Keywords

1 Introduction

The term chai karakFootnote 1 (literally ‘strong tea’) refers to a type of tea beverage that is popular in the Arab Gulf States. While there is no historical account of how the beverage came to become so popular in the region, it is believed by many that ‘South Asian workers in the region brought with them their love of milky tea when they left their homes’ and moved to the Gulf (Chadalavada, 2011). Dubai-based food blogger, Arva Ahmed (2017), refers to chai karak as ‘that democratizing drink that fuels Dubai: the jewellers and tailors of Meena Bazaar, workers on construction sites, fishmongers in Al Ras, hot-blooded race-car youth in Jumeirah and Satwa and middle-class Indian families seated al fresco in Mankhool’. She also describes chai karak as ‘[seeping] its way into local food culture and [becoming] a staple drink in Emirati homes and restaurants’. Emirati journalist Elham Al Dhaheri (2015), however, argues that chai karak is an already established staple within Emirati homes, reflecting a wider trend of the UAE claiming ownership over the beverage. Other examples are present in the VisitDubai website—run by the Dubai Corporation of Tourism and Commerce Marketing—which lists chai karak as an Arabic drink,and in gentrified local cafés and restaurants that serve the beverage. One such example is Karak House, which claims to be a ‘homegrown Emirati restaurant [that draws] on traditional Emirati tastes while adding a contemporary twist’ (in Johnson, 2017). Many other popular examples of this trend also exist, such as the restaurants Al Fanar, Logma, and Local Bites.

This study primarily aims to investigate how Emirati claims of ownership over chai karak have impacted the relational status of South Asians in the UAE. It will do this by critically analysing first-hand oral history accounts of South Asian tea vendors across the Dubai-Sharjah area, as well as by analysing a body of secondary literature in order to develop a theoretical and contextual base. The research questions that this study seeks to address are the following:

  • What kind of racialised relationships have emerged from the Emirati claims of ownership over chai karak?

  • How have these relationships affected the political and socioeconomic status of the South Asians who work with chai karak?

  • What does the contestation around chai karak reflect in terms of trends within the UAE’s social relations?

In response to the first question, this study will argue that the main relationship that has emerged is one characterised by cultural appropriation and exploitation. Richard Rogers defines cultural appropriation as being ‘the use of a culture’s symbols, artefacts, genres, rituals, or technologies by members of another culture’ (2006, p. 474). For Rogers, cultural exploitation is one of the four types of cultural appropriation, alongside cultural exchange, dominance, and transculturation (p. 475). He defines cultural exploitation as being ‘the appropriation of elements of a subordinated culture by a dominant culture without substantive reciprocity, permission, and/or compensation’ (p. 477). The importance of recognising such a phenomenon is drawn from bell hooks’ assertion that ‘minority peoples need to critically engage questions of their representation and its influence on questions of identity formation’ (Coombe, 1993, p. 267). It is also important to note that the relationship produced between Emiratis and South Asians regarding chai karak’s appropriation strongly resemble those produced by histories and practices of colonial (and settler colonial) exchange and integration.

With regard to the second question, this study will argue that the relationships produced have entrenched class divides that are largely based on ethnic origin. Speaking on cultural appropriation in the USA, Jason Rodriquez’s assertion that ideological discourses are ‘essential for reproducing the racialised social system’ (2006, p. 645) can also be applied to the UAE. In relation to the role of food in perpetuating discourse, Ronald Ranta explains that ‘adding a nationality to food increases its perceived value and appeal’ (2015, p. 34), while Claude Fischler explains that ‘food is central to our sense of identity [because] the way any given human group eats helps it assert its diversity, hierarchy and organisation, but also, at the same time, both its oneness and the otherness of whoever eats differently’ (1988, p. 275). Speaking on class specifically, Pierre Bourdieu writes that ‘the art of eating and drinking remains one of the few areas in which the working classes explicitly challenge the legitimate art of living’ (1979, p. 179) while Janine Chi describes food as serving ‘as a symbolic means of expressing belief systems and social class distinctions’ (2006, p. 160).

Finally, this study will argue that the contestation around chai karak in the UAE is reflective of the both the ‘unique societies’ that ‘migration and the international mobility of labour are commonly believed to have created’ in the Gulf states (Fargues, 2011, p. 273) as well as of a form of cultural extractivism resembling that seen in colonial relationships. The role of the South Asian diaspora in the Gulf is of particular importance because ‘the South Asian labour community is a vibrant community without which Gulf economies perhaps would not survive’ (Jain & Oommen, 2016, p. 3). The discourses are also reflective of ‘certain characteristic features of South Asian manpower, namely docility, political neutrality, flexibility, willingness to work at marginal wage differentials, and capacity to work hard also helped in this process’ (p. 4). Furthermore, this practice of appropriation itself shows another facet of the measures taken to ‘maintain a highly privileged position of the nationals’, alongside ‘the sponsorship system, the rotational system of expatriate labour to limit the duration of foreigners’ stay, curbs on the naturalisation and citizenship rights of those who have been naturalised’, among others (Kapiszewski, 2016, p. 48).

2 Methodology

As a result of a lack of availability of existing literature regarding the politics of chai karak in general and in the UAE and the rest of the Arab Gulf states in particular, this study will rely on primary and secondary sources in order to address the above questions. The primary sources that this study uses are oral history interviews with South Asians who work in close proximity to chai karak across the Dubai-Sharjah area. The secondary literature will consist of theoretical, contextual and historical literature, as well as literature that relates to analogous case studies that will be used in order to situate the data analysed from the interviews into existing debates regarding the politics and appropriation of food.

Five in-depth interviews were conducted for the purpose of this study, with the participants coming from a variety of backgrounds in terms of their ethnic heritage and professional experience. All the interviews were anonymised, with pseudonyms being used within the text of this paper. The interviews covered each participant’s experience of consuming and working with chai karak, as well as their perspectives regarding its history and place within the social and cultural fabric of the UAE and South Asia. As well as these interviews being the only way in which it was possible to gather data that directly addressed all of the research questions, interviews are important because they are ‘an interchange of views between two or more people on a topic of mutual interest [that see] the centrality of human interaction for knowledge production, and [emphasise] the social situatedness of research data’ (Kvale, 1996, p. 14). Furthermore, oral history, as ‘a means for transforming both the content and purpose of history […] can give back to the people who made and experienced history, through their own words, a central place’ (Thompson, 1978, p. 3). When it comes to addressing questions of social relations, oral history is a doubly important method because ‘the boundary between what takes place outside the narrator and what happens inside, between what concerns him or her and what concerns the group, becomes quite thin, and personal ‘truth’ may coincide with collective ‘imagination’’ (Portelli, 1981, p. 99).

It is important to note that the data gathered through the interviews may be coloured by a specific experience of state intervention that was relayed by one of the participants. He stated that many chaiwalas—a term for those that serve chai karak—and their managers fear being questioned by undercover policemen and investigators from the local municipality who visit chai karak cafeterias regularly. As a result of this, some of the responses provided may not be entirely truthful nor reflective of the beliefs or opinions of the participant. This claim was given credence when another participant expressed trepidation when he thought he heard the word ‘municipality’ during the interview. Additionally, an anonymous local businessman corroborated the claim. However, the data that was gathered was still highly useful and sufficiently addressed the research aims of this study.

This study also utilises a number of secondary sources for the purpose of contextualising the primary data and forming a strong framework within which its analysis can take place. The secondary sources that this study used are divided into three categories, with the first two being composed of theoretical materials and the final one of historical materials.

The first category is literature that relates to case studies that are analogous to the subject of this study. The aim of using these sources is to relate the politics of chai karak to other examples of food politics within the broader region of study, primarily West and South Asia. This section begins with an analysis of Liora Gvion’s study, Cuisines of Poverty as a Means of Empowerment: Arab Food in Israel, which explains how the exoticisation of food leads to the objectification and subjugation of marginalised communities. Gvion’s study also includes first-hand accounts by Palestinian activists and restaurateurs, as well as an analysis of them. The second part of this section addresses the topic of political and economic conditions disrupting the connection between food and belonging, as expressed in the works of Ronald Ranta and Yonatan Mendel, mainly through the book that they co-authored, From the Arab Other to the Israeli Self. It is worth noting that both of the so-far-mentioned texts assess the politics of food in an Israeli settler colonial context. The third part of this section assesses the book Food Culture in Colonial Asia by Cecilia Leong-Salobir, which looks at the politics of food produced as a result of colonial encounters, specifically with reference to the British appropriation of Indian so-called curry.

The second category of secondary literature relates to established theoretical works within the field of food anthropology. The aim of this category is to provide theoretical context to the arguments made as part of this study and to develop a theoretical framework that can be applied to the primary data. It opens with an assessment of the connection between food and culture, as explained by Pasi Falk in his works The Consuming Body and Homo Culinarius: Towards an Historical Anthropology of Taste. After this, it addresses the connection between food and identity from a theoretical standpoint, relying on Claude Fischler’s study Food, Self, and Identity. The final theorist whose work will be looked at in this category is Pierre Bourdieu, who in his book Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste addresses the connection between food and social class.

The final category of secondary literature relates to literature regarding the migration and presence of South Asians in the Gulf. This category seeks to provide a historical and socio-political context to the analysis of the primary data. Upon establishing the importance of the presence of South Asians in the UAE and Gulf more generally, this section will look at the commodification of South Asian labour and the political position of South Asians in the region. The main scholars whose works will be looked at in this part of the study are Girijesh Pant, Prakash C. Jain, and Andrzej Kapiszewski.

3 Analogous Case Studies

As explained, this section will begin with an analysis of Liora Gvion’s work on cuisines of poverty in Palestine and Israel. The main phenomenon that can be observed within this study is the manner in which the politically and socioeconomically dominant group within society, in this case Israeli Jews, are able to both de-value and exoticise the status of the marginalised group’s ordinary food items simultaneously. This is done by modifying the taste of these items to suit that of the dominant group (2006, pp. 307–308). This view is informed by the testimony of Warda, a Palestinian political activist from the Galilee, who told Gvion that Israelis have ‘appropriated only dishes which have suited [their] eating habits’ and that they ‘have changed them accordingly regardless of the way we eat them’, ending her statement by saying that she felt disrespected (p. 309). The main impact of such a process of appropriation is to transform the marginalised groups into objects whose express purpose is to supply such foods to the dominant group. Amin, a Palestinian restaurant owner from Haifa who Gvion interviewed, articulated this by stating that his Jewish clients view him as being only good for producing ‘hummus and kebobs’, with the rest of his food all being ‘disgusting and not worth even trying’, despite one of these clients claiming that he considers Amin to be ‘a brother’ (p. 308). Mendel and Ranta describe Gvion’s process of appropriation as being ‘not part of a new process of inclusion and of creating new spaces for coexistence and cooperation, but rather a new and useful mechanism for subduing and domesticating a threatening space’ (2016, p. 99).

With regard to food and belonging, Ranta argues that ‘despite its seeming ordinary nature, food holds an important place in how we view our national identities’ and that ‘food represents the nation’s attachment to its land, history, and culture’ (2015, p. 40). He carries on to claim that it is for this reason that ‘certain food items are fought over and contested’, which is very significant in the context of this study since tea was historically at the centre of pretexts for colonial wars and power struggles during encounters between the British Empire and other powers present on the Asian continent in the past (Moxham, 2003). This connection, between food and belonging, can be disrupted by political and economic forces, however, according to Mendel and Ranta. By way of example, they bring up Diana, a famous eatery in Nazareth that describes itself as an Israeli Grill Restaurant. They argue that ‘the [restaurant’s] sign, bringing together the Palestinian-related name Diana, with the invented concept of ‘Israeli Grill’ and with a Kosher certificate’ is a result of Jewish-Israeli ‘dominance and hegemony’ forcing the Palestinian owners of Diana to compromise in order ‘to ensure the flow of Jewish-Israeli customers and money into the restaurant’ (2016, p. 78). From this, Mendel and Ranta conclude that the censoring of Arab and Arab Palestinian contributions to the food landscape of Israel is due to ‘political, commercial and ideological reasons’ (p. 88).

Finally, it is important to assess the case study of the British appropriation of Indian curry. The point of comparison to which this relates to the Emirati appropriation of chai karak comes from the fact that ‘while most scholars would agree that curry by itself is not a dish that had its genesis in India it is, for all intent and purposes, the most identifiable dish that has been associated with India’ (Leong-Salobir, 2011, p. 40). Leong-Salobir argues that ‘although curry was adopted and adapted by colonizers it was not invented by them’, rather ‘curry figured prominently in the colonial imagination [and] its culinary creation was a collective but haphazard effort of both the colonizer and the colonized’. In describing this effort, she states that ‘curries were created, adapted and modified through the input of indigenous cooks, by the availability of ingredients in particular regions, by the social mores of the time, and also by health and nutritional thinking of the nineteenth century’ (pp. 39–40). As will be explained later in this study, an interesting point of comparison can be drawn between the canned milk of chai karak and the powder of colonial Indian curry, which Leong-Salobir posits ‘was developed by the British to pander to the fondness for curry that the colonials had acquired in India’ (p. 45). This demonstrates that there exists a precedent for the appropriation of South Asian food items that is based on colonially-influenced alteration, thus linking the study of Leong-Salobir to those of Gvion, Mendel, and Ranta.

4 Theoretical Framework

The first theorist whose works will be assessed in this part of the study is Pasi Falk, who argues that ‘taste preference is a multi-relational concept which cannot be reduced to a relationship between the objective properties of food-stuffs and the sensory-physiological reaction of the human ingestive and digestive organism’ (1991, p. 757). This is significant because it provides a socio-cultural element to understanding the popularity of food items within communities. Falk also posits that ‘at the sensory level taste preferences are necessarily also related to and even determined by the symbolic principles which translate the material universe into representations of the edible vs. inedible, which are then further specified into different subcategories according to taboos and ritual rules’. This distinction that he draws between edible and inedible forms the basis of the homo culinarius theory, which suggests that it is ‘the most fundamental distinction made by man’ since it ‘divides the world […] into that which may be incorporated and that which may not’ (Falk, 1994, p. 69). According to Falk, ‘edible vs. inedible is a basic distinction closely related to analytically constructed and more abstract binary oppositions such as us vs. them, same vs. other, inside vs. outside, good vs. bad and culture vs. nature’, ultimately defining ‘edible’ as ‘something which may be accepted or ‘taken in’ to our community and, in the last instance, into our bodies’.

The second theorist whose works will be assessed for this study is Claude Fischler, who draws the connection between food and identity. For him, the relationship between humans and food is two-dimensional: ‘the first [dimension] runs from the biological to the cultural, from the nutritional function to the symbolic function [while] the second [dimension] links the individual to the collective, the psychological to the social’ (1988, p. 275). Due to man’s omnivorous nature, Fischler believes that ‘incorporation is an act laden with meaning’ (p. 276). Incorporation, in this context, refers to the process, ‘in both real and imaginary terms’, of incorporating ‘all or some of’ the properties of food’; in essence, ‘[becoming] what we eat’ (p. 278). Fischler describes this as ‘a foundation for identity’ and the reason for which ‘identification of foods is a key-element in the construction of our identity’ (pp. 276–278). He expands this claim to include incorporation as ‘also the basis of collective identity and, by the same token, of otherness’, since ‘food and cuisine are a quite central component of the sense of collective belonging’ (p. 278). This concept is notable because ‘human beings mark their membership of a culture or a group by asserting the specificity of what they eat, or […] the difference of others’ (p. 279).

The final theorist whose works are relevant to this study is Pierre Bourdieu. For Bourdieu, ‘taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier’, since ‘social subjects, classified by their classifications, distinguish themselves by the distinctions they make, between the beautiful and the ugly, the distinguished and the vulgar, in which their position in the objective classifications is expressed or betrayed’ and that ‘oppositions similar in structure to those found in cultural practices also appear in eating habits’ (1979, p. 6). This most significantly relates the choices people make with regard to their food and what this indicates of their social position. Bourdieu explains this difference through the example of the café, which he claims is ‘not a place a man goes to for a drink but a place he goes to in order to drink in company, where he can establish relationships of familiarity based on the suspension of the censorships, conventions and proprieties that prevail among strangers’, while in the bourgeois or petit bourgeois café ‘each table is a separate, appropriated territory’ (p. 183). As the interviews will show, this distinction is particularly relevant in the case of chai karak cafeterias and the social conventions that govern them. With regard to the composition of a working-class meal, Bourdieu points out that is ‘characterized by plenty (which does not exclude restrictions and limits) and above all by freedom’ (p. 194).

5 Migration and the Status of South Asians in the UAE

In order to provide a historical and contextual backdrop to this study, it is vital to assess a number of sources that speak about the migration and status of South Asians in the UAE. The South AsiansFootnote 2 form an important ethnic group in the UAE because although the post-pandemic numbers are not yet clear, they together, prior to the COVID-19 outbreak, ‘[comprised] around 55% of UAE’s total population’ (Snoj, 2015) and likely still remain the largest sector of the population. This number gains increased significance when one looks at the historical development of the workforce in the UAE. In 1975, after the oil boom of the previous years, foreign workers, mostly South Asian, ‘in the UAE comprised 84% of the total labour force’, with this number rising to 89% in 1990 (Jain, 1999, p. 25) and 90% in 2004 (Kapiszewski, 2016, p. 48). Furthermore, at least when speaking specifically of Indians, although this can be extrapolated in a pre-Partition context to the rest of the subcontinent, Bansidhar Pradhan points out that ‘ties between India and the UAE run deep into history predating the emergence of the two as independent political entities, out of the shackles of their common colonial master – Britain’ (1999, p. 228).

Much of the literature that speaks of the presence of South Asians in the Gulf addresses the issue from an economic perspective. This is largely because both the Gulf States and the South Asian countries benefit from this movement in economic terms, mostly in the shape of ‘manpower export and remittances’, which ‘have acquired a critical role’ in the relations between said states (Pant, 1989, p. 51). Pant pinpoints ‘the oil price hike of 1973–74’ as the starting point for this relationship, despite the fact that South Asians had been migrating to the Gulf beforehand. This is because ‘the new emigration is not permanent in nature’. He argues that due to the contractual nature of the new emigration, ‘It can be regarded as an export of labour services instead of an export of people’, thus transforming the majority of South Asians of the Gulf, in economic terms, into a commodity rather than a community. He also highlights the fact that ‘this migration is not only temporary in nature but also of that section of the population, which belongs to economically the lowest stratum of the exporting countries’, although Masood Ali Khan points out that Kerala’s 90% literacy rate makes it the most popular Indian state to recruit from (1999, p. 61). It is notable that the majority of South Asians historically ‘have been employed in the construction sector, followed by the service sector’ (Pant, 1989, p. 62), since this makes chai karak cafeterias the place where South Asians who work in these sectors come into contact, thus fitting in with Bourdieu’s observation of the significance of proletarian cafés.

Politically, it seems that South Asian labourers benefit from the fact that they are viewed as being ‘more efficient and less troublesome’ than Arab labourers (Pant, 1989, p. 59). Kapiszewski adds to this that ‘unlike governments in many Arab states, Asian governments became involved in the recruitment and placement of their workers, facilitating their smooth flow to the Gulf’ (2004, p. 120). That being said, they do face ‘political, economic, and socio-cultural’ discrimination because the ‘the patriarchal nature of the social structure and the rentier nature of the economy and state […] have effectively curtailed freedoms of political expression, occupational choice and recreational and formal religious activities of the Indian immigrants, and particularly of the non-Muslim immigrants’ (Jain, 1999, p. 35). Jain also claims that the ‘segmented’ nature of the social life of South Asians has created ‘little scope for building a community among the working class’ South Asians (p. 36), but Nasra M. Shah disputes this, stating that ‘once social networks of friends and relatives are well established in the host country, migration takes on a self-perpetuating character as seems to have happened in the case of Asians in the Gulf’ (2004, p. 100).

6 Interview Results and Analysis

Prior to conducting each interview, it was important to note that the design of a vast majority of working-class chai karak cafeterias, where all but one of the interviews were carried out, force a separation among consumers. Many of the cafeterias do not have tables, and the assumed wisdom is that one either orders the beverage from and to their car or drinks it standing outside. There is a divide in terms of who consumes chai karak in what way, with the majority of car-riding customers being more affluent Emiratis, an observation that was confirmed by interview participants, and standing customers being South Asian labourers. This fits in well with Bourdieu’s characterisation of the café as being indicative of social classification, where the bourgeois Emirati customers are constantly kept separate from the working-class South Asians. This creates a social hierarchy within the cafeteria based on social class and ethnicity.

The question of the country of origin of chai karak resulted in answers that were reminiscent of Leong-Salobir’s narration of the invention and history of Indian curry under the British Empire, as well as Falk’s homo culinarius and the cultural construction of taste. It is striking that while non-Indian participants were quick to attribute the drink to India, Indian participants attributed it to the UAE. When asked about what distinguished chai karak from Indian tea, Hamza, a Keralite shift manager at one of the city’s oldest Pakistani restaurants, states:

In India and in Pakistan, we use fresh milk. We always get a hold of fresh raw milk with which we make karak chai. Here, you are deprived of that. Of fresh milk, you know? Here, it is more common to have your chai made with powdered milk or with canned milk. It is a problem that we are only able to work with these kinds of powdered and packaged milks, but we have to rely on this chai.

Hamza’s differentiation between the fresh milk-based chai karak of India and the canned milk-based chai karak of the UAE is a result of the relative difficulty of obtaining fresh milk for commercial use, particularly when he had first arrived from India to work for his current employer in the late 1980s—a period that coincided with one of the largest waves of migration of South Asian labour to the UAE. This echoes Leong-Salobir’s description of British curry powder, which differentiates British-Indian curries from more local Indian dishes. To add to this, while Hamza does recognise that canned milk-based chai karak was created by Indian labourers in the UAE, it is only later in the interview when he becomes more comfortable calling it ‘our’ drink. He articulates this by saying that:

When we originally came here we were all labourers and this was how we made our chai. The Arabs of the time welcomed it and enjoyed it, and in my opinion their culture has evolved a lot during this time. There was not that much of a difference between their habit of having chai then and now. They used to have a cup of Suleimani chaiFootnote 3 after lunch, dinner, or meals, but that is the main difference. [Back then,] Dubai was still being constructed and it was still evolving. For labourers, karak chai was a cheap drink to have, but the Arabs became interested in our chai back then just as they are now.

Omar, another Kerlite chaiwala at a newer karak chai cafeteria popular primarily among a diverse community of university students, on the other hand, states that the reason for using canned milk in the chai karak that he serves is because although ‘we do have fresh milk in the cafeteria, the customers do not like it […] They think that if we use fresh milk, the taste of the chai will not be as good’. This relates to Falk’s theories on how culture impacts taste. While all of the South Asians interviewed in this study expressed that they would rather drink chai karak made with fresh milk, it is the Emirati customers who prefer it to be made with canned milk who dictate the market. To add to this, Farhan, a former senior sales manager for a large South Asian dairy distribution company, stated that the move towards a more Emirati taste for karak chai is also shifting market forces back in South Asia, where diary distributors are introducing liquid tea whiteners, such as canned milk, to the market as a cheaper-to-produce alternative to fresh milk since. This played into the notion expressed by Mendel and Ranta that commercial forces can alter the cultural heritage of food products.

Ranta and Fischler’s theories of associating identities with food as a means of adding value to it were visible in responses to the question about South Asian dominance in the chai karak industry. Hamza jokes that while other large migrant communities in the UAE, such as East Asians, ‘do not really have the same past with chai and do not really understand it […] chai karak might be in itself a blood group in Indian and Pakistan’. Shahid, a Bangladeshi chaiwala at another, older chai karak cafeteria, adds to this that ‘people from other countries do not really want to work in this field’. However, he also says that while Afghans would like to sell chai karak, since ‘it is a big deal’, they simply ‘do not know how to make chai’ in his opinion and that the burden falls upon people from ‘poor, chai-making countries like India and Bangladesh’, in his own words. This response also recalls Gvion’s Cuisines of Poverty, as well as Pant’s suggestion of the commodification of South Asian manpower, in objectifying a certain sector of the South Asian diaspora in the UAE as being one that is only good for making chai karak (among other cafeteria specialities) when it comes to their gastronomic output.

Jasim, a more recently-arrived Pakistani part-time chaiwala at another chai karak cafeteria, provides a different account of why it is the case that the chai karak industry is dominated by South Asians and South Indians in particular. He stated that:

It’s the beautiful concept of a community. One person comes here from a particular community. One person comes from that neighbourhood in South India and then asks everybody to come over and help him build a business over here. They create a whole market over here together from that neighbourhood. One after another they continue to migrate here, so it becomes a complete extended family of South Indians from the same place. They really help other Indians from their communities to get settled in these kind of places, giving them good benefits and return on investments, outside of India.

This account, explaining that communities from South India transfer themselves to the UAE, contradicts Jain’s claim that it is difficult to form South Asian communities in the UAE; rather, it complements Shah’s assertion that these very communities and networks perpetuate the migration of South Asians to the Gulf.

The responses of the participants to the questions about who consumes chai karak were all indicative of a form of Gvion’s social objectification similar to that expressed by Shahid above. While not as confrontational, the responses of each of Jasim, Hamza, Omar, and Farhan shared the sentiment of Amin and Warda, Gvion’s Palestinian interviewees, who stated that the interest of the dominant group, Emiratis, in chai karak does not translate into respect for its maker and that they who make and serve chai karak have become almost supplementary to the actual process of customers consuming chai karak. Although, as earlier stated, the UAE has a very large population of South Asians—in fact, five times the size of the Emirati population—each participant stated that the majority of their customers were Emiratis. Hamza’s response that Emiratis started consuming chai karak en masse once they ‘realised the kind of kick that we Indians and Pakistanis get’ from the beverage also hints at cultural appropriation and exploitation along the lines of Rogers’ definition.

The final area in which the interviews yielded results of interest came when the status of South Asians in the UAE was addressed directly. Jasim, speaking about his position as a Pakistani within an industry heavily populated by Indians, said that:

All of the blue-collar workers in Dubai are Malabaris.Footnote 4 Because they are uneducated, and sometimes illiterate, they are actually everywhere and end up taking control of everything in Dubai.Footnote 5 Being a Pakistani, I don’t have any problem living here with them. We all live here hand in hand in one way or another. We don’t have any cultural or racism problems.

I developed a connection with my colleagues over a period of time that helped me show them how to make chai in the way that I want it. Otherwise it is such a hard thing to translate to chaiwalas this [Pakistani] method and to get them making it in other places.

I had to explain to them to keep the milk quantity higher than any other ingredient, be it the water, tea, whatever, and to use fresh milk rather than Rainbow.Footnote 6 It was hard work teaching them how to do it here, so I would be similar hard work explaining to somebody how to do it elsewhere. Over here, they honour my way of making chai, though.

Jasim’s response shows the importance of chai to building the social relationship between him and his Indian cohabiters and colleagues, thus aligning with Ranta’s statement on expressing identity through food as well as Fischler’s theory of incorporation in defining communities and creating otherness.

Hamza, by virtue of his longevity within the UAE, initially agreed with Jasim that, ‘Here in Dubai, there is absolutely no difference between Indians and Pakistanis. There is no India and there is no Pakistan. We are all one’. However, he also stated that, ‘Initially, there were a lot of problems when I first arrived here, with treating India better or treating Pakistan better by Arabs. We were all treated in different ways, but lately their mind-set has developed and they are all fine with us’. He estimated that this process of change took around fifteen years and has arisen out of the fact that the UAE shares good economic relations with both India and Pakistan, which has affected the culture in the UAE. This fits in with Mendel and Ranta’s characterisation of commercial and market norms forcing cultural shifts.

7 Conclusion

A lack of available literature necessitated the heavy reliance on theoretical materials and analogous case studies in carrying out this study. In conclusion, however, it is clear that the theories as understood by analysing the secondary sources and the experience as understood through the five oral history interviews align and complement one another very well.

It is evident that there is a discourse of cultural appropriation and exploitation that runs through the centre of any conversation on the history of chai karak in the UAE, but additionally there exist themes of integration, incorporation, exploitation, and objectification that need to be further explored. These themes have affected the social status of South Asians who work with chai karak because it entrenches the notion that their presence in the country is a heavily commodified phenomenon, since they exist as service providers and cultural objects that feed into the national culture. The fact that neither Emiratis nor the Emirati state are fearful of the influence of South Asians on the local culture in the same way that they are fearful of the influence of expatriate Arabs (Kapiszewski, 2004) demonstrates that they are fully in control of the contestations that surround South Asian cultural integration into the social fabric of the country. Finally, the contestation around chai karak in particular in the UAE reflects trends within the UAE social relations by enforcing the supremacy of Emiratis above all other ethnic groups and by connecting the social power of different ethnic groups and communities to market forces. This creates a form of hegemony that acts alongside other mechanisms of maintaining the privileged position of Emiratis, many of which were described by Kapiszewski earlier in this study.