V.j. Varghese

University of Hyderabad, Department of History, Faculty Member

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Papers by V.j. Varghese

Labour Migration to the Gulf and India’s Emigration Governance: Expanding Bounds of Protection

Millennial Asia

This article shows how migration from India to the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries has b... more This article shows how migration from India to the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries has been the primary determinant in constituting India’s regulative infrastructures that govern its transnational migrations. The article identifies three moments in the history of India–Gulf connection through migration since the 1970s to suggest that the Indian state regulations on the emigrant workers evolved over time progressively in response to specific challenges offered by the labour flows to the Gulf than migrations to other destinations. It suggests that the temporal controls in a sending country are outcomes of complex mediations involving diverse players and conditions and are in a constant state of becoming.

Emigration of Female Domestic Workers from Kerala: Gender, State Policy and the Politics of Movement

Transnational Flows and Permissive Polities

8. Emigration of Female Domestic Workers from Kerala Gender, State Policy and the Politics of Movement

Transnational World and Indian Punjab: Contemporary Issues

Migration, Mobility and Multiple Affiliations

The Department of NRI Affairs is also responsible for formulation and inplementation of schemes r... more The Department of NRI Affairs is also responsible for formulation and inplementation of schemes related to NRIs with regard to: (a) Plan Scheme-C.D. 2.35 providing matching grants in NRIshared projects for creating infrastructure like schools, buildings, community services, hospitals, libraries, drinking water schemes, sewerage disposal facilities, public latrines, streetlights and sports stadium and other projects; (b) following an integrated policy for using funds provided by Punjab Government in NRI-shared www.cambridge.org

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Malabar and its economic niche

Colonialism came to India through Malabar. The place was Kappad and the year 1498. What followed ... more Colonialism came to India through Malabar. The place was Kappad and the year 1498. What followed was the subjugation of a people, the sea keeping the doors open for the invaders. The blue waters have always allowed foreigners in, but those who came early were purveyors of ideas and goods and not imperialism. Thus, Malabar's economic history, as part of the larger geography of the Malabar coast, has been fashioned through its oceanic connection right from the beginning. Its history, as a result, is inseparable from the constant flow of ideas, goods, power and people, from across the ocean and within — the Romans, Jews, the Chinese, the Arabs, the Europeans, the Brahmins, the Gowdas, the Syrian Christians ... If many of them became part of Malabar society, some of them left their lasting influence on the region's economy and culture. Malabar continues to evolve in line with its specificities and its connection with the external world — a biography ever in the making with its o...

Migration, Transnationalism, and Ambivalence: The Punjab–United Kingdom Linkage

Migration and Transformation:, 2012

This chapter investigates developments in the Punjab–UK transnational space, a long-standing and ... more This chapter investigates developments in the Punjab–UK transnational space, a long-standing and extensive migration corridor. Within India’s diverse migration history, Punjab’s specificity is its particular historical connection with the UK, despite criss-crossing colonial and postcolonial migrations across the globe. We juxtapose field research in the UK and Punjab and show that transnationalism appears and works differently when viewed from either location—highlighting the differentially empowered nature of transnational space, as well as irresolvable ambivalences that are worked into transnational relationships. We reconsider the transnationalism paradigm through five interrelated arguments. We demonstrate the complexity of transnational space, which exceeds the binary sending–receiving country relationship that characterizes the literature. We find that transnationalism is not merely produced “from below” by the activities of migrants and diaspora, but is orchestrated and formalized by various arms of the Indian and British states. Moreover, illicit flows of people are also produced by the governance of migration. Transnational connectivity does not diminish individuals’ desire for a single, solid citizenship and nationality beyond the pragmatism attached with citizenship. Finally, we argue for historicizing of transnational networks and appreciation of the social relations of gender, generation, class, and caste by which they are cleaved.

Emigration of Women Domestic Workers from Kerala: Gender, State Policy and the Politics of Movement

Restrictions imposed by the Government of India on the emigration of women in 'unskilled' categor... more Restrictions imposed by the Government of India on the emigration of women in 'unskilled' categories such as domestic work are framed as measures intended to protect women from exploitation. Special protection for certain categories of emigrant women workers makes way for gendered conceptions of citizenship and sovereignty through the use of gender to assert control over space in ways that curtail women's access to mobility and emigrant work opportunities. However, restrictions have directed potential migrants to the use of informal / illegal processes in connivance with state agencies. Whereas, intermediaries, including recruiting agents and government officials, profit from the use of informal / illegal processes by prospective emigrants and hence they have an interest in rendering these more effective than formal processes established by the state, we argue that the gender politics around movement provides an enabling condition for both state restrictions and the burgeoning of informal / illegal processes. To spell out the implications of state policy on emigrant women domestic workers, the paper compares their position and experience of migration with that of emigrant nurses on the one hand and outmigrant fish processing workers on the other. It also explores the nature of women's agency involved when domestic workers resist state policy and social norms to emigrate through informal / illegal means.

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Outside and Inside the Nation: Migrant Narratives and the Making of a Productive Citizen in Kerala

India Migration Report 2011

An Industry of Frauds? State Policy, Migration Assemblages and Nursing Professionals from India

The Migration Industry in Asia, 2019

The presently defunct Ministry of Overseas Indian Affairs (MOIA) issued an order on the 12th of M... more The presently defunct Ministry of Overseas Indian Affairs (MOIA) issued an order on the 12th of March 2015, making the procedure of 'emigration clearance' mandatory for its citizens emigrating for employment as nurses to all countries designated as Emigration Check Required (ECR) ones. 1 The order also banned recruitment of nurses through private recruiting agents (RAs) and restricted the recruitment to state-run recruiting agencies, namely NORKA Roots and ODEPC, both which are based in the

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Governmentality, Social Stigma and Quasi-citizenship: Gender Negotiations of Migrant Women Domestic Workers from Kerala1

Looking Beyond the Emigration Act 1983: Revisiting the Recruitment Practices in India

Dreaming Mobility and Buying Vulnerability

List of Tables, Figures and Abbreviations. Preface Introduction 1. Making of the Institution 2. P... more List of Tables, Figures and Abbreviations. Preface Introduction 1. Making of the Institution 2. Process of Emigration: Mounting Costs and Paltry Returns 3. Vulnerability, Intensity of Corruption and Institutional Failure 4. Between Unfettered and Controlled Informality: Testimonies of an Enervated Institution 5. Summary and Recommendations Appendix I: Emigration Act, 1922 Appendix II: Emigration Act, 1983 Appendix III: Emigration (Amendment) Rules, 2009. About the Authors. Index.

“For God and the Country”: Agricultural Migrations and their Moralities in South India

Religion and the Morality of the Market

Migration and the consequent expansion of agriculture to previously untamed areas has been one of... more Migration and the consequent expansion of agriculture to previously untamed areas has been one of the defining features of Kerala's economic modernity. Entangled in the intertwined history of colonialism, capital and native agency, mobilizing a new discourse of development that broke radically with the existing notions of land management, it not only led to the conversion of vast areas of forests, hills and “wastelands” into arable land and the emergence of capitalist agriculture, but also provided the local Syrian Christian community with a new identity as oriented towards progress and development. As purogamana karshakar (forward-looking peasants) and productive citizens committed to national development, the community claimed a particular affinity to and wielded an authority over Kerala's modernity. In this chapter I will consider the migration of Syrian Christian peasants from the cultivated plains of rural Travancore to the pristine and sparsely inhabited mountain forests of Malabar. Starting in the early decades of the twentieth century and continuing well into the 1960s, this migration picked up in the 1940s. Over more than forty years, tens of thousands of Christian migrants colonized huge tracts of fallow land, turning hills and forests into highly profitable farms and plantations. I will argue that the Syrian Christian Church was directly involved in this modernist enterprise of turning “empty” environments into sites of human activity, production and development. It did so not only by offering a theological rationale for land reclamation and its hegemonic developmentalist ideology, but also by leading the political struggle of the laity to protect its arduously won material world in Malabar from state interventions. During the expansive colonization of a space described as “lost” and largely heathen by its leadership, the Church provided a particular orientation towards modern entrepreneurship and capital accumulation by expounding and sanctifying a new conduit for social and spatial mobility, with land and hard work at its heart. I will also suggest that in this engagement with the modern economic sphere, the Church and its narratives did not stick to any single line of reasoning. It straddled theological, nationalist, economic, ethical and humanitarian rationalities with ease and careful calibration, moving freely between the spiritual and the material with claims of morality and citizenship and building bridges with “anti-religious” communist ideology.

Migration as a Transnational Enterprise: Migrations from Eastern Punjab and the Question of Social Licitness

Migration, Mobility and Multiple Affiliations

To Survive or To Flourish? Minority Rights and Syrian Christian Community Assertions in Twentieth-century Travancore/Kerala

History and Sociology of South Asia, 2011

The arrival of modernity not only constituted communities but also impelled them in competition a... more The arrival of modernity not only constituted communities but also impelled them in competition against each other in Kerala. Modern politics of the state as a result is inextricably linked with intense community politics. The success of community politics for rights and resources varied across communities, so also did strategies of assertion. This article will focus on different instances of community assertions by the Syrian Christians in twentieth-century Travancore/Kerala. The confrontation of the community with the ‘Hindu state’ and the then Dewan in the 1930s, the ‘Liberation Struggle’ against the Communists during late 1950s and the anti-eviction movements of the 1960s testifies its lack of primordial adherences and openness to heterogeneous strategies as required by different historical circumstances. It moves freely from secular to non-secular, minoritarian to majoritarian and lawful to unlawful, with claims to a greater citizenship. The hegemonic developmentalist ideology ...

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De-scribing Self: Reading Migrant Novels on Malabar Migration

The paper reads a set of novels written by the migrant authors, who were part of the Syrian Chris... more The paper reads a set of novels written by the migrant authors, who were part of the Syrian Christian migration to Malabar and argue that these literary interventions of the migrants are political articulations necessitated by specific historical circumstances. The careful configuration of a migrant self by the ‘low’/non-elite texts under discussion is read as an intervention of the migrant imagination against a burgeoning sense of cynicism towards the very historical enterprise they were taking part in or were part of. The two decades, 1960-70s when these texts were published and read, are particularly important as they witnessed several governmental attempts to evict the migrant peasants from various migrant centres in Malabar and eastern hills of Travancore.

Protecting Women or Endangering the Emigration Process Emigrant Women Domestic Workers, Gender and State Policy

Economic and political weekly

The paper discusses the case of emigrant women domestic workers from Kerala, a state which has ha... more The paper discusses the case of emigrant women domestic workers from Kerala, a state which has had a long history of migration of workers in this segment. It draws attention to the critical failure of the social science scholarship to address the question of poor women migrants. It also provides an overview of state policy on migration and underlines its complicity in generating regulatory gaps. The paper engages with the gendering of citizenship and sovereignty through a comparison of the state policy on migrant women workers and the experience of three segments of this workforce – emigrant nurses, domestic workers and outmigrant fish processing workers. It then considers the question of agency in the context of women workers who are thrust into the position of breadwinners for their families and, finally, the question of responsible state intervention. This is a revised version of a paper presented at a workshop on "Transnational Flows and Permissive Polities in Asia" at...

The Alluring Music of Labour: Modernity, Migrations and Recreation of the Syrian Christian Community

The paper attempt is to capture the contours of the new Syrian Christian subjectivity in the hist... more The paper attempt is to capture the contours of the new Syrian Christian subjectivity in the historical context of Syrian Christian migrations for agriculture and mobility within Kerala, with special reference to the migration to Malabar. The transformation of the Syrian Christian community into a modern community with positive and productive attributes is traced in its historical and discursive contexts. This would yet again foreground identities as historical formulations, always transient, most often upsetting the primordiality generally attributed to them, and susceptible to the structural changes.

Indian Punjabi skilled migrants in Britain: of brain drain and under‐employment

Journal of Management Development, 2013

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to examine the careers of skilled migrants from Indian Punjab... more PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to examine the careers of skilled migrants from Indian Punjab. This study complicates the normalization of skilled migration as a “win‐win” situation by examining the career trajectories of skilled migrants from the Indian Punjab who are trying to establish themselves in Britain.Design/methodology/approachThe paper examines 20 life history interviews undertaken with skilled migrants from the Indian Punjab to Britain, in IT, media, law and hospitality industries, health and welfare professionals, and student migrants.FindingsSkilled migrants were able to migrate on their own auspices through migration economies in Punjab. Once in Britain, however, they were directed to universities and labour markets in which they were not able to use their skills. They experienced under‐employment, devaluation of their qualifications and downward mobility, which forced them into ethnic and gendered markets within their home networks and created ambivalence about m...

Book Reviews : PAUL ERIK BAAK, Plantation, Production and Political Power: Plantation Devel opment in South-west India in a Long Term Historical Perspective, 1743-1963, Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1997, pp. 370

Indian Economic & Social History Review, 2000

social. One last point to end the review: the problem(s) that the book takes up are with referenc... more social. One last point to end the review: the problem(s) that the book takes up are with reference to the conditions prevailing in India. It seems, therefore, surprising that it is conducted entirely in relation to literature produced in the West, especially so with the discussion on community rights. Of much that has been produced in India there is hardly a mention. It is not clear whether it is an oversight or a thoughtout research strategy. Nevertheless, this is a book deserving a prominent place in one’s library.

V.j. Varghese

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