Kochi : For decades, Keralam’s relationship with the Gulf has been measured in remittances. The stories of Malayalis working abroad were about the money sent home, the houses built with remittances and the families whose lives have been transformed by Gulf earnings. After it was highlighted by several prominent personalities, Congress MP from Thiruvananthapuram, Shashi Tharoor, expressed concerns about the findings of the study and called for dialogue within the Muslim community.
The research paper found that Keralam migrants returning from Saudi Arabia were significantly more conservative than non-migrants on several measures of gender attitudes, including attitudes towards gender-based violence, household decision-making and extreme gender norms. On Sunday (August 23), Tharoor called the findings “disturbing reports” and warned about the import of “conservative and even reactionary attitudes and customs from abroad”.
Keralam’s society has long been known for its tradition of religious syncretism. In 2020, a mosque in Alappuzha hosted a Hindu wedding conducted with traditional rituals, including yagna fire and ceremonies led by a priest, to help an economically disadvantaged family. During the 2018 floods, the Purappullikkavu Ratneswari Temple in Thrissur opened its premises to local Muslims for Eid al-Adha namaz after the nearby mosque was submerged and inaccessible.
Shashi Tharoor was reacting to a post by Milan Vaishnav, Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who shared the World Bank’s policy research working paper. The research paper is titled Beyond Money: Does Migration Experience Transfer Gender Norms? Empirical Evidence from Kerala, India. “These are disturbing reports. Kerala has long been host to a liberal, progressive practice of Islam, fully in tune with the coexistence and communal harmony prevalent across the state. Kerala is proud of its record of educating Muslim girls and women to the same levels as boys and men,” Tharoor posted on X.
She highlighted one of the study’s central findings that compared with people who had no migration experience, attitudes of migrants returning from Saudi Arabia towards gender-based violence were more conservative by three standard deviations.”These empirical findings confirm the numerous anecdotal reports from Kerala over the last 3 decades. Compared with those who have no migration experience, the attitudes of returning migrants from Saudi Arabia toward gender-based violence were more conservative by three standard deviations. This is a great cause of concern to all of us,” Shamika Ravi posted on X on Sunday.
The World Bank’s study, published in March 2022 as World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 9966, was authored by George Joseph, Qiao Wang, Gnanaraj Chellaraj, Emcet O Ta, Luis Andres, Syed Usman Javaid and Irudaya Rajan. Its central question was whether migration transfers not only money but also social norms and values from destination countries to the migrants’ home communities. The research used the Kerala Migration Survey 2013, conducted by the Centre for Development Studies in Thiruvananthapuram. The survey covered 14,575 households across all 14 districts and 63 taluks of Kerala (now Keralam), with information on 63,230 household members.
Read Also : At 19, Kaziah Liz Mejo Has Turned A Childhood Dream Into A National Crown