravasi identity surviving the
time between the past, present and future of such an identity. His rendering of pravasis
as spectral figures no doubt haunts the dominant narratives of the Gulf—they are an
omnipresent, yet seemingly ever-changing diaspora that brings together past, present
and future to bear upon one another.
Moreover, characters in Temporary People are revelatory figures for exploring and
rethinking the complex notion of citizenship apropos genealogical and geographical ori-
gins. Arriving in Abu Dhabi as an infant and living there for twenty years before going
to the USA, Unnikrishnan considers Abu Dhabi his home, yet it is a home to which he
does not hold a key—that of citizenship. Male children of Gulf-pravasis are legally bound
to leave the Gulf once they turn eighteen because they can then no longer be sponsored
on their parents’ visas. In an article for Open City, Unnikrishnan provided further insight
into the dilemmas of nationalist identity politics and its ontological discrepancies:
The specifics are simple: Back home, I am an Indian on Emirati soil, the child of
retired guest workers now sponsored by their daughter, a guest worker herself. In
India, I am a coveted product, an H-1B holder, an NRI (Non Resident Indian). In
New York, where I presently live, I don’t need to be anybody, but at JFK, I am
Arab; in Bay Ridge, I am undoubtedly Indian; in bars, I am whatever you want me
to be. But even in New York, a city blooming with hyphenated identities, the Abu
Dhabi-ian does not exist, because few people know what an Abu Dhabi-an is sup-
posed to be, including myself.39

35. Wimbish, ‘Deepak Unnikrishnan’, para. 5.

36. Unnikrishnan, ‘Abu Dhabi’, para. 13.
37. Emphasis mine.
38. Derrida, Specters of Marx, p. 6.
39. Deepak Unnikrishnan, ‘Places: A Rumination on Cities: From Abu Dhabi to the East Coast’, Open City Asian
American Writers Workshop, 14 Jan. 2013 [https://aaww.org/places/, accessed 2 Feb. 2018], para. 2.
 SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES 9

This absence of knowledge of what an ‘Abu Dhabi-an is supposed to be’ not only com-
plicates our understanding of fixed and authentic national identity, but also enables
Unnikrishnan to positively conjure the many versions of being Abu Dhabi-an: ‘When I
tell people Abu Dhabi raised me, I’m not just talking about the city. I’m also talking
about its people, those who’ve been here a while, those from here, and especially those
who may not last long, but help the city run’.40 For second-generation Gulf-pravasis
like Unnikrishnan, being a formal citizen of Abu Dhabi and becoming culturally
assimilated has never been an option. In an article for The Guardian, Unnikrishnan
wrote: ‘even though we lived in Abu Dhabi, we were supposed to be Indians … . I went
to school with the children of teachers, butchers, drivers, engineers, office assistants
and managers—all of them brown people who risked their ambitions and fortunes on
the Gulf’.41 In this condition of ‘insider’s outsideness’,42 Gulf-pravasis experience vul-
nerabilities associated with separation, isolation and insecurity, producing a fragmented
identity that Unnikrishnan uses as a space for exploring. The wide range of characters
in Temporary People—from a wealthy Arab woman who pays a clown for vicarious sex-
ual pleasure to a loyal dog who dies lonely in the house built by a pravasi, to a young
nurse who tapes together construction workers who fall from high rise buildings—all
serve to undermine the Gulf experience as homogenous, to provide a more ambiguous
rendering of a Gulf history and, by extension, a Gulf identity. Unnikrishnan compli-
cates this by translating identity into a hybrid genre, a form of literary self-
representation or autobiographical fiction, located on the border of fact and fiction by
using his own name, Deepak, in the final chapter. Here, we witness an exchange
between a factual-fictitious Deepak, a pravasi returning to Abu Dhabi from the USA to
visit his dying father, and an immigration officer at the Abu Dhabi International
Airport who challenges Deepak’s national identification of being Abu Dhabi-an as not
authentic. The immigration officer, who presumably is a Gulf national and so repre-
senting ethnic purity, is puzzled when Deepak tells him that Abu Dhabi is home; he
and his sister were born in Abu Dhabi, and that his grandfather had lived and died
there too, just as his father soon would in hospital:
The consulate man asks about my nationality. I tell him. He says, ‘Tourist Visa, three to
four days’. ‘I don’t understand’, I tell him. ‘I was raised in Abu Dhabi, it’s home, my
home, my father’s on his deathbed’. ‘Sorry’, the man tells me. ‘Three to four days’.43
Here, the comingling of a formal Abu Dhabi-an citizen with the Gulf-pravasi brings
together two seemingly disparate identities into contention, thereby challenging all
claims to citizenry politics based on geography and genealogy in the Gulf.
Home is an imaginary for the Gulf-pravasi. The omnipresence of the spectre of tran-
sience disturbs our awareness of a singular idea of a home and a return to it in this
context. Unnikrishnan’s character, Gulf Mukundan, articulates this clearly: ‘Longing
for the homeland is what marks you out to be a Gulf-party man’.44 In Unnikrishnan’s

40. Esposito, ‘Four Questions for Deepak Unnikrishnan’, para. 5.

41. Unnikrishnan, ‘Abu Dhabi’, para. 6.
42. Homi Bhabha, ‘Unpacking My Library Again’, in Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, Vol. 28, no.
1 (Spring 1995), p. 14.
43. Unnikrishnan, Temporary People, p. 249.
44. Ibid., p. 222.
10 P. MENON

text, stories evoking nostalgia for multiple homes—Kerala, the Gulf, the United
States—defy homogenous narratives of a singular home based on places of birth or citi-
zenship. For instance, Unnikrishnan’s parents are Gulf-pravasis in Abu Dhabi who
find it difficult to leave after forty years:
They care about the Khaleej (gulf), my parents. It’s home, you understand. But they care
about India too. Americans may understand this basic need to acknowledge/
accommodate two nations, one that raised you, and the other that adopted you. But
what they may not get is what it means to return to a nation after you’ve left it for a
while, what it means to return to the place where you were born, so that you may die.45
Such co-ordinated nostalgic responses to different geographical locations help
Unnikrishnan challenge the singular idea of home via the trope of repetition. Through
several imaginary and physical returns, Temporary People’s fluidity of space, time and
language complicates this idea of returning home. That the book opens with a return is
no accident. Entitled ‘Gulf Return’, the surreal first chapter of Book 1, in which men
escape labour camps by morphing into passports and suitcases on runways, lays down
the complex relationship of Gulf-pravasis to their ancestral land, Kerala, while also
making the cyclical framework of the text more conspicuous. The title signifies at once
their temporary stay in the Gulf, and at the same time the several ritualistic temporary
returns to Kerala (perhaps for holidays, family visits, etc.) before leaving again. Kerala,
just as the Gulf, is an imaginary home, desired but never fully realised. In an interview
with Andre Naffis-Sahely, Unnikrishnan linked the presentation behind the ‘ritual of
return’ in his text with his own childhood travels to Kerala:
When I was a child, whenever we went to visit our family in Kerala, we would always
say, ‘We’ll be back’. If my sister or I ever said goodbye to anyone, my mother would tell
us, ‘You don’t say “bye”, you say “we will come back”’. That was always the refrain,
because people were still waiting for us. However, what if those people died—what
would you be returning to, exactly? So you’re also returning to a mythology. There is a
certain kind of mythology that you’re expected to return to.46
The ritual of anticipated return for Gulf-pravasis enunciated in the farewell statement
of ‘We’ll be back’ contains the double entendre of ‘we’ll be back’ (historically, in a
physical return) and ‘we’ll be back’ (mythologically, as a collective warning), the tem-
porariness of a visa always giving way to an interweaving of mythology and history.
Thus, the return is a ghostly reappearance of the pravasi spectre to make itself visible
in the occulted narratives of the Gulf. In Book 1, Chapter 8, entitled ‘Le Musee’,47 a fic-
titious novelist writes of ‘a disenchanted labourer leading a revolt against a village
chief’, and a critic identifies the text as ‘warning, expressed as fictive literary revenge’.
Read carefully, Unnikrishnan’s own narrative appears as a medium for literary revenge,
an uncanny return of the pravasi spectre to claim its place in the historical narratives
of the Gulf. For Unnikrishnan, then, the history of the Gulf-pravasi is an untold ghost
story that must not be forgotten, and the spectral presence of the Gulf-pravasi in every

45. Esposito, ‘Four Questions for Deepak Unnikrishnan’, para. 7.

46. Andre Naffis-Sahely, ‘A Child of the Place: An Interview with Deepak Unnikrishnan’, Los Angeles Review of Books
(3 June 2017) [https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/a-child-of-the-place-an-interview-with-deepak-unnikrishnan/,
accessed 3 Mar. 2018], para. 7.
47. Unnikrishnan, Temporary People, p. 70.
 SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES 11

aspect of Gulf historiography ought to be read, through deferred meaning, as that

which will come back again and again, which will continue, hauntingly.
In an interview with Esposito, Unnikrishnan discussed the architecture of his
book, that he wanted his ‘readers to hear these people, temporary inhabitants with
accents and myths, and wanted them to appear and disappear, maybe reappear.
That meant I had to break certain conventions, explore what a book was sup-
posed to do, then burn certain rules’.48 What Unnikrishnan means by burning
rules is not only to break the conventions of genre in his text by adeptly moving
between short stories, sketches and lists that all tie up to be novel-like, but also
that the book ends where it begins—like a cog, in search of what it means to be
a Gulf-pravasi. In a stunning string of repetitions, Unnikrishnan connects all three
sections of his book with a singular chapter title, ‘Pravasis’, repeated in each
book, but varying. In each of the three sections of the book, he struggles to
define the particular expatriate experience in the Gulf, ultimately arriving at a
blank page of absence.49 In ‘Pravasis’ in Book 1, Chapter 3, we encounter a list
of conditions and professions allied to Gulf-pravasis:
Expat. Worker.
Guest. Worker.
Guest Worker. Worker.
Foreigner. Worker.
Non-resident. Worker.
Non-citizens. Workers.
Workers. Visa.
People. Visas … .
Acclimatizing. Homesick.
Lovelorn. Giddy.
Tailor. Soldier.50
The list’s repetition of ‘worker’ is a privileging gesture of the recovery and transmis-
sion of the hidden histories of the labour of Gulf-pravasis which maps and
co-ordinates Unnikrishnan’s process of claiming a particular Gulf migrant identity. In
Book 2, Chapter 4, we find a more chaotic list that appears to respond to the titular
question that seems to ask what and who are ‘Pravasis’ while comparing them to cogs
in the gigantic labour machinery that materialises the process of ‘country making and
place building’ in the Gulf.51 However, it is in the final chapter in Book 3, Chapter 10,
that we encounter a visual triumph that drives home the absence-presence of Gulf-pra-
vasis via ‘a shocking state of erasure reflected on a virtually empty page, with an
unsolvable equation at the bottom right, ‘PRAVASIS¼’.52 This final chapter of the
book, in which ‘PRAVASIS¼’53 equals a blank page, the absence of text itself enacts

48. Esposito, ‘Four Questions for Deepak Unnikrishnan’, para. 12.

49. Unnikrishnan, Temporary People, p. 25.
50. Ibid., p. 23.
51. Ibid., p. 139.
52. Hong, ‘Temporary People Depicts the Lives of Guest Workers in the UAE’, para. 7.
53. Unnikrishnan, Temporary People, p. 251.
12 P. MENON

the looming presence of a certain kind of spectre that Unnikrishnan argues for, which
correspondingly demonstrates the topographies of a spectre demarcated by Derrida:
‘The specter is … what one imagines, what one thinks one sees and which one
projects—on an imaginary screen where there is nothing to see’.54 It appears, then, that
the labour that Unnikrishnan attempts to make visible in Temporary People does not
refer merely to Gulf-pravasi labour, and Unnikrishnan’s labour as its author, but also
to our labour as its readers. How are we as individual readers to read this spectral
design—the blank page, the lists and calisthenics in his text? In fact, it calls for what
Matthew Schulz describes as a ‘performative interpretation’,55 an analytical lens that
Derrida engages to study ghosts: ‘that is an interpretation that transforms the very
thing it interprets’. While my own reading of Temporary People emphasises the
spectres of pravasis as a historical recovery to better explain the complexities of Gulf
migration, others may find ghosts of different compelling forces in the same text.
Unnikrishnan uses spectral tropes throughout his book—resurrection, contamin-
ation, the apparition of the inapparent, and omnipresence—to suggest and bring
together various spaces, temporalities and languages so that individual words and sen-
tences, as well as the text as a whole, always have multiple and deferred meanings.
English, Malayalam, Hindi and Arabic, languages of the Gulf, contaminate one another.
Certain names and words are censored repeatedly as if to make apparent the inappar-
ent, and future, past and present overlap. The sense of disjunction and dissociation
begins right on the cover. The critic, Terry Hong, suggests: ‘The words “A Novel” writ-
ten sideways, unobtrusively stamped along the left side under the title Temporary
People, might be considered misleading’.56 The novel is really a collection of three
books containing eight, nine, and ten chapters, respectively. Actually, in place of the
expected ‘Chapters’, the reader encounters the word ‘Chabters’ repeated 27 times,
which, according to Hong, is ‘a nod to native Arabic speakers whose mother tongue
doesn’t use the “p”-sound, and replaces such with a “b”-sound’.57 Even the three books
are numbered in the eastern Arabic numerals of ١ , ٢ and ٣ . Fragments marked as
‘chabters’ such as ‘Dingolfy’, ‘Cunninlingus’, ‘Kada (shop), Kadha (story), Kadakaran
(shopkeeper)’ all work to leave behind a trace—a reminder of an absence of what is left
behind by the Gulf-pravasi.
Another conspicuous way in which Unnikrishnan brings together the multifarious
cyclicality of spectral repetition in the text is through its architecture of loosely
threaded form and content. For instance, three stories in two different chapters have
the same title, ‘Blattella Germanica’, in which stubborn German cockroaches,
‘programmed to live’,58 repeatedly take over the narrator’s multiple homes in two dif-
ferent cities. Like the Gulf-pravasis, Unnikrishnan’s roaches are ‘polyglots’, ‘practical’
and ‘fastidious’, but their hosts are ambivalent about them—their ‘tenacity admired;
[but their] infiltration feared’.59 Kafkaesque in style, both stories charge the reader

54. Derrida, Specters of Marx, p. 63.

55. Matthew Schulz, ‘“Arise, Sir Ghostus!”: Textual Spectrality and Finnegans Wake’, in James Joyce Quarterly, Vol. 49,
no. 2 (Winter 2012), p. 283.
56. Hong, ‘Temporary People Depicts the Lives of Guest Workers in the UAE’, para. 1.
57. Ibid.
58. Unnikrishnan, Temporary People, p. 120.
59. Ibid., p. 119.
 SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES 13

with the task of identifying the relevance of the recurring army of roaches—
’immigrants [that] infested’60—in the unnamed narrator’s living space. Buried in both
texts is a haunting clue for the reader: ‘The roaches not only ate their dead, they also
returned for them’.61 This return is supported both in content and form. Whereas in
content, the narrator encounters the roach infestation in his new home ages after his
initial battle with them in the building he was ‘raised [in] years ago’,62 in form,
‘Blattella Germanica’ is repeated as two different chapters of Book 2 and again in Book
3. These tenacious pravasi cockroaches, ‘the best in business’,63 are, then, a revenant,
that which returns to haunt the living. In other words, the pravasi cockroaches as
spectres are characters omnipresent throughout Unnikrishnan’ s text and constitute
the text itself: its form which cyclically affirms the return of the end.
The metaphorical absent-present ghosts of Gulf-pravasis form the foundation upon
which Unnikrishnan constructs the text’s spectral architecture. Each of his ‘chabters’
are storytelling attempts to reclaim and recover the inaudible/invisible presences and
voices/life experiences of pravasis who dare to cross seas and oceans to labour, to help
create new places and (re)create old stories of home. In an attempt to evoke what
Matthew Schulz calls ‘positive conjuration—one that convokes specters from the past
and not to evoke fear and cause recoil but to represent complexity and ambiguity’,64
Unnikrishnan awakens, interprets and traces the originary mythic tales of the Keralan
people’s emigrant anxieties transmitted through generations of oral storytelling. One
such story is that of the ‘Surpeneka’ myth from the Ramayana in the chapter entitled
‘Sarama’.65 In it, an old Keralan grandmother, Muthassi, traces her family’s ancestry to
the forest demon, Sarama, and evokes a primal migration and mixing: crossing of
‘Water is significant to us … . One of our ancestors, The Male, crossed into [Sri] Lanka
over water … . He, our ancestors, along with others, slaved night and day on this mas-
sive undertaking until his muscles hurt, until his body refused to cooperate’.66 That
Unnikrishnan returns to this well-established myth to connect the labour of the
modern-day pravasis—this time, crossing the Arabian sea—reflects Keralan history’s
predominantly spectral structure; it has an ever-present past that gets written over—
where people have always been able to labour in other places to ‘make buildings bigger,
streets longer, the economy richer. [But] [t]hen to leave. After’.67 Reciting the epic ‘out
of sequence’, Muthassi implores the narrator ‘to focus more on characters than the
story itself” because ‘everybody has a past that ought to be heard [and the] present is
paralyzed without a past’. Thus she calls attention to the relevance of communing with
ancestral voices that tell stories of dislocation for a Gulf-pravasi.68 That Sarama’s child
was born out of rape by ‘The Male’ of Rama’s army emphasises the violence and loss
involved, right from that moment of conception of the pravasi prototype. Be it the
mythic Lanka or modern-day Abu Dhabi, the Keralan pravasi is doomed to leave after,

60. Ibid.
61. Ibid., p. 238.
62. Ibid.
63. Ibid., p. 235.
64. Schulz, ‘“Arise, Sir Ghostus!”’, p. 285.
65. Unnikrishnan, Temporary People, p. 197.
66. Ibid., p. 199.
67. Ibid., p. 19.
68. Unnikrishnan, Temporary People, p. 198.
14 P. MENON

reinforcing Unnikrishnan’s assertion of the temporality of pravasi existence which, in

fact, itself becomes the pervasive spectre of his text. Such an appropriation, amalgam-
ation and organisation of the telling and retelling adumbrates Unnikrishnan’s critique
of the production of historiographic knowledge of Gulf emigration as simply
transactional.
In Temporary People, we have observed how Deepak Unnikrishnan calls upon the
Gulf-pravasi spectre to establish migration to the Gulf states as being far more complex
and intricate than popular Gulf narratives have formerly reflected. This novel under-
standing of the spectre occupying Unnikrishnan’s fiction allows for a sharper reading of
the text exemplifying how the Gulf’s competing histories might be employed in associ-
ation to re-inscribe the complexities and inconsistencies of Gulf-pravasi experiences that
have been either omitted or overgeneralised by ideologically influenced historical repre-
sentations. Consequently, Unnikrishnan’s text goes beyond the prevailing socio-history
and reportage to challenge the reliability of any narrative (socio-historical or fictional)
that assumes authority over the Gulf-pravasi experience. Temporary People highlights the
nuances of the formation of Gulf identity and literary discourse, thereby influencing the
ways in which we look at the Arabian Gulf. Ultimately, by showing that Unnikrishnan
uses spectrality to blur the boundaries between future, past and present Gulfs, the histor-
ical and fictional representations of Gulf history, and the socio-political concerns over
the true nature of Gulf-pravasi identity, I suggest that Temporary People is self-conscious
in its treatment of questions about history and representation. By making visible the
anxieties of transience and the vulnerabilities associated with lack of citizenship, we see
how Unnikrishnan takes on the dual role of novelist and historiographer to expose the
overt omission of Gulf-pravasi experiences from ideologically driven narratives.
Ultimately, Unnikrishnan links literature and social change in a sustained study which
illuminates the ethical response humanity owes to the Keralan emigrants on whom it
continues to build development, but whom it opportunely refuses to recognise.

Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the Fulbright Scholar Program under the Fulbright-Nehru
Academic and Professional Excellence Fellowship 2018 during which I was affiliated with the
Centre for Development Studies, Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, India. It also benefitted from
valuable comments the anonymous reviewers for South Asia generously provided.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).