Recent scholarship on trans-oceanic exchanges between the Persian Gulf and South Asia has delved into previously neglected minutiae of everyday migrant life beyond labour. Combining ethnographic research and media content analyses, I build on this scholarship through a novel study of vernacular radio as a critical means of sustaining South Indian (Malayali) diasporic communities betwixt and between their home and host societies. This paper shows, firstly, the interwovenness of work and leisure in the everyday lives of Malayali migrants in Qatar; and secondly, the role played by radio listenership and production practices in crafting distinctive ethnolinguistic spatialities of sound (sabdam) via sonic connections that transcend the binary between being at home and abroad. Paying attention to sonic waves and networks that bind together radio stations and audiences in Qatar across work and home spaces, I argue that diasporic vernacular radio both reinforces and challenges notions of 'Malayali-ness' within the Gulf Malayali community (bandham) and beyond.
Doha, once a sleepy Indian Ocean port and now a symbol of Qatar's rise as a petro-state, is a city divided between its wealthy citizens and resident aliens and the migrant workers that serve them. The city's spatial divisions are rooted in its transoceanic history as much as its makeover as an urban experiment in authoritarian modernism (Hashim, Irazábal, and Byrum 2010). As Qatar's monarchical regime liberalized its economy with an eye to the post-hydrocarbon future (Nonneman 2006), Doha came to be defined by imposing edifices towering over awestruck subjects and a lack of public spaces and street corners in which different strata of society can mingle or gather freely. With the arrival of COVID-19, the well-planned residential neighborhoods of wealthy citizens and expatriates seem starkly separated from those of the working poor even as their dependence on each other is arguably greater than ever before. This deeply divided city, wrestling with the politics of contagion, shows how logics of exclusion and interdependence are, paradoxically, intertwined inextricably.
This special section draws on the dynamic new field of Indian Ocean studies to rethink key concepts such as space and circulation (Jeremy Prestholdt), gender and kinship (Mahmood Kooria), and popular media and infrastructure (Bindu Menon Mannil). Through fresh interdisciplinary insights from the contributors' archives and fieldwork, the articles critically interrogate these concepts from a distinctive intellectual vantage point. Historians and anthropologists based in different parts of the globe come together in this special section to “think with the Indian Ocean.” The authors take a concept that is in wide currency in the humanities and social sciences and then reimagine it creatively in the contexts that they study. In doing so, they decenter familiar ways of seeing and knowing, offering a new decolonial lens to make sense of the circularities and connections that constitute our world.
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