Gulfkaarande Bhaarya/ The Expatriate’s Wife: Reading the Left- behind Mappila Woman in SA Jameel’s Letter Songs

Abstract

Dubai Kathupattu [Dubai Letter Songs] by SA Jameel, written in the1980s, inaugurated a new era of literary expressions that captured the nuances of Mappila expatriate experience. Placed in the larger context of pravasam (migration) and the changing socio-political dynamics of Kerala, Jameel’s letter songs reflect a set of new perspectives on the left-behind wives—their bodies, morality, religiosity, sexual anxieties, isolation, as well as various other aspects of their lives and separation from their husbands. Using a methodological framework that combines gender studies and Islamic feminism, this analytical study attempts to forefront the Mappila wife’s representation from within the constitutive structures of pravasam (“migration”), religion, and emergent Malayali patriarchy of the period. This analysis is further necessitated by an understanding that the popular Mappila cultural texts can be read and reread for vignettes of Mappila Muslim women’s lifeworlds. Although central to understanding the lived realities and related aspects of Gulf migration, these peripheral genres of Mappila literature and cultural expressions have received limited attention in academic scholarship. Hence these texts are in need of reparative efforts that can rescue it from the marginality within the Malayalam literary and cultural corpus.