Impossible Citizens: Dubai's Indian Diaspora

by Neha Vora

Indian communities have existed in the Gulf emirate of Dubai for more than a century. Since the 1970s, workers from South Asia have flooded into the emirate, enabling Dubai's huge construction boom. They now compose its largest noncitizen population. Though many migrant families are middle-class and second-, third-, or even fourth-generation residents, Indians cannot become legal citizens of the United Arab Emirates. Instead, they are all classified as temporary guest workers. In Impossible Citizens , Neha Vora draws on her ethnographic research in Dubai's Indian-dominated downtown to explore how Indians live suspended in a state of permanent temporariness. While their legal status defines them as perpetual outsiders, Indians are integral to the Emirati nation-state and its economy. At the same time, Indians—even those who have established thriving diasporic neighborhoods in the emirate—disavow any interest in formally belonging to Dubai and instead consider India their home. Vora shows how these multiple and conflicting logics of citizenship and belonging contribute to new understandings of contemporary citizenship, migration, and national identity, ones that differ from liberal democratic models and that highlight how Indians, rather than Emiratis, are the quintessential—yet impossible—citizens of Dubai.

Genres: Nonfiction, Anthropology, Middle East, India

264 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2013

About the author

Associate Professor of Anthropology, Lafayette College . her works focus primarily on Citizenship and Belonging,Neoliberalism, South Asian diasporas, Gender and Ethnicity, States, Migration, Transnationalism, the Gulf Arab States, Feminist Theory, Globalized Higher Education, Indian Ocean Connectivities

Reviews

[Nadia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Just so nobody gets the wrong idea this is a study of the Indian middle class in Dubai, not its labourers but it's a pretty solid and insightful study. There were a couple of paragraphs in the conclusions were she briefly mentioned the "Arab Spring" and Bahrain and how it was painted as strife between native Bahrainis while ignoring the migrant population, but at the same time she kind of neglected the particulars of Bahrain that put the migrant/immigrant population there in a very unique situation among migrant populations in the Gulf (instrumentalized by the sectarianism of the Bahrain regime,) so that surprised me. I think that was my main issue, I didn't have any with the actual body of her study which I definitely think is worth reading.

[Adam LoBue · Rating 3 out of 5]

Overall this is a good ethnographic study of Indian diaspora in Dubai that complicates contemporary narratives of globalization, identity, mobility, and political economy. However, my one major critique is that that the author claims the majority of Indian diaspora scholarship is focused on movement to western countries post 1970s, which is a gross mischaracterization of this literature. Since she is an anthropologist by training this could be in reference to ethnographic works only, but if that is the case that should have been more clearly stated. Within historical scholarship there is a vast corpus of work focused on Indian diaspora and migration from the 15th century into the postcolonial era and distributed across the Indian Ocean world as well as Europe, the Americas and the Global South. This is more a critique of the framing of the project and its subjects than of the general arguments and findings, but it is still an important issue that detracts from what is overall a quite good ethnographic study.

[Sharad Pandian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Solid ethnography on middle-class Indians in Dubai, tracing their role in the Emirati "production of cosmopolitan futures and the erasure of cosmopolitan pasts" (53):

Indians in Dubai participated in several forms of citizenship and belonging, including urban, substantive, neoliberal, and consumer. For example, middle-class Indians claimed Dubai, and especially the neighborhoods of old Dubai, as Indian cultural space, and they performed public belonging to the city through practices of consumption. And business owners often acted in the stead of citizen-kafeels by governing over other migrants. Moreover, Indians are subjectified by the state and by other institutions both as insiders and outsiders, and therefore they are imbricated just as much as ‘‘locals’’ in processes of governmentality. Certain Indians are policed as migrants, for example, and consigned to the outskirts of the city, while others are offered neoliberal forms of participation in the country’s economy, and still others have direct influence on state policy. Dubai Indians both participated in the production of their own exclusion and staked claims to belonging through criticisms of racial injustice, through nostalgia and historical memory, and through the production of geographic spaces of Indianness within the city. Indian businessmen, for example, simultaneously claimed no desire for Emirati citizenship even as they insisted that they ‘‘built this country.’’ And Dubai-born South Asian university students felt that Dubai was their home but that they were also ‘‘second-class citizens.’’ Indian foreign residents in Dubai are therefore, like all contemporary subjects, political. In fact, the very elision of their political subjectivities from scholarship about the Gulf participates in the production of official citizens, who supposedly were once docile but now increasingly make so-called democratic claims on a nonliberal state. What we mean by ‘‘democracy’’ within the Arab Spring therefore depends on the erasures enacted in much scholarship on the region to define the differences between citizen and noncitizen, and between economy and nation. (176)

[Salama Mohamed · Rating 1 out of 5]

In my personal opinion this is a terrible book, it is non factual and is a bit deceiving, first of all, Indian "diasporas" does not exist solely in the Gulf, but all over the world you will find literal communities of Indians living and working in almost every major country in the world, when retiring, no matter what their obtained nationality is, many Indians eventually return to their home country, if you perform a study and analyze the number of real-estate these Indians have I assure you that the biggest majority choose to purchase estates and land in their homeland. The issue with why Indians can never be nationals in the Gulf is primarily themselves, their religion, culture and national identity; Indian Americans never feel completely American, the same issue is with Indians that live in Europe, Russia, Middle East, Singapore, the issue is with THEM and NOT the country they happen to live in. They almost always STRICTLY marry from each other through arranged marriages and have a VERY controlling system of nuclear families, they simply cannot merge with the Middle East or any other place in the world, they love their bubble and it continues to thrive, they are only comfortable in their own mother nation 'India'. If you make a simple study of Indians in Europe, similar to the Turkish diasporas, they hold their ethnic and cultural identity very close and do not merge with their host countries, this causes issues in the social demography of any country and creates stubborn "circles of people" that act like mafias and only marry, hire and do business with one another. Unless they are willing to become completely integrated in their host countries Indians will continue to isolate themselves anywhere they live in around the world and create intentional"diaspora mafias". I believe the book should address "the inside out" rather than the "outside in" and analyze why Indian communities unwilling to merge into any countries/societies they live in.