Eleventh Global Studies Conference

Abstract

South Asia and the Gulf Cooperation Council are deeply entrenched in contemporary circuits of transnational labor as exporters and receptors of labor configured in a tight dipole. The millions of migrants in the GCC nations are relegated to the footnotes of the narratives of migration, as in the recent past, scholars such as Neha Vora and Laavanya Kathirevelu have focused their attention on the “middle class” in the United Arab Emirates rather than the “bachelor bodies” (Ye 2014) who build and maintain the cities of the GCC. This paper draws the lens onto the migrants from South Asia particularly Bangladesh and Pakistan in the Sultanate of Oman (often overlooked in academic literature on the Diaspora in the GCC). The author sheds light on the voices of migrant labor in Muscat and explores their anxieties, challenges, and aspirations in relation to lives back home in Bangladesh and Pakistan through an ethnographic approach in the backdrop of oil price recession which has led to massive layoffs and nonpayment of wages at the minimum. The paper ruptures the notion of a Gulf, where streets are paved with prosperity and also attempts to shed light on the paucity of welfare available to migrants in the Gulf.