‘Dubai’ as a Place of Memory in Malayalam Cinema

This paper is an exploration of cinematic memory as a resource for remembering large-scale Keralan migration to the Gulf since the late 1960s. The south Indian state of Kerala, which predominantly speaks Malayalam, is a major contributor to the migrant labour force in the Gulf region for the last five decades. However, until recently, the migrant figured in the public discourse of Kerala as an economic agent alone. There has been increasing instances of memorialising the Gulf in the Malayalam public sphere since the beginning of the 2000s which brings to light the subjective aspects of the Gulf migration. However, what is lost in these accounts is the simultaneity and interlinked nature of the two places. Cinema, on the other hand, offers resources to inscribe the mutuality of the two places in the collective memory of Kerala. Invoking Pierre Nora’s concept of places of memory, the paper looks at cinematic renditions of ‘Dubai’ as one such site of memory in the present when the image of Dubai and the profile of Keralan migrant has undergone a shift. Taking the example of one Malayalam film, Pathemari (Salim Ahamed, 2015), and tracing its cinematic genealogy, this paper analyses the ways in which ‘Dubai’ is remembered and how this remembrance inscribes the Gulf as part of the collective memory of Kerala. The paper identifies the persistence of filmed space, intertextuality, and the archivality of the star body as the modes in which cinematic memory achieves this collective memorialisation. The mutuality between Kerala and Dubai, offered by cinematic memory, allows it to be an act of affective citizenship on the part of the migrants, i.e. embodied and sensorial acts of claiming the universal right to have rights.


Introduction
When memory is studied with relation to migration, it is a truism that it is home which is remembered from one's location in the place that one has migrated to (Marschall, 2018).For the Keralan migrants to the Gulf, owing to the circular nature of the Gulf migration, however, it is the place one had migrated to, the Gulf, which is often the remembered place.This paper is an attempt to imagine the Arabian Gulf as a 'place of memory' (Nora, 1989) as it appears in mainstream Malayalam cinema.The central question in this paper is to explore the possibilities of cinematic memory in mobilising affective citizenship for migrants to the Gulf who are denied formal citizenship in the target countries and are considered non-residents in India.This paper looks specifically from the vantage point of the migration from the south Indian state of Kerala to the countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) -Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
Commentators have pointed out that the denial of citizenship to the migrant labourers is at the heart of the nation-building measures in the Gulf countries (Fargues, 2011;Sater, 2013).The 'guest worker' status of the migrant workers in the Gulf make them a 'temporary people', to recall Deepak Unnikrishnan's (2017) novel on the experience of Gulf migration, forcing the migration to be therefore circular in nature.Because of this circularity, the migrant often ends at a place other than the Gulf, and as far as the Keralan migrants to the Gulf who settled back in Kerala are concerned, what is remembered is the Gulf phase of his/her life.The temporariness of the Gulf life 'creates anxieties of transience' (Menon, 2020, 189).Memory becomes a means through which the loss of the Gulf is negotiated in repatriation.Looking at migrant photographs, Karinkurayil (2021) argues for the role of positive memory as acts of claiming for oneself a place one is no more a part of, and as means of tentative fixity to the permanently temporary nature with which the Gulf scape is characterised by (on the latter, see Elsheshtawy, 2019).As Ilias (2018) has illustrated, the memories of the early post-oil migrants from Kerala to the Gulf, while narrating their personal experiences, provide us resources for imagining a past of the Gulf at odds with its present, and personalised accounts of the transformations in the Gulf.
Taking this interest in Keralan Gulf migrant memory further, this paper is an attempt to analyse the recent memorialising of the 'Dubai' (as a shorthand for the Gulf) in mainstream Malayalam cinema as acts of 'affective citizenship'.Fortier (2016Fortier ( , 1039) ) uses the term affect 'to designate a generic category of emotions and feelings, including embodied and sensory feelings through which we experience the world, and through which worlds, subjects and objects are enacted and brought forth'.Drawing on Isin's characterisation of citizenship acts as acts through which 'subjects constitute themselves as citizens -or, better still, as those to whom the right to have rights is due' (Isin, 2008, 18), Fortier synthesises affective citizenship as the embodied and sensory aspects of these acts.While outlining the trajectory and contours of 'Dubai' in Malayalam cinema, the paper focuses on two movies in particular -Vilkkanundu Swapnangal (Azad, 1980), the first Malayalam movie 1 3 'Dubai' as a Place of Memory in Malayalam Cinema shot on location in Dubai, and Pathemari (Salim Ahamed, 2015), a movie which thematises the memory of a migrant labourer from the early years of post oil-boom migration to the present.Through this, the paper illustrates 'cinematic memory' as a resource for memorialising the migrant experience.The latter film is studied as a reiteration of the first, and both being mainstream films, they are acts of mobilising a collective memory which is as much that of the non-migrant in Kerala as it is that of the migrant.Cinematic memory, as distinct from migrant narratives, is seen as offering us a narrative of transformation of the Gulf and Kerala in their simultaneity, making it possible to imagine citizenship in its universal dimension as 'the right to have rights'.

The Great Amnesia
In 'Between Memory and History', Pierre Nora (1989) elaborates on 'places of memory' as the embodied signs of one's heritage one turns to when the present fades into an irretrievable past.Nora characterised les lieux de mémoire as those icons that one turns to -'the archives… the libraries, dictionaries, and museums as well to commemorations, celebrations …' -when the immediacy of life has been disrupted, and one looks out for signs of historical continuity.The sites of memory are those which are characterised by a collective will to remember when there is a consciousness of a break with the past.They are seized upon in moments of history, while forgotten at other times.They thus appear in and out of collective memory in particular times.These sites of memory are attempts to pause history itself; but they are themselves open to the transformations caused by history in their changing interpretations -'a site of excess closed upon itself, concentrated in its own name, but also forever open to the full range of its possible significations' (Nora, 1989, 24).
What is this past that has been broken and, in acknowledgement of the break, is in the process of reconstitution?The connection between the regions that today constitute the state of Kerala in India and those which constitute the Arab Gulf dates back to at least sixth century BCE.Port cities such as Kozhikode (also known as Calicut) and Kodungalloor (also known as Crangannore) were important points of the trade between the two regions.Placed as they are along the Indian Ocean, the regions of the Arabian Gulf and present-day Kerala are historically connected by trade, peculiarities of religion, movement of texts, diaspora, and exile (Ho, 2006;Jacob, 2019;Kooria & Pearson, 2018;Prange, 2018).In the early years of the discovery of oil, some Indians were channelled there through British agencies to work in oil rigs, and these included some from Kerala as well (Seccombe, 1983).There were also a small population engaged in trade.From the late 1960s onwards, the Arabian Gulf, or simply called the Gulf or Dubai, became a popular destination for those from Kerala who wanted to escape the unemployment and food scarcity back home.The earlier destinations for migration from Kerala included Ceylon (present day Sri Lanka), Rangoon (present day Myanmar), Malaysia and Singapore (Devika, 2012), but none of these destinations witnessed the kind of largescale migration which the countries of the Gulf would, from the late 1960s onwards.These early migrations were mostly through undocumented channels, and this was also the time in which the Gulf region was yet to acquire its present form.The Gulf settled into the political contours it has today in the beginning of the 1970s, and this was when the labour migration from Kerala to the region was formalised.The word 'Dubai' while it may refer to the city, was often used in popular parlance in the last decades of the twentieth century to refer to the region as a whole, replacing the word 'Persia' which was in vogue in the 1970s and prior.
The turn to a place of memory, in the case of 'Dubai', is to be seen in the context of Dubai reinventing itself towards the late 1990s as 'a street of the world' (shari' al-dunya, as the theme song of the first Dubai Shopping Festival characterised the city).This was a Dubai stressing on its rebranded profile as a tourist and vacation spot and at the forefront of the technological marvels (see, Kathiravelu, 2015), becoming more 'international' or 'global', as against the contiguity of Dubai with the affairs and labour of the Indian subcontinent (Mathew, 2019(Mathew, , 2020).An earlier phase of history, with its interpersonal relationships between the migrants and their influential sponsors, is eclipsed by an impersonal bureaucracy, and is now consigned to memory (Ilias, 2018).
'Dubai' as a place of memory assumes significance against the general amnesia that has characterised Gulf migration in the Malayalam public sphere as well, staged in migrant narratives themselves.While from the late 1970s to early 1990s, the photographs of the Gulf migrants -the most prolific of Gulf narratives -produced the Gulf as an aspirational space (Karinkurayil, 2020), the recent works on the Gulf in the Malayalam public sphere is often seen as exposing the 'real Gulf'.A watershed moment in Malayalam literature in general and especially with relation to the Gulf migration was the publication of Benyamin's Aadujeevitham (2008; available in English translation by Joseph Koyippally as Goat Days (2012)) which went on to become the most sold Malayalam novel in history (Ibrahim, 2019) and bagged numerous awards including the Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award.Benyamin's Aadujeevitham was hailed as the novel which exposed the harsh conditions of labour and life in the Gulf for the first time (Vinai & Prasuna, 2015).Numerous memoirs dealing with the Gulf years of migrants have been published since the early 2000s, such as those by Babu Bharadwaj, Muzafer Ahamed and Krishnadas.The memoirs as well as other migrant media, such as the short films produced by Keralan migrant labourers in the Gulf -for example, Visit Visa (Shafi Orange, 2014) and Passport (Manoj Mohan Mynagappally, 2015) -take the tone of revelation.All of them seek to educate those in Kerala about the real conditions of life in the Gulf.It is as if the Gulf, despite being a lived experience for millions of Keralans, has to be 'revealed' each time.These migrant memories affect a disjuncture between the Gulf and Kerala even as they acknowledge the essential role that the migrants played in Kerala's development.In effect, what is lost is the memory of a simultaneous growth, and the transnational movements which made this growth possible.

Cinematic Memory
How can cinema create an affective archive of memories that create a space of belonging, one that is in the past, and is a foreign country?How can it reactivate the simultaneity between the Gulf and Kerala?Bhrugubanda (2018) and Srinivas (2013), in the context of erstwhile Andhra Pradesh in south India, have pointed out the foundational role played by cinema in forging a collective memory about one's land and its people.Filmed locations 'transcend their moment of recording, almost instantaneously, to shape and become part of other social, experiential, and institutional spaces of regulation, exhibition and memorialisation in commercial theatres, state documentaries, school curricula, and archives' (Jaikumar, 2019, 13).In this section, I will look at how 'Dubai', memorialised in terms of textual references (but without the self-consciousness displayed in intertextuality) to earlier cinematic renditions of the place, become an act of reclaiming memory in the face of disruptive changes.
The 1980 film Vilkkanundu Swapnangal (Dreams for Sale), directed by Azad, written by M.T. Vasudevan Nair, and produced by V.B.K. Menon, who was a distributor of Malayalam movies in the Gulf, was the first Malayalam movie to be shot on location in the Gulf.The film advertised itself on its posters as 'a golden opportunity to see the Gulf'.The film narrates the story of a Gulf migrant from Kerala who, at the beginning of the film, makes his way to the Gulf as an undocumented on a dhow owing to the utter privation at home.Thanks to his education and his intelligence, he makes the way to the top of the firm he had joined as a junior employee, becomes fantastically rich, makes his good fortune visible back home by buying land and building a concrete house for himself.However, upon returning home, he soon realises that his new found riches will not deliver him from the injuries inflicted by the past, and after being rejected by his fiancé and dejected at the land that has caused him so much loss, he returns to the Gulf for good, putting up his newly constructed house in the village for sale.
The 1980s was a time in which the Gulf started impacting the Malayalam cinema in a big way, both as a source of funding and as a newly formed segment of audience.Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema notes of the period that 'the 80 s is Kerala are marked by the 'Gulf money' remitted by expatriate workers, spawning a 'newly rich' consumerist sector and fostering a lumpenised urban mass culture' (Rajadhyaksha & Willemen, 1994, 143).Malayalam cinema underwent a boom in this period with a spurt in the number of movies produced.Citing Nair's (1999) study on the economic aspects of Malayalam cinema, according to which 'the number of films produced increased from 241 films produced in 1970-75 to 465, 551 and 497 in 1975465, 551 and 497 in -80, 1980465, 551 and 497 in -85 and 1985465, 551 and 497 in -90, respectively', Radhakrishnan (2009, 219) , 219) notes that the impact of Gulf migrants and other entrants such as those from plantation economy was also felt in the bigger budgets of Malayalam films for this period.Though diegetically invisible in the period between 1980 and the late 1990s, the Gulf made itself manifest in these films through semiotic associations such as gold bars, transistors, and wrist watches (Radhakrishnan, 2009, 220-221).The bigger budgets of Malayalam cinema of this period also gave rise to a new breed of cinema which could now shoot in foreign locations.The period is marked by some of these extravagant films shot in exotic locations -Ezhamkadalinakkare (I.V. Sasi, 1979) (set in the USA), Love in Singapore (Baby, 1980) (set in Singapore), America America (I.V. Sasi, 1983a) (set in the USA), and Iniyenkilum (I.V. Sasi, 1983b) (set in Japan).Paul Mathew (2019) identifies the characteristic of this new 'imageregime' -the procedures through which the sayable and the visible, the visible and the invisible are related to one another (Ranciere, 2003) -that came into being in Malayalam cinema from 1980s as moving away from the individual centric and biographic mode of narration to a non-centred vision.
Vilkkanundu Swapnangal, however, belonged to the older image-regime where the focus was on the biography of the protagonist.As mentioned, the film narrativises the departure of a migrant, his rise through the time, his return to his homeland, and his final exit from that land.This older feature of the film is no less to be credited to the writer of the film, M.T Vasudevan Nair.An epitome of the Malayalam literary culture with several renowned novels to his credit, and with remarkable success both as a screenwriter and a director, M.T. (as he is popularly known) represented the old against the new.His novels are set against the crumbling Nair taravad (matrilineal joint family) which represented the older system, and was oriented towards the reinvention of the Nair -who was understood to be in the wane thanks to the rise of newly rich classes -as 'the van-guard of a progressive-nationalist/ politico-aesthetic operation that has shaped and continue to shape the political and cultural life of Keralites' (Ansari, 2016, 174).Vilkkanundu Swapnangal connects the theme of the Nair decay in the highly influential novels by M.T., such as Naalukettu (1958) and Asuravithu (1962) and connects it to the 'discovery' of the Gulf in Keralan discourse.As Menon (2005) notes, for M.T. the village was the centre of the moral universe.The river was the boundary of this village, and its moral scaffolding.The ocean on the other hand was the source of the illicit, trouble and degeneracy.Thus, the ending of the film, in which the migrant decides to leave the village for Dubai forever, is affectively ambiguous.While tragic for the protagonist, it is however also the exit from the moral-economy of the village, of an outsider (the protagonist who is himself morally degenerate) to its usual degeneracy, and therefore hardly a matter of anguish from the standpoint of the village.
Dubai in Vilkkanundu Swapnangal is one of intimate connection to Kerala.Here, the migrants are in constant and multisensorial connection with their folks back home.The letters, gifts, and audio letters (recorded in cassettes) traverse the two spaces, between migrants and their left-behind families.The political events in Kerala are of concern to the migrants in the Gulf.After Vilkkanundu Swapnangal, the Gulf was absent as a diegetic space in Malayalam cinema for a long time.The collective memory of the appearance of Gulf in Vilkkanundu Swapnangal is taken here to be the reference point against which the Gulf has underwent these numerous reinterpretations in later years.
It was only towards the closing years of the 1990s the Gulf became accessible again as a diegetic space for Malayalam cinema.Most of them treated the Gulf as a space of thrills and adventure, in consonance with the spirit of Gulf migrant photographs of an earlier time, with some stereotyping of the Arabs and Sharia law occasionally thrown in.Examples include Ayal Kadha Ezhuthukayanu (Kamal, 1998), Sharja to Sharja (Venugopan, 2001), Dubai (Joshiy, 2001), Oru Marubhoomikkadha (Priyadarshan, 2011), Diamond Necklace (Lal Jose, 2012) and Casanovva (Rosshan Andrrews, 2012).These films did refer to the exploitative labour conditions in the Gulf, but only in passing.The Gulf in these movies was mostly just another city, albeit one with a lot more racial diversity.They were also a recognition of Dubai's brand new image.This was the Dubai of skyscrapers, superfast motor bikes, and 1 3 'Dubai' as a Place of Memory in Malayalam Cinema white women grooving to fusion music.There were, at this same time, other movies too, in the social realist tradition of Malayalam cinema, where the Gulf appeared in harsher tones as a space of hard labour and precarity, beginning with Kallu Kondoru Pennu (Shyamaprasad, 1998), Garshom (P.T. Kunju Muhammed, 1999), to the later Arabikkatha (Lal Jose, 2007), andKhaddama (Kamal, 2011).
The rest of this paper focuses on the film Pathemari, directed by Salim Ahamed, and released in 2015.The film is a retrospective on the Keralan Gulf migrant experience, and therefore directly connected to the question of cinematic memory.While the current image-regime of Malayalam cinema is characterised by an aesthetic of fast cuts, multi-centred visions, bricolage and pastiche, an aesthetic which is popularly referred to as 'new generation cinema', Pathemari is reminiscent of the earlier mode of cinema which is biographical in its orientation, and realist in its aesthetics.But the film stays clear of pastiche.The new-generation aesthetic is largely limited to depict scene transitions between the past and the present, and in the narrative order which shuttles between the two times.It is to a detailing of cinematic memory in this film that this we shall presently turn to.

The City of Memory
'Who'd have been the first Malayali to step on this land?' asks Narayanan to Moideen, in the film Pathemari (Salim Ahamed).The film thematises the travails of a migrant, Pallikkal Narayanan (played by the Malayalam 'Megastar' Mammootty) who made his first journey to the Gulf on a dhow, possibly in the late 1960s, and continued his migrant life to meet the various expenses and demands at home, and finally expires in the Gulf.Each time he visits home, he yearns to stay back and not return to the Gulf anymore, but each time there is a new crisis at home the solution to which always lies in his going back to Gulf and toiling for a few more years.As years pass by, his family grows more distant from him, and he is remembered only as the bread-winner to turn to in case of a monetary need.Moideen is Narayanan's close friend with whom he had planned and set on that first dhow journey.He has been the closest friend of Narayanan even before the journey, and continue to be so.The day before Moideen is finally set to go back to Kerala for good, they revisit Khor Fakkan which was where they made their first landing many decades back, as undocumented migrants who had to swim their way from the dhow, away from the eyes of the authorities, and had to hide behind a giant rock in the sea close to beach where they had to wait till it was nightfall to make the crossing to the land.It was there, now, decades later, that Narayanan asks Moideen, in a perfunctory curiosity laden with a sense of loss of the precious years that was lost from the lives of both of them away from the loved ones at home, 'who'd have been the first Malayali to step on this land?'To this Moideen replies, 'whoever it was, he wouldn't have been a tourist'.
There are many different layers of memorialising operationalised in Pathemari.The first, in the image of the dhow, is that of the memory of the undocumented early migrants of the late 1960s and early 1970s when the Gulf states were in a state of flux and the migration to the Gulf from India was yet to be properly channelized.
The lore of the early migrants who had to swim their way to the Gulf from the unauthorised laanchis (dhows) are a staple of the Gulf migration story.The film shows the clandestine transport of migrants to be part of the common knowledge of the village, to the extent that the one who organises this transport tells his customers that he won't state his charge for transport himself and that those interested can find it out from the public because it is common knowledge 'to everyone on this shore'.The reaction to the young protagonist's announcement that he is leaving for the Gulf is received differently by the members of the family.While the mother sides with the protagonist, the father stops speaking to him.It is not the curiosity of an unknown land that we see in them.It is rather the knowledge of a land which is unknown, the acknowledgement of a known-unknown that we find in them.This known-unknown is already present to them as both a space that can finally deliver all of them from the pangs of humiliating privation they are in, but also as a space where people are lost forever.The mixed reaction of the members of the family mirrors the mixed message that the Gulf itself was both as a succour and a hazard.We also see, on the day of the departure, many from the village who have come to the strip of the shore to see the departing ones off.The film thus etches the Gulf migration not as the adventure of a few individuals, but as a hazard that was embedded into the knowledge and the conscience of Kerala, represented here by the seaside village.
The rock in Khor Fakkan is presented as another site of memory.The rock, which used to be known to the early migrants as 'adayalappara', or the 'signal rock' was where many of the early migrants to the Gulf landed for the first time (Sreekumar, 2015).It is interesting to note that while the usual representation of the Gulf in Malayalam mainstream media is that of the skyscrapers or the sand dunes, Pathemari makes a departure from this trend by marking a rock in the sea as the marker of the Malayali's Gulf experience.The skyscrapers 'serves to establish Dubai as an ordered rational and bureaucratised space for global public consumption' (Kathiravelu, 2015, 32).The sand dunes are proverbially temporary.The rock in the sea, on the other hand, devoid of its association with the desert or with the marvels of uber modernity, has nothing characteristically Gulf about it.It is of a time before the skyscrapers.It belongs to a different order of temporality, and serves as a marker of a different time.The rock compresses the time in its texture.It evokes promises of a grander scale, a mythic scale, made at another time, than the newly minted city.For some, the rock (sans the sea) might even be reminiscent of American Westerns.What makes it representative of the Gulf is its association with an older phase of Keralan migration.The rock is generative of a memory to be excavated from the depths beneath the sand dunes and the high rises.The rock is a place which is also time-space, harking back to a time that is here and is another country.In a way, it is Pathemari which brought the rock back to Keralan consciousness, as a place which can now be found (in both senses of retrieving as well as establishing) in memory.
By marking the Gulf with the rock of Khor Fakkan, the film reconfigures the history of the Gulf as one which is intimately bound with the invisible bodies waiting for the nightfall so that they may cross over and construct the marvel of the world that is Dubai.The rock becomes a piece of negative labour, 'an oscillation between presence and absence' (Bach, 2013, 32) of the labour that built the Gulf, now sedimented on a natural formation.To assert that the first travellers to 1 3 'Dubai' as a Place of Memory in Malayalam Cinema this land were not tourists is to recover another history of the Gulf, more so for the Keralans themselves, whose images of the Gulf was amnesiac of the labour that sustains it, much of which comes from amongst them.
A formal property of Vilkkanundu Swapnangal that is repeated in Pathemari is how they begin as the story of a collective and is then focalised on an individual.The collective experience is conveyed through a voice-over which occasions the commencement of both the movies.In Vilkkanundu Swapnangal, this is what the voice-over has to say: We were always attracted to the idea of a place which yielded gold.Once upon a time it was Ceylon; then Malaya.In the last decade there were stories going round in the western shores, of a land where, if you could somehow reach there even if you had to sell-off your house, you would be rescued [you would prosper -auth.].For thousands of youth there was now a dream to nurture -Dubai!(translation mine) Pathemari similarly begins with a voice-over: A people who used to live by fishing and pearl hunting; a society which had to face tragedies; the coming of petrol changed them immensely.History marked this period as 'camel to Cadillac.'It was quite quickly that those used to travel by camel shifted to Cadillac, one of the most expensive cars of the time.The hearsay about this land which yields gold attracted young men who used to find their lives an everyday challenge.When the rulers with foresight were joined by the hardworking young men, dream cities rose on sand dunes -that city which lures and seduces everyone, Dubai! (translation mine) However, one can see the transformation of Dubai from 1980 to 2015 as one from rumour to that of objective knowledge.While in 1980 the voice-over spoke of rumours and hearsays, thereby baring its inability at total knowledge, the 2015 voice-over has a steady hold on the object of its narration, its prehistory, history, and its present.Though Dubai was hearsay, it is no more so.While the voice-over in 1980 can be compared to the beginnings of a fable in face-to-face story telling cultures, in 2015, it gets replaced by the objectivity of author-ity characteristic of societies permeated by print culture and the impersonal mode of communication (for a discussion on direct speeches, see Moretti, 2005, 81-85).
The film thus sets up the ascendance of History such that Dubai emerges as a fact rather than a hearsay.Even the fact of hearsay becomes a part of objective history.However, for the rest of the movie, it is the image of 'Dubai as a mirage' (Kathiravelu, 2015) that the film offers.This is where dreams turn into (dis)illusions.The celebratory historical account has to now contend with the subjective experience of the individual migrant.And this experience is an itinerary of loss and heartbreak.History is recalled, a history that is in keeping with the global image of Dubai, so that memory may have its rightful place, as the right way to remember.Having begun with the certainty of the voice-over, the film prods its way to the conflicting subjective accounts of the place.
As mentioned earlier, in its biographical mode, the image-regime of Pathemari is closer to 1980 than to the 2000s.Though deploying a star body -the 'megastar' Mammootty -as its protagonist, the aesthetic of Pathemari is catered towards his realistic acting prowess than his star persona.As S.V. Srinivas has illustrated with reference to the 1980s Telugu cinema, stardom is a vacant space to which anyone can be elevated within the filmic texts through the deployment of a set of cinematic techniques (Srinivas, 2009, 94-104), which then has to be supplemented by extrafilmic means, and accumulated as a substratum across appearances in the star's career.Pathemari provides a negative example of this in that it doesn't deploy any techniques associated with star films, while it inevitably does refer back to the star's repertoire.The inside knowledge that Pathemari refers back to in the context of Mammootty's star body is to remind its audience of the realist actor par excellence that Mammootty is and was, the actor who has bagged several awards for his acting prowess, and whose depiction of frailty, anguish, and marginalisation -such as in Mrugaya (I.V. Sasi, 1989), Amaram (Bharathan, 1991), Vatsalyam (Cochin Haneefa, 1993), and Ponthan Mada (T.V. Chandran, 1994) -is unparalleled in Malayalam cinema.In fact, another layer of memory which accrues in the body of Mammootty in Pathemari with reference to Vilkkanundu Swapnangal is how Mammootty appears as a minor character in the latter who in his brief appearances has to transition from the role of a neighbourhood rich youth to a wasted drunkard.The film thus reminds its audience of a time before superstardom, an object of nostalgia in Malayalam cinephile social media pages, but also of a time which was formative of the present, and which is all the more vivid when seen through the vantage point of the here and now.The movement of time and its connection to an earlier time is inscribed in the star body as an activated archive of his earlier roles.
For a perspective on the shift of perception regarding 'Dubai' in cinematic terms, the role of star-body in Pathemari may be contrasted with another Mammootty-starrer.Dubai (Joshiy, 2001), set in the city of Dubai amongst other places in the Gulf, was a lavish star vehicle for Mammootty.The migrant labourer is in the fringes of that movie, and a subject of the largesse of the super-rich Malayali entrepreneur played by Mammootty.The film deploys the accoutrements that came to define the star figure of Mammootty in the late 1990s -signature body gestures, defiance to symbolic authorities, and English delivered in an oratorical style.Add to it the skyscrapers and a helicopter, and Dubai was marketed as a veritable play of riches at a time when the low-budget social-realist aesthetics of Malayalam cinema was cowering under pressure from the even-lower budget soft porn films on the one hand, and the high-budget, spectacular Tamil and Telugu films on the other.From Dubai to Pathemari is a shift -when the labourer at the margins come to occupy the star body.
Pathemari marks the simultaneity between Dubai and Kerala in the space of its diegesis as well.Framed as the memory of Moideen, a frame that doesn't overbear on the plot, the film shows the transformation of the space of Dubai as well as the space of the village back home.The sandy beach that marked the village is spliced with shops that line an asphalted road to mark the past and present respectively.The movement of time is reflected in the change in clothing styles, the shift from thatched or tiled houses to concrete structures, and the fast moving pace of the world 1 3 'Dubai' as a Place of Memory in Malayalam Cinema around the reminiscing migrant.The emptiness of the desert of Khor Fakkan contrasts with the city of high rises where the migrants are in search of a bedspace.
The simultaneity and the disjuncture between Dubai and Kerala is brought out starkly in a sequence of a phone call between the migrant in Dubai and the family back home.It is the day of his niece's marriage, and the migrant in Dubai, who has now bestowed almost everything he has earned towards this marriage, calls home to partake of some of the excitement.Back in Kerala, the house teems with guests and is in the thick of action.The ringing phone is picked up, and the line kept alive as the person who attended it goes in search of the migrant's wife.The phone handset lies there, relaying to the lonely and longing migrant the hustle and bustle of his festive home, while also making it amply clear to him that no one is missing him there.His is just the role of a remitter.The active telephone line becomes an instance of the production of a locality that defies any established boundaries of local-national-global (Adelson, 2005, 31-77), while also staging the emotional disconnect in this space.The film thus becomes the space in which the seemingly distinct spaces are brought together in an omniscient story-telling that breaks free from the frame of a memoir.

Contours of the Present
One could only hypothesise on the contours of the disruptive present that engender the specific memories and memorialisations of Dubai as it does.On the one hand the means of transport and technologies of communication have developed greatly, increasing the mobility between the two regions.The arrival of cable television towards the late 1990s is another aspect why Dubai might not be a subject of hearsay anymore.At this juncture, it is relevant to point out the crucial role played by Pravasalokam, a phone-in programme airing since 1998 in the Malayalam television channel Kairali, in which folks back home called to register and seek public help in the Gulf regarding disappeared migrant or cases of shocking labour exploitations (on this, see Mini, 2016).The heart-wrenching phone calls aimed at the root of the aspirational space that Gulf used to be.Certainly such a programme would not have been conceivable before the popularisation of phone, and more accessible television channels.
At the same time, one has to differentiate between knowledge in itself and a display of knowledge.The real conditions of labour in the Gulf may have been known to the folks back home right at the beginning of migration.After all, the Mappila songs of the late 1970s alluded to the harsh living conditions in the Gulf (Arafath, 2020).The point is that there was an aversion towards a public acknowledgement of this knowledge until the late 1990s.Vilkkanundu Swapnangal is an excellent case in point.Towards the very beginning of the film, a migrant in the Gulf tells the newly arrived protagonist that people in Kerala falsely assume that the migrants have a cosy life in the Gulf.And yet, it is precisely such a fantastic life of riches and comfort that come to characterise the protagonist's life in the Gulf.This fantastic nature of the Gulf as a space of unimaginable riches would persevere until the late 1990s.The shift in perspective can also be attributed to the shift in the demographics of the migrant labourer themselves.The profile of the average migrant has changed from uneducated and unskilled to a more educated and skilled labour force.As an example, the migrants with a degree or secondary school education in 2014 made up double the percentage of their share in migration in 1998 (Rajan & Zachariah, 2019, 199).
There are a few possible other reasons too for the reconfiguration of Dubai towards the late 1990s and henceforth.The first of these might be the repositioning of politics with reference to globalisation.The increasing awareness of globalisation, the public stances for and against it, and a re-articulation of the terms of globalisation to local conditions and re-inscribing the local as part of the global is an ongoing and fraught process in Kerala (Lukose, 2009).Dubai is now seen as the epitome of globalisation as the city came to rebrand itself towards the end of the last century (in Malayalam cinema, this fact is visually figured by the display of racial diversity in exterior establishing shots).While the local political and cultural formations such as electoral parties and cultural organisations in Kerala have sought the help of the Gulf migrants at least from the 1980s, these acquired a formal structure only towards the late 1990s (Ilias, 2015).The re-inscription of the Gulf migrant as a labourer suffering under global capital, rather than as a local rich man who made his fortune away from sight, might be the product of these realignments.The Malayalam film Arabikkatha (Lal Jose, 2007), which thematises labour in the Gulf, and has as its protagonist a communist worker from Kerala who finds the self-fulfilling virtue of labour in the desert, is an excellent depiction of a public acknowledgment of transnational solidarity of labour in Malayalam public sphere (for a discussion of the film, see Radhakrishnan, 2016).
The other fact is that of the state expanding itself to bring the migrants within its reach.The formation of NORKA (Non-Resident Keralites Affairs Department) which was started as an arm of the government of Kerala is an example of the outreach of the state.Though a result of the increasing demand by the migrant organisations to the state to take care of its welfare (Mini, 2020, 150), it is also an effort by the state to channel the migrant resources and affection towards it.NORKA engages in a variety of activities including verification of job offers, facilitating verification of applicants' certificates, programmes for upgradation of skills, providing rehabilitation funds, repatriation of the bodies of dead migrants, etc.The latest mission of Kerala state to channel migrant resources for its 'Rebuild Kerala' scheme is another example of the state's outreach into the transnational sphere.
In this context of governmental outreach, it is pertinent that we pay attention to the place of affective citizenship in the resolution of Pathemari.With reference to Clarke et al. (2014), Fortier (2016) points out that affective citizenship 'takes place', that is, it occupies a place through 'emotions, feelings, bodies' (Fortier, 2016(Fortier, , 1040)).Interestingly, the place which the subjects of Pathemari or Vilkkanundu Swapnangal claim for themselves is not a place in 'Dubai', but back in Kerala, and by virtue of them labouring in 'Dubai'.Of the many facts of migrant life -narrated by the (now expired) migrant in a TV interview in the closing minutes of Pathemarithat comes as a 'revelation' to those at home are 'When we sent home ten thousand rupees, those at home think we actually got twenty thousand, we have kept ten for ourselves and are sending them only ten; the fact is we got only seven thousand, and then we borrow three, so that we can send home ten thousand… When 1 3 'Dubai' as a Place of Memory in Malayalam Cinema we see children here we always remember our children at home; how many children remember their father when they see a man of their father's age?'This is the last word of the migrant seeking a place in his loved ones' thoughts, mediated through television, while the migrant lies dead, awaiting his burial.But this is a Kerala which is now inextricably linked to Dubai; its built environment is a memorial to the migrant labour.To be given a place therefore in this land, and in the thoughts of the folks back home, is an appeal that, given that the only recognised role of migrant is of being a remitter, has to be framed as a debt owed to him by the folks back home.To be remembered as a father is not the same as to be remembered as a citizen, but it is on the common ground of remittance/providing that one gets coded as another.
The claim for an affective belonging, even as it may take the language of rights, is not the same as economic citizenship.The claim to a place where one belongs, though accentuating the melodrama because of the material losses the migrant has incurred to keep his folks back home happy, is not to imply that Dubai is materially exacting.In fact, Narayanan's best friend Moideen's son is doing very well in Dubai, but that doesn't stop Moideen from bemoaning the lost time.The film instances many characters who have flourished because of the Gulf.The right to be remembered and thought of is a more primordial one, just like the rock, predating the nations and not to be reduced to its provisions.

Conclusion
In the very staging of television in the film, as if in a concluding statement, the film also monumentalises itself as mostly a thing of memory, while in the new age the migrant energies are dissipated and marshalled in other media forms, the television being one of them.Pathemari has the hindsight of migrant narratives in Malayalam, and tries to mobilise the motifs, themes, and energies of these migrant memories spread across genres and media.At the same time, it also has the resource of mainstream cinema, the most important of it being the star body of Mammootty, to affect the migrant experience as the experience of a Keralan viewing public.
This paper has shown how 'Dubai' which stands for the region of the Arabian Gulf as a whole, is excavated out of memory in Malayalam cinema and is transformed in the process.From a source of easy wealth to a land of toil, the depiction of Dubai in Malayalam cinema shows the incorporation of the Gulf within the objectivity of a historical knowledge on the one hand, while on the other, it also records the narratives of an earlier Gulf built on the dreams of the migrant labourers, which now has to be reiterated against the insignificance of the personal narratives brought about by the sweeping grand-narrative of this very history.Meanwhile the city of Dubai as well as the region of Kerala has transformed beyond recognition, and it is for cinema to reactivate the traces left of an earlier time, in the primordiality of the rock, the repository of myths that is the sea, and the archive of affects that is the star-body.
The paper has attributed the possible reformulation of Dubai as a place of memory to the changing conditions in the present in which the profile of migrants has undergone a change, the older modes of migration and its experience has been disrupted by the advances in transport and technology, and the image of the migrant as out-of-sight is replaced by the migrant-on-call who is roped in to the governmental reach within the sending state.The rebranding of Dubai (and the Gulf in general) in which the region is now seen as a global hub rather than one which had special (maritime) connections to Kerala (and south Asia in general) is another feature of this disruptive present.
The paper further illustrates that 'Dubai' becomes the referential space by virtue of which the migrant can lay a claim in the affective economy back home in Kerala.The cathecting of cinematic memory as collective memory to 'Dubai' thus also becomes the migrant's act of affective citizenship, i.e. an act of claiming from below the right to have rights, which is in itself a public coding of a more personal demand to find recognition in the thoughts of the folks back home.It is a call to recognise the migrant not just a provider but also one who is in need -of being remembered in their rightful place, above all.