Research

Ongoing Research

Love, Sexuality, and Masculinity in Troubled Times: Exploring Masculine Identity and Family Reunification Among Undocumented South Asian Male Migrants in Greece

Each year, thousands of poor, rural young men from Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan end up in Greece in the hope of a better life. Burdened with the emasculating tag of ‘failed masculinity’ due to their inability to provide for families back home, migration emerges as a compensatory masculine strategy to reinstate lost manly stature. The men’s cheap and flexible labour fills a vital labour gap in the agrarian and informal economy of Greece. Many of these men leave families behind, and dream of bringing their spouses and children to Greece once they are settled.

I have obtained SSHRC’s Insight Development Grant for 2020-21 to to studying this group of South Asian male migrants who are mostly in their 20s, unmarried or with spouses back home, poorly educated, and /or low-skilled or unskilled.

The research allows us to understand how relational and hierarchical masculinities in their home countries are reproduced, refashioned, or dismantled in host countries where their othering is held up through discourses of Islamophobia, racism, and xenophobia. Barring the Indians who are overwhelmingly from the Sikh faith, Pakistani and Bangladeshi men are all Muslims. Carrying out the study in Greece is similarly deliberate, as a site for research, due to its ethno-nationalism defined by a common Hellenic ancestry and Orthodox Greek Christianity, its restrictive regularisation policies and border controls, as well as the virulent and violent anti-immigrant and Islamophobic rhetoric. As well, through an in-depth analysis of labour migration as a phenomenon, the undocumented status of these migrants, and current citizenship regime in Greece, my research unpacks the complex relationship between precarious migrant status, contemporary anti-immigrant and Islamophobic discourses, and restrictive citizenship policies in (re)shaping masculinity and gender relations.

The research sites are both urban and rural. These include the informal sector in Athens and Thessaloniki and the agrarian regions surrounding Megara, Thiva, Nea Manolada, Argos, and Crete.

Read here my article, published in Men & Masculinities that discusses the contradictions of failed masculinity among undocumented Indian and Pakistani migrant men in Greece.

Migration has Stripped Us of Our Manhood: Contradictions of Failed Masculinity Among South Asian Male Migrants in Greece

Read here my article on disciplinary mechanisms used to extract docility from Indian and Pakistani migrant farmworkers in Greece:

Visible yet invisible: the disciplinary mechanism of self-surveillance among undocumented South Asian male migrants in rural Greece 

Read here my article in The Conversation about the inhuman and degraded living conditions of undocumented Bangladeshi migrant men working in the commercial strawberry sector in Greece. 

Migrant Strawberry pickers face deadly risks living in flammable shacks

Read here what I wrote about undocumented Indian male migrants that was published in Indian Express, a leading Indian English-language daily with a print readership of 16 million.

I have given presentations at the International Migration Research Centre, Balsillie School of International Affairs, Waterloo and Society for National and International Development (SNID), Queen’s University, Kingston in Canada, on this subject.

THIS IS EVIDENCE: RE-PRESENTING SOUTH ASIAN MIGRANT MEN IN GREECE: A PHOTOVOICE PROJECT

What happens when undocumented Bangladeshi and Pakistani men in Greece pick up their cell phones to record their lives as migrant agricultural workers?

Funded by SSHRC Connection Grant, the multi-media project builds on my past creative engagement with “in-the-margin” communities. Over a twelve-month period, I collaborated with groups of South Asian migrant men in Greece who used their cell phones to take photographs, record videos, and narrate their stories. It used the participatory action visual research strategy of Photovoice that asserts the problem-solving ability of marginalized people to think critically about problems and express them through creative collaborative means to catalyse social change.

The collaborative project resulted in a travelling multi-media exhibition, “This is Evidence: Re-presenting South Asian Migrant Men in Greece. Check out www.thisisevidence.com to find out details about the migrant men and the process of this collaboration.

The exhibition premiered in Athens, Greece in April 2022 before moving to its Canadian premiere at the prestigious Isabel Bader Centre for the Performing Arts in Kingston (in April - May 2022 and then back again, on popular demand, in February 2023. It was also exhibited at the Toronto Metropolitan University in November 2022. It is moving on to University of Namur, Belgium from 19 April - 27 June 2023.

Mardangi! Enacting Maleness: The Role of Religion, Caste, and Political Economy in Shaping Masculinities in Contemporary North India

This second ongoing research of mine examines the role of religion, caste, and political economy in shaping relational male identities and masculinity among lower classes of rural Indian men in contemporary North India. This study is relevant in understanding contemporary resurgence of right-wing masculinities globally as much as the similarities and dissimilarities in processes that shape identity-formation.

The research idea emerges as an offshoot from my doctoral research in the two North Indian provinces of Haryana and Rajasthan. Focussing on the same region, I analyse the crisis of masculinities faced by lower classes of rural Indian men from the early 1990s on when India embarked on neoliberal reforms. Fears of losing hegemonic dominance, loss of livelihood options, and/or patriarchal masculine stature have aggravated tensions between historically opposed caste and religious groups such as the dominant Hindu Jat caste, the religious minority of the Meo, and the Dalits (formerly untouchables). Situating this study within the agrarian crisis throws light on how male privilege and masculine norms are dislocated by market-led growth policies.  In particular, it examines how the intersections of caste, religion, Hindutva, and neoliberal economy define, shape, or bring fluidity in the way various hierarchies of masculinity, either hegemonic, subordinate, complicit, marginalized, or dissident are enacted, or contested by these men.

My fieldwork is based in the Nuh and Rohtak districts of Haryana and that of Alwar in Rajasthan. Speaking to diverse groups of men and women there is allowing me analyse how contestations between multiple and contradictory masculinities impact gender roles, gender relations, gender equality, and gender-based violence within and between these groups. Here, my research underscores the gendered cost of these masculinities on women, whether in the realm of intimate relations, gender-based violence, and the ability to seek wage work, freedom of movement or association, or the attainment of gender equality.

Past Research

My doctoral research, Dispossession of Matrimonial Choice in Contemporary India: Examining the Link Between Cross-region Marriages, Neoliberal Capitalism, and New Forms of Gender Subordination, studied an emergent phenomenon of marriage migration that started in rural North India soon after the country adopted neoliberal market reforms in 1991. Transgressing customary rules of marriage within one’s caste and/or religion, lower-class men (Meo Muslims and peasant castes from Hindus), began traveling long distances across India to seek wives from lower castes, other ethnicities, and/or different religions. Acting as a corrective to earlier theorizations about such matrimonies as either instances of bride-trafficking and coerced marriage or as laudable illustrations of national inter-caste integration and cultural assimilation, my findings take to task Western feminist theorization on agency, victimhood, and trafficking. It presents an alternative framework to understanding how the migrating brides negotiate their multiple dislocations in the alien environment of North India, i.e. a macro analytical framework on the workings of neoliberalism, ethnocultural chauvinism, classism, and other social oppressions that shape the choices and vulnerabilities of poor, marginalized women worldwide.

At its core, my work proved that the multiple intersections of neoliberalism with caste, class, ethnicity, and religion, has hyper-commodified the female body, particularly that of women from the historically marginalized communities of the Dalits (the low castes) and the Muslims. Those intersections have also intensified gender subordination, eroded women’s bargaining ability around both their labour and bodies, and increased their vulnerability to new forms of gender-based violence. The forces of accumulation unleashed by the neoliberal project in India have led to a “dispossession of matrimonial choice,” a term that I employ in reference to the constriction of marital choices for Dalit and Muslim women who are then forced to “voluntarily” undertake these new forms of cross-region matrimonial migrations. My work presents an alternative framework to understanding how the migrating brides negotiate their multiple dislocations in the alien environment of North India, i.e. a macro analytical framework on the workings of neoliberalism, ethnocultural chauvinism, classism, and other social oppressions that shape the choices and vulnerabilities of poor, marginalized women worldwide.

Beside the extensive international media coverage and direct policy impact, this project has resulted in journal articles, a forthcoming book, a documentary film, and a policy-based report. I have just completed my book manuscript, Partial Truths, Negotiated Existences: Examining Dispossession of Matrimonial Choice in Cross-Region Marriages in India, under an advance contract with Cornell University Press.