and modernity in eastern Sri Lanka - CiteSeerX

Veiled constructions: Conflict, migrationand modernity in eastern Sri Lanka

C.Y. Thangarajah

C.Y. Thangarajah is a member of the Department of Social Sciences, Faculty of Artsand Culture, Eastern University, Chankalady, Sri Lanka.

This article analyses transformations of rural gender relations and local patterns ofreligious consumption amongst female Muslim migrants from eastern Sri Lanka to theMiddle East. Migration has led to reconfigurations of everyday practices within a unifiedand unifying pan-Islamic code of conduct. It is evident, however, that women are suc-cessfully negotiating and recasting their roles by utilising those very same religiousdiscourses and practices which attempt to regulate them. Migrant women in Sri Lankause imported consumer goods and ’Arabi’ practices as a means of empowering them-selves. In this context, Islamic religious practices play an empowering and progressiverole in migrant women’s lives.

This article is about the transformations taking place in rural genderrelations and local patterns of religious consumption. The context is themigration of women from eastern Sri Lanka to the Middle East, wherethey are employed as housemaids. The analysis is situated within thecomplexities of global flows of goods, ideas and people, and shows theimpossibility of predicting social change, as well as the ambiguities in-volved in transnational reformist Islam. It also attempts to unravel someof the complexities of patriarchy within Islamic societies. Conventionalanalysis suggests that patriarchy and Islamisation exert pressure onwomen by restricting them to particular styles of dress and housing. Myfieldwork indicates that women are using Islamic styles to renegotiateand expand rights and opportunities. By selling their labour in the MiddleEast, they use their experiences of working in Muslim households in theGulf, and their adoption of Islamic dress, as means of establishing moral,religious and material superiority over others in their villages. I suggest

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that these women are transforming themselves and wider society byrestructuring existing social categories and cultural symbols.

But these processes are not linear. For instance, migration is conven-tionally presented as a harbinger of modernity. In this case the mobil-isation of resources, increases in the productivity of labour, and theproliferation of urban forms of life which migration involves appear notto have encouraged secularisation, which modernity is supposed to usherin. In that sense, migration is complex and multi-faceted, transforminginstitutions and identities (Bernal 1994: 39). But in analyses that privilegethe constant, the structural and the timeless, or emphasise the abstractrather than the concrete, such everyday and often contradictory processesin the village are frequently denied. This article argues that one mustmove away from unilinear, universalised, male dominated perspectivesto investigate the process of mediation and engagement within the newglobalised labour relations in which identities are constantly beingnegotiated and renegotiated (Feldman 2001; Gardner 1995; Hale 1994;Moghadam 1993; Ong 1987). It traces such processes by giving primacyto women’s everyday practices, showing how they negotiate the emergingtrends within modernist orthodox Islam to reconfigure an Islamic identity,interpreted through their personal experience.The wider context of these changes is the following: global processes,

particularly migration, have incorporated local South Asian communitiesinto a wider Islamic world and have helped to reconfigure everyday reli-gious practices within a unified pan-Islamic code of conduct. These pro-cesses are intensified by the religious schools and movements sponsoredand supported by wealthy Islamic nations such as Iran, Saudi Arabia andLibya. This is evident in eastern Sri Lanka where local orthodox Islamicgroups that derive their inspiration from the Islamic nations have influ-enced members of the rising middle class. They have benefited fromthe open economy policy of the Sri Lankan government and have gainedwhite-collar jobs, thanks to their new-found bargaining position vis-A-visthe national government and the expansion of opportunities availablethrough state patronage.

This new complexity of relations within the global cultural economyis seen by some as overlapping, ’disjunctive’, and defying the usual’centre-periphery models’ (Appadurai 1997: 32). Appadurai argues thatthese relations go beyond the usual dichotomies of push-pull factors(migration), or of consumers and producers. He uses the term ethnoscapeto capture the disjuncture while emphasising ’fluidity’ and the ’culturalflow’ (ibid.). Thus construed, these movements and relations are ’not



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objectively given relations that look the same from every angle of vision.Rather, they are deeply perspectival constructs, inflected by the historical,linguistic and political situatedness of different sorts of actors’ (ibid.).Here again Appadurai privileges specific context over the universal.Even though national borders have become less meaningful, as

Appadurai points out, in another sense new orientations develop. In thisreoriented perspective, Islamisation is seen in relation to the Middle East,an area that is perceived as the ’centre’ of the Islamic world. This ofcourse neglects the fact that there are more Muslims or practitioners ofIslam outside the Middle East in countries such as Indonesia, India andMalaysia. Furthermore, the so-called core of the Islamic world has asubstantial number of non-Muslims including Jews, Christians of variousdenominations, Bahais and Yezidis (Khalidi 1998: 75). Such mispercep-tions are common for regions such as the Middle East (Said 1978) andIndia (Cohn 1996), and have been systematised and legitimised as formsof knowledge in area studies programmes, from the 1950s to 1980s,particularly in the US (Khalidi 1998: 79). A key aspect of this ’orientalism’is, of course, the representation of women in Islamic societies. Here, an-alysis has tended to assume a totalising and universalist practice andfails to pay attention to the particular circumstances in which traditionsand customs are constructed, reconstructed, interpreted and deployed.Such an approach views patriarchy ’as made up of male domination andprivilege, the absence of individual agency, ... as a totalizing project’(Feldman 2001: 1100).

Rather than being timeless and rigid, however, there is evidence acrossthe Muslim world of how women change their lives by successfullynegotiating and recasting their roles using those very elements that attemptto regulate and control them. As pointed out by Moghadam, it is importantnot to conflate Islam with patriarchy (Moghadam 1993). Rather, Islamand patriarchy must be understood in specific contexts and in ’social-structural and developmental terms’ (ibid.: 109). People in specific con-texts negotiate and reorder the social structure in a variety of ways. InBangladesh, for example, migration has altered power and status relationswithin migrant villages, transforming economic and social processes,and Gardner documents how to have access to the metropolis is to haveaccess to wealth and power (Gardner 1995: 272). Similarly, by acquiringwealth and symbolic capital in the ’core’ areas of Islam, women from’marginal’ areas are able to gain power and wealth.

In analysing such issues, we also need to carefully distinguish whichwomen we are discussing, for cultural representation is clearly linked toclass structure. Meriwether and Tucker, for example, point out instances



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where upper class Muslim women are visible in the public arena (Meri-wether and Tucker 1999: 16). Upper-class women in Egypt take part inreligious discussions and general discourse on the Koran (Hegland 1999:191). In societies such as Egypt, there are women who were neverrestricted by the veil or confined to the home, who had and have accessto the public sphere, and who operate relatively freely. Yet at the sametime the popular image of ’women’ in such societies is rather differentfrom dominant models. Along similar lines, women from the margins ofthe Islamic world may establish links with what are seen as centres ofIslamic culture and religion, and through their representations of thatlife can acquire a new authority. It is this phenomenon which my articleseeks to examine.

Sri Lankan women who go to the Middle East as housemaids enlistmaterial goods and ’Arab’ practices as a means of empowering them-selves. In Sri Lankan Muslim society, these ’Arab’ practices are associatedwith greater sophistication, mobility and social respect. The Islamicorthodoxy experienced by housemaids in the Middle East is mediatedby the material wealth and economic success which they also find there.This in turn alters their self-perception as Muslims and on their returnthey construct a new Islamic identity. Their role is recast, not simply interms of a moral superiority acquired through altered religious practices,but as women who have acquired a new level of sophistication by theirknowledge of a high-tech way of life. In this sense, religion for thesewomen plays an empowering and liberating role. Even though theyultimately return to a life of domesticity and mothering within the village,they have a new authority gained from managing and running a MiddleEastern household.

I

The role of the housemaids in the economy

As has frequently been remarked, the global capitalist economy impliesa global labour market. As far as Sri Lanka is concerned, this involves areorientation of labour away from agriculture to industrial and otheractivities both at home and abroad. Yet while the demand for migrantlabour increases the labourers’ economic returns, globalisation keepsmigrants on the political and social margins in the host countries so thatthey can be easily expelled once they are no longer required (Parrenas2001: 1134). Employers of migrants such as housemaids rely on harshand discriminatory immigration regimes, lack of labour protection, andwages set by the ostensibly free market to maximise their returns. Many



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housemaids assume the role of surrogate mothers and caretakers withinArab homes, providing the women of their host Arab families with theopportunity to go out to work and creating a stable domestic environmentfor their host families. Yet this is at the cost of leaving their own childrenand other dependents-in return for meagre economic returns.

There is no denying the importance of their labour in Sri Lanka. To acash strapped economy such as that of Sri Lanka, remittances from theMiddle East constitute over 60 per cent of the total foreign exchange in-flow. Between 1991 and 1999 remittances from the Middle East recordedan almost fivefold increase from Rs 9,515 million to Rs 45,766 million.A substantial segment of these are remittances from housemaids.

According to statistics from the Sri Lanka Foreign Exchange Bureau(SLFEB), 15,809 people left for the Middle East in 1986. By 1999 thisfigure had increased to 179,114. In 1986, 67 per cent of migrants weremale and 33 per cent female. By 1990 this proportion had reversed withmen forming only 36 per cent of all migrants, and the male/female ratiohas remained constant ever since.’ Since 1991 housemaids have consti-tuted between 75 per cent and 80 per cent of all female migrants, thenumber of housemaids peaking at over 113,000 in 1995 but still totallingnearly 88,000 in 1999. Each year there are new entrants into this labourmarket for, while some women return again and again, others stay in SriLanka and are replaced by new migrants.Thus for Sri Lanka as a whole, the employment of women as house-

maids in the Middle East is a major source of foreign exchange. TheEastern Province is one of the major beneficiaries of such flows andmany villages in this area are dependent on remittances from womenworking in the Middle East. One such village is Ullur.

IIThe village of Ullur

Ullurl is situated in the Batticaloa district of eastern Sri Lanka. It has a

population of 30,477 consisting of 7,236 families.’ The people of Ullur

1 The importance of female remittances is never publicly acknowledged. This is ofcourse nothing new, and neither is the fact that women have always made a largecontribution to the domestic economy. Indeed, in Sri Lanka, the lower one goes in thesocial hierarchy, the more women contribute in terms of their labour.

2 This is a pseudonym.3 The Muslims of the East in general have a historical perception of being either the

descendants of traders from Afghanistan and Arabia, or indigenous, Tamil-speakingMukkuva clans (Hussain 1998).



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today consider themselves to be almost exclusively Muslim. The villageof Ullur claims at least 500 years of recorded history.4 Some villagersclaim to be descended from Indian immigrants, while others claim thesuperior status of Arab descent. Like other Muslims in Sri Lanka, UllurMuslims speak Tamil.

Muslims of the East Coast live in endogamous segments, the unit ofendogamy being the local village. McGilvray (1997) has documentedthe strong influence of matrilineal clans called kudi to the south ofBatticaloa. Today the influence of such formally organised matrilinealclans is waning in those areas, and is almost non-existent in the north ofBatticaloa. The increasing influence of globalised and universal Islamicvalues has made such practices un-Islamic in local perceptions. Now,people tend to dismiss any reference to them as an expression of anthakaalam, ’those days’, and today class is much more important. Matriliny,however, is still prevalent in marriage and property transfer, and resi-dential patterns are still matrilocal. Women tend to marry matrilateralcross-cousins and after marriage husbands go to live with the bride inher natal home. Within a year or two at the most, the new conjugal couplewill move into another house built commonly within the same compoundor a new house built in the neighbourhood. At marriage, the bride receivesa dowry in accordance with the wealth of her family.

McGilvray has argued that the Muslims of Sri Lanka are historicallyand culturally closely linked to the Mappilla Muslims of Kerala and theMarakkayars of southern Tamil Nadu (McGilvray 1998). Yet, while southIndian Muslims have been relatively secure in terms of their ethnicidentity as Tamils or Malayalis, the situation is rather different for Mus-lims in Sri Lanka. Under British colonial rule, Muslims were identifiedas, and saw themselves as, ’Moors’, ethnically distinct from Tamils al-though sharing a common language. After independence, the rise ofSinhala Buddhist nationalism marginalised both Tamils and Muslim’Moors’, accusing both groups of unfairly gaining ground during thecolonial period at the expense of the Sinhala-Buddhist majority. At thesame time, Muslims began to establish community mosques and attemptto construct a more explicitly Islamic identity.

The rise of conflict between the Sinhala-dominated state and groupsof Tamil militants from the early 1980s onwards had a devastating effecton the inhabitants of Ullur. Previously, most inhabitants of Ullur were

4 There is a multitude of written ’History of Muslims’ from the East Coast. SeeHussain 1998: 2-6 for details.



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dependent on paddy cultivation either directly as labourers or owners,or indirectly as traders in paddy or in agricultural inputs; others dependedon government employment or petty trade. The poor were also heavilyinvolved in lagoon fishing and collecting forest products, and alsobenefited from a ’social security’ system which allowed them access tothe leftovers after harvest. As a result of the conflict, access to paddyland was heavily restricted or even denied, travel for trade or to gain ac-cess to forest resources almost impossible, and traditional forms of supportfor the poor and the destitute ruptured. Furthermore, Muslims in Ullurwere increasingly caught between the Tamil militants on the one hand,and the forces of the Sinhala-dominated state on the other.

In such a situation, the people of Ullur had to look for other means ofsurvival, the only alternative being meagre social security handouts fromthe government. One strategy was to seek other employment opportunitiesoutside the district, but much more important was international migration,especially migration to the Middle East. In 1997 over 85.3 per cent of11 households were dependent on some form of social security benefit.5 5

By 2001, that figure had dropped to 77.2 per cent, thanks largely to theremittances from the Middle East. Now over 1,000 families in Ullur-more than 14 per cent of the total-have members employed in the MiddleEast, over 50 per cent of them being employed as housemaids.

III

Housemaids or housewives

The first Sri Lankans to migrate to the Middle East were men who workedas labourers, cleaners and other low-wage employees. They were fol-lowed by women from southern Sri Lanka seeking domestic work. Theseincluded some Muslim women from the south, but they were few innumber (Brochmann 1993). In the Eastern Province, there was someresistance to women leaving their homes. Traditionally, women who lefttheir homes to earn money were primarily from the lowest rungs ofsociety: widows, the destitute, or elderly women who travelled aroundselling reed mats or cashew nuts. But in places such as Ullur, the increas-ing pressure of poverty after the inter-communal violence coincided withan increasing demand for Muslim housemaids to work for Muslim house-holds in the Middle East. Where men had to raise between Rs 30,000and Rs 50,000 to obtain an overseas job, the great demand for Muslim

5 The following data are from the Divisional Secretary’s Office, Batticaloa.



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maids meant that recruitment agencies were willing to recruit Muslimwomen without a charge, and they could migrate within a month of mak-ing the initial contact. Thus, the potential for women to migrate began toopen up.

In the case of the initial group of women who left for the Middle East,the existing ideology of matriliny and matrilocal residential patternssupported their absence in the Middle East, the absentees’ domestic dutiesbeing taken over by their mothers. Most migrants were middle aged(between 35 and 40 years old), and came from poorer sections of thecommunity. In addition, many of the women from this stratum had alreadyleft the confines of their homes and had been venturing into areas outsidetheir villages to make a living as itinerant traders. Living on the marginsof the society and seen as unrepresentative of Islamic culture, they werealso less bound by cultural taboos against movement. Domesticity intheir case necessarily involved venturing out of their houses for collectingfirewood, harvesting reeds for mat-weaving, etc.

Apart from the less stringent social control against emigration, thismobility had also enabled a degree of economic and social independencefor such women. Most household expenses were met from their earnings.They were usually members of networks of related households consistingof parents and the married children who, though they might live separate-ly, shared a common compound with other households. Food might beprepared separately but shared between the natal family and the conjugalcouple, and the cooking was often done in the home of the daughterwhen the father and mother or the son-in-law were away. Alternatively,the mother might do the cooking and take care of the children while thedaughter was absent engaged in petty trade, collecting firewood or harvest-ing reeds. For this group, then, women were both housewives and incomegenerators at the same time, so that migration to the Middle East wasless of a break with customary ways of life and household organisation.Many of the first women migrants had also had the primary responsi-

bility of running the family, being widows, or having husbands too oldto make any substantial living, or unable to find work. One woman saidthat she had to go to the Middle East because her husband was an invalid.Another was a widow with three small children who had lost her husbandin crossfire between the militants and the army, whilst a third womanwas deserted by her husband and did not have any means of livelihood.In the case of Ullur, it was predominantly the widowed, deserted anddestitute women who began the initial transformation. The manner inwhich they negotiated their move to the Middle East was also illuminating,



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for they used the veil and Islam to negotiate a shift out of a life of povertyand suffering. The next section details that change.

IV

Leaving for the Middle East

As we have seen, most poor women in eastern Sri Lanka had been affected

by a lack of mobility and the resultant restrictions on opportunities toearn a living. Many had already accumulated large debts and were facedwith major problems in feeding their children and other dependents.Migrating to the Middle East was an opportunity to deal with these prob-lems, but what gave them the confidence to venture out was that theywere going to a Muslim country, to work within Muslim households.Thus, both Islamic orthodoxy and domesticity, generally seen as restrict-ing for women, instead opened up a space of social mobility, financialindependence and empowerment. Furthermore, anxieties about sexualinsecurity did not arise with regard to this initial group of women, sincethey were older than subsequent migrants and more accustomed toindependence.

Poor women from Ullur began to leave for countries such as SaudiArabia, Oman, Dubai, and Abu Dhabi in the mid-1980s. On arrival, theMiddle East was less threatening than they had feared. Instead, the hijab(also called abbhai) seemed literally to wrap them in a protective layer.The women related how, immediately on arrival, they were covered bythe flowing gown and veil:

As soon as we arrive in the airport we are met by the Arab boss. Withthe family, they take us to the Souke and buy us abbhai and longdresses like maxi. We wear the maxi when inside the house. Both

abbhai and maxi are long flowing gowns which cover from the neckto toe: they cover all the body. There is a scarf which covers the entirehead except the face. They also buy us gloves that cover our hands.When we go out, we cover the faces with a cloth. It is a piece of smallscarf with a piece of elastic so that you can put it just above the nose;only the eyes are left open. They do not like the saree because it mayexpose sections of body, such as parts of the waist. When they see usarriving wrapped in a saree, they say ’Harram ... harram ...’.

There has been an extensive body of literature on the role and functionof Islamic dress for women, seen as restricting women to the procreative



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role, or even protecting men from the dangers of their sexuality. But theveil also creates a space for the Islamic woman to move out of the domes-tic arena: ’veiling and sex segregation ... [are] ... the means to education,work, and public activity, without jeopardizing family and communitysupport’ (Hegland 1999: 191 ). Protected from the gaze of men, it facili-tates mobility and empowers women to capture some space within areasdominated by men (Memissi 1975: 97). For the women from Ullur, theinitial act of wearing the hijab or abbhai was a source of protection andsafety from the anxieties of arriving in an alien land. During her fieldworkin a village in the western province, Gamburd notes that the Saudi agentsviewed the restrictions on movement for the housemaids in the host coun-

try and the protection of the dress as ’benevolent supervision’ (Gamburd2000: 58). But what also emerges from Gamburd’s work is the importanceof being Muslim.The relative advantage that women from Ullur and other Muslim

villages have over women from other parts of Sri Lanka is that they areMuslim, and the demand in the Middle East is for Muslim housemaids.Not surprisingly, many non-Muslim women alter the names in theirpassports (Gamburd 2000: 67). In turn, employers attempt to verifywhether the housemaids are indeed Muslims.

Initially when we arrived, the Arabi wanted to verify whether I amreally a Muslim. Since a lot of non-Muslim women arrive with theirnames changed as Muslims, the employers try to ascertain the truth.They ask you to recite the Koran or ask you the direction to face whenpraying. You are allowed to handle food and to cook only if you are aMuslim. Non-Muslims are employed to do other cleaning work in thehouse. They may do the preparation but cannot do the actual cooking.That is done by the madam. They are also not treated as well asMuslims. There is always a idaiveli in the relationship if you are not aMuslim housemaid. They are seen as unclean.

This ritual of authentication and the restricted access to kitchen and

cooking for non-Muslim housemaids is an important component instrengthening Islamic identity. The privilege given only to Muslim womento be housemaids, and the difference in status and the access to activitiessuch as food preparation, makes them feel privileged and strengthenstheir identity in comparison to non-Muslims. The taboo on preparingfood is one of the strongest disadvantages for the non-Muslim house-maids, since cooking is an integral part of their identity as women at



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home. The taboo makes the Muslim women feel that the non-Muslims

are denied an essential part of their value as persons.Coming from rather deprived Muslim villages, most of the women

are amazed by the luxury of Gulf households, which manifest the wealthand prosperity of Islamic society; at the same time men are respectfuland protective of their women. Thus, for the migrants from Ullur, boththe Muslim country and the Muslim household are equated with wealthand religiosity. In turn, Islam is experienced through the prosperity,wealth, material comforts and technological advancement which theysee there. Thus initiated into the Middle Eastern world and domesticity,the women begin another phase of the experience, that of householdchores.The daily routine of the housemaid consists of the entire gamut of

household work from cooking and cleaning to washing clothes and takingcare of children. The women begin work with the preparation of breakfastand tea at 4.00 AM and end the day at midnight with the washing up ofplates and pans. Sometimes they may have a short break of about thirtyto forty minutes after lunch. The average household consists of a husband,wife and three to seven children:

The daily chores typically begin at about 4.00-4.30 AM with thewashing of the cars. There are two or three cars, which have to bewashed. Then the work shifts into the house with preparing morningcoffee and breakfast. Afterwards the children have to be awakenedand dressed if they are of school age. Later when the family leaves forwork and school, back to the kitchen to prepare lunch. By mid-morning, after preparing lunch, the house has to be tidied up, dustedand vacuumed.

Though they do all this and more for a salary of $70-80 per month, thewomen do not see any comparative disadvantage in this rigorous regime,at least in the initial phase. The following statement was made by a 20-year-old returnee who migrated when she was 18.

There are twelve rooms and eight bathrooms in the house. I beginwith the cleaning of the bathrooms; after cleaning the bathrooms andtaking away the clothes to be washed, I start with dusting the house.The Arabi is very strict; he will touch the walls and window sills tosee whether there is any dust; windows had to be wiped and the panesgleaming; the floors had to be cleaned using the machine. It is a very



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nice machine. They have expensive carpets; if it is a tiled floor, thereis a broom-like thing that you wipe the floor with; the floors have tobe spotless. It is such a large house and it takes until about 1.00-1.30PM by the time I finish that chore .... Oh ... yes, ... I forgot ... I also hadto wash the clothes in the washing machine. The clothes of each personhad to be washed separately; so, while cleaning the house I also operatethe washing machine. While doing all this, I had to take care of thebaby, feed her, change nappies, and play with her until she goes tosleep.

By 2.00 PM everyone returns from work. They change their clothesand have lunch that I had prepared. After that they sleep in the after-noon. I feed the children and wash the plates and the kitchen utensils.After tidying up the kitchen, I look after the children or play withthem. Madam will take the baby to her room. By then, it is time toprepare the evening tea. Then, they may go out to the souke; sometimes,they also take me; I am allowed to do some shopping, of course usingmy own money; sometimes they buy me soap, toothpaste, or a smallbottle of cologne if it is a special day. Sometimes they also visit friendsand relatives. We may have dinner out or return home. If dinner is tobe prepared, then I stay back to do the cooking. After everyone returns,they have dinner and watch TV. Then, I have my dinner and clean upthe kitchen. By then, it is about 11.00 o’clock and I go to bed. Some-times, when I have time, I write a letter to my family in Sri Lanka.Other than that, I have no time of my own. The people in Saudi arevery religious. They are very particular about praying five times. InSri Lanka, we do not break our journey while travelling to pray. But,in Saudi, they stop their cars while travelling and say their prayers.Even if it is in the middle of the desert, they touch the sand and wipethemselves in the absence of water. The women do not go to the

mosque; only men do. Usually, women pray at home.

This is typical of a day’s routine in the life of a large number of house-maids, as other researchers have also indicated (Brochmann 1993; Gam-burd 2000). Even though the pay is meagre for the amount of work, thewomen do not complain. The electric cooker that is used for cookinginstead of the firewood at home, the packaged food readily availablefrom the freezer that minimises cooking, the washing machine that hasreplaced the backbreaking effort of washing as done at home by the riveror at the communal well, the vacuum cleaner that does the sweeping



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instead of the broom: these are all comparatively effort-saving. The maid’srooms also often contain a radio, TV and attached bathroom, luxurieswhich are unimaginable at home. Finally when they receive the salaryequivalent to about Rs 7,000 at the end of the month, all their anxietiesand efforts are put into perspective.

These remittances make a substantial difference at home. The moneyis usually sent to the maid’s mother or father, since they take care of thechildren, and is initially utilised for settling debts. In some cases, thehusband receives the money and gives whatever is necessary to theparents-in-law who take care of the children. Usually, it is because ofcompelling debts that women have migrated in the first place, and it isonly when they have repaid these debts and carried out some repairs tothe house that they decide to return. Here again, the age of the children,the assessment of their well-being during their mother’s absence, theability of her parents to take care of the children, and the possibility ofbetter employment for the husband, are all factors that influence thewoman’s decision to return.

Many maids say that once the initial excitement begins to wear off,they feel the pressure of the work, even with the help of appliances suchas polishers and washing machines, and the standards expected of themare very high. Yet another issue is the threat of rape by the men of thehouse. Though none of the informants, except one, openly admitted thatthey were sexually harassed or raped, it emerged in subsequent interviewsthat the threat of rape is very real. It is an occupational hazard that thewomen felt they had to face. One woman said that if the men at home areso concerned that women should remain ’pure’, then they should notinsist on dowry, forcing young girls to migrate for employment andexposing them to such risks.Many women said that they had to take the risk in order to provide a

stable future for their children, and most women remained committed tolocal ideals of motherhood. Taking care of their children and the husband,along with older parents, still remains the primary focus. Nonetheless,as Gamburd argues, ’migrant mothers try both to conform to older idealsand challenge the validity of these restrictive images’ (Gamburd 2000:195). Indeed, migrant women seem to be caught between these contra-dictory desires, between the physical care of their family-once seen astheir sacred function-and their material provision of them. In this contextit is difficult to distinguish between the roles of mother, income-earner,and home-maker. Indeed, while women are blamed for abandoning theirchildren, evidence shows that most children adjust after a short while to



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their immediate carers such as grandparents or maternal aunts (Samara-singhe 1989). Women migrants are going beyond a narrow cultural defin-ition of motherhood and employing their skills to ensure a wide range ofmaterial benefits for their dependents.

IV

The migration of younger women:Building houses and getting married

The success of the first wave of female migrants led other and youngerwomen to consider migration. After the first generation of women mi-grants began to repair and improve existing houses, the possibility ofusing earnings to build new houses became apparent. This was related tothe issue of dowry. Amongst both Hindu Tamils and Muslims in easternSri Lanka, a house is a major component in a bride’s dowry. Given thematrilineal tendencies in this area, property-including houses-tendsto devolve to girls. Uxorilocality after marriage means that young coupleslive either with or adjacent to the bride’s parents. Whilst poor couplessimply build a house for themselves, many young women demand that ahouse be built for them before marriage, if at all possible, to attract arich and high status husband.

However, the local conflict and the reduced livelihood opportunitiesthat have ensued have meant that the possibility of houses being builtfor a family’s daughters has diminished, except insofar as migrants areconcerned. Where men are working in the Middle East, they have beenable to construct houses for their sisters. Even mothers who went abroad

began to repair their houses, preparing them for their daughters. Withincreasing numbers of families attempting to build houses, the marriagemarket began to be linked to a brick and mortar house for dowry. Thisfurther increased the pressure on families with young girls without broth-ers to support them, or parents who did not want them to migrate. Theoption for young women was to go to the Middle East in order to earnthe money for building a house themselves, for if marriage is an importantcomponent in the life-cycle of a young girl, then houses have become aprerequisite for marriage.Once in the Middle East, most of these younger women are awestruck

by the wealth they see there. They also make two particularly interestingobservations. First, they say that Islam is practised within a strict andprotective environment. The veil and the protection offered to women is



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emphasised; they say they are offered safety, mobility, and a separatespace of their own. According to one interpretation, Islamic religiousorthodoxy veils the woman to control her overwhelming sexuality, butthe housemaids argue that it is rather a means of protecting them fromthe sexual advances of men, something many of them were very afraidof before their departure. Combined with the protection and freedomthey offer, long flowing dresses worn both by men and women are alsoseen as a symbol of wealth and modernity. Life in the Middle East is notmerely Islamic, it is also a life of wealth and prosperity, and high fashion.This aspect of Islam is in contrast to life at home, where religion requireswomen to be confined to the home, but without the necessary facilitiesand comforts.

Second, younger women migrants always refer to the fact that in theMiddle East the men have to give brideprice if they are to marry. Thiswas something that they felt was particularly good about Arab customs,especially in comparison to their own experience. ’The men at homewant a dowry and we have to find the money’, said one particularly irri-tated young girl. ’They have a different Islam at home. That is not thereal one,’ commented another. Clearly, then, the three components ofveiling, brideprice and modernity have a combined impact on thewomen’s sense of identity.

Aside from the overall influence of religion and life-style, the womenare also earning their own money. This gives them considerable power,since they are transformed from being dependents to having othersdependent on them. From the senior male (the father) to the most able-bodied young men, all are dependent on the migrant. Even though theirprimary aim is to build a house for themselves, these women also spendsome money on their younger siblings. Combined with this, the womenalso become experienced household managers. Particularly in host house-holds where the wife is also employed, the maids virtually run the entirehouse, except in some cases where there may be an older parent who isalso living with the family. In many instances, these older people getparticularly attached to the maids since they give the ’care of a daughter’,as one girl said. The more responsibility the housemaids have, the morethey integrate into the household. Similar experiences have beenencountered with women from the south of Sri Lanka as well (Gamburd2000: 196-99). This also enables them to think of themselves as Arabwomen and, not surprisingly, to attempt to recreate a house at homesimilar to the one they lived in during their stay in the Middle East.



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v

Recreating the household: The rise of Arab styles

Significant changes have taken place in the construction of houses aftermigration to the Middle East began in the 1980s. Almost all the familiesof their young girls initiate the construction of a house as soon as moneybegins to be remitted, apart from a small amount that is used to pay offtheir debts. These houses have incorporated the changing perceptions ofprivate and public spaces that the migrants have been exposed to whileemployed in the Middle East.The traditional houses of the poor, constructed of thatch, consisted of

a basic room and an outer room, or two rooms with a veranda, withoutany specially designated space for men and women. The toilet is usuallyconstructed away from the house, and the kitchen is also separate. Thehouse is enclosed within a fence just about eye level, with the lower partof the fence consisting of barbed wire and the upper segment coveredwith thatch. In contrast, the new houses built by the Middle East returneeshave clearly demarcated areas for men and women, and brick walls thatare higher than usual. One young girl showed me the house that she wasin the process of building, with the foundation laid for an outer hall yetto be built. This outer hall, she said, is reserved for men so that womendo not have to mix with men:

I took this idea from Saudi (Arabia). When the arabi family go tovisit friends and relatives, the women go inside the house where theyhave separate spaces [idam]. Men do not go to where the women are.

They stay in the outer hall, which is large and ornamental. Women donot come into these areas where men congregate. Unlike here [in SriLanka], women do not mix with men as easily. Even in the houses ofrelatives, unless they are brothers and sisters, they stay separately.

On the surface, this gender segregation appears to be a patriarchal restric-tion. Yet, as encountered by these young women, Islam is not merelyreligious but also economic in nature for the reason that religious trans-formation is also synonymous with mobility along the path to modernity.By becoming Islamic, the women also become ‘modern’ in terms of life-style, as well as economically independent. The women in Saudi Arabiaare seen as protected and wealthy; thus migrant women use their economicpower to acquire status by attempting to recreate a life-style reflecting



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that of the Middle East. When the girl eventually returns, she personallysupervises the construction of the house, going out dressed in the hijabin order to purchase various items for the house. In the past, it was menwho would have done such things, but now young girls personally visitthe shops to select the fixtures and building materials.

Islamic dress here is not merely religious attire, but also a status symbol.By choosing to wear the hijab, young women are also reliving the life ofthose Muslim women in the Middle East. Particularly for the women onthe margins, this acquisition of wealth is complemented by the hijab,which in the perception of the local men is not only religious but also thehighest form of modesty. Hence, even though the image of the womanin the hijab may be that of the modest Muslim maiden, for the womaninside the dress, it is a sign of confidence, high fashion and economicpower. The mobility facilitated by the hijab also comes at a time whenthere is increasing restriction on women imposed by the more conser-vative section of Ullur, particularly the young students of the madrasas.For the affluent vehicle-owning elite these restrictions on movement areonly cosmetic, but for the less wealthy the situation is rather different.Where women have to work both within and outside the home, the hijabcomes as a welcome device, enabling more, and not less, mobility.Combined with this, returnees possess the sophisticated knowledge

needed to run a modem house, and having been halfway around theglobe, they are able to handle money and banking and indeed give a newlife and dignity to their households. The transformation and rise in statusof returned migrants involves the commoditisation of domesticity. Inmany interviews parents were proud to point out the knowledge that theirdaughters had acquired in the Middle East. One mother proudly explainedthe ’knowledge of medicine’ her daughter had; another stated herdaughter’s ability to handle household equipment; yet another showedoff the interior decoration of the house, the display of imported artefactsattempting to replicate and reproduce Gulf house-styles.Once the house is built, the equipping begins. The commodities that

are brought from the Middle East supply the necessary trappings to createthe atmosphere of a ’modem’ and ’Islamic’ household. These includesmall artefacts that have been discarded by the hosts, such as lampshades,ornamental mirrors, carpets, plastic flowers, etc. Wall hangings withIslamic motifs and pictures of the Karbala form an essential part of re-creating the Arab life-style. Such artefacts, which accumulate in thehousemaids’ rooms, are packed in large boxes and freighted back to thevillage.



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Collecting these boxes, which arrive about a month after the return ofthe women, is usually a small ceremony in itself. Apart from giving riseto a small army of light trucks which are hired from the local village totransport these huge boxes, there is also lucrative employment for thosewho make the containers and an opportunity for the woman’s family toexperience one facet of the wider experience she has had. The woman,perhaps with the help of some male relatives, will leave for Colombowearing the hijab. This trip is also an occasion to visit shops, go to thecinema, etc. After obtaining clearances from the shipping agency, thereturn journey begins. All this while, the returnee spends liberally andgenerally looks after her entourage, buying novel items, food or otherwise,explaining to the relatives their usage, and displaying her newly acquiredknowledge and skill. On arrival at the village, the box is opened to revealan entire range of goods and artefacts collected during her stay. Theycan range from perfumes to small radios or broken mirrors, to half emptycans of paint, along with discarded carpets, posters, picture frames, orna-mental vase stands, ceiling fans, etc.Once the structure of the house is complete, the family begins to look

for a suitable bridegroom. There is very little inhibition amongst potentialsuitors in respect to women who have gone to the Middle East. One ofthe strongest elements offsetting any doubts about the woman is herknowledge of Islam, which the others presume to be more than theirsafter her experience of living in an Islamic country, and her mode ofdress further reinforces that sentiment. Hence, a woman with a house,even one only partially built, has a better chance of finding a husband.Indeed, most of the women who had returned, had married after theyhad built a house. This has also created an unexpected outcome. As onereturnee who has a daughter now working in the Middle East commented:

Those days, the men were content with a small hut that we built forthem within the compound and gradually everyone contributed forthe building of the house. Now, the demands are so high. Today, fel-lows who used the river-bank as the toilet demand a bathroom [Indakki,athila ponavan ellam bathurum kekiran].

Almost all of the bridegrooms have no permanent jobs. They are dailywage earners working in the paddy fields or rice mills, or as shop-assistants. The women are markedly different from the men. During theinterviews the women happily described their experiences and showedthe items they had brought, while the men merely sat looking on with



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fascination. The women also often commented that they would have togo back to the Middle East in order to complete the houses they hadbegun to build. In most cases, the families were keen to get the girl marriedoff as soon as the house had been built, but after marriage, it is up to theyoung couple to decide whether the woman should go back again. Wherethere were small children, the woman did not want to go until the childrenwere grown. They said that they would prefer to take care of the childrenuntil they are at least two years old, since it would be difficult for themto work abroad looking after the children of an Arab family while theirown children were languishing without them. But all the same, a womanmay go abroad three or four times in the course of her life. She builds ahouse after the first two visits and gets married. After marriage she returnsto the Middle East to complete the house or to accumulate additionalcapital.

VIConclusion: Gender and culture in Ullur

One of the startling phenomena that the opportunities in the Middle Easthave brought is the migration of girls as young as fifteen. With extendedkin, family and neighbourhood networks, any change in the circumstancesof one family immediately impacts on the other. When households ofmigrant women began to improve visibly, particularly with improvementsto the house, even younger girls were motivated to attempt to migrate.Older sisters began to arrange placements in the Gulf for younger sisters,and neighbours recommended and encouraged agents to send out younggirls. Girls as young as fifteen subjected themselves to the harsh workregime in order to break out of lives of poverty. It was not merely buildinga house, but the experience of working overseas that transformed themfrom domestic objects confined within the house to confident youngwomen with economic power and better prospects for the future. Theywere also able to increase their chances of getting married, as well asassist their families to move up the social ladder.

There was yet another area of transformation. Some of the womenwho returned from the Middle East were also beginning consciously toadopt a more secluded form of behaviour. In many cases, they carefullybalanced the public/private dichotomy. They were confidently going outto attend to various matters, but that was within the protection of thehijab. They were also consciously minimising their movement within



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the public arena after most of their work was done, to conform to what isexpected of a Muslim woman, clearly manipulating their behaviouraccording to the status and stages in their lives. In the initial stage, theyoung girls have to prove that they can handle themselves as migrants,but on their return they carefully negotiate public space in order to attendto matters such as banking, building a house, etc., protected by the hijab.Once that is settled, they then renegotiate their behaviour according tothe social norms of seclusion in order to marry.Viewed from this perspective, it is clear that women are able to take

control over their lives, manipulating symbols and circumstances to carveout a life of stability and prosperity. Even the local orthodoxy concedethat migration to the Middle East has contributed towards greater reli-giosity. More families send their children to school and attendance atthe madrasas is on the increase. The orthodox Islamists see this as adefinite improvement in the religiosity of the migrants and in society ingeneral. But the women are by no means following the directions offundamentalist Islam. While conforming to the external symbols requiredby the local variant of Islam, they are able to engage with yet anotherrepresentation of Islam that is both orthodox and modem at the sametime, and that also offers them space to expand their roles as Muslimwomen.

Since the early 1980s, mainly due to the influence of countries suchas Iran and Saudi Arabia which funded religious schools, and groupswhich were in the forefront of this campaign,’ there has been a movementin Muslim villages in eastern Sri Lanka to impose an ’Islamic’, that is’Arabic’, dress code. Young girls were targets of this reform, which wasseen as a ’religious’ requirement, and there were even attacks on thosewho were seen as resisting the new codes, dress and otherwise. The Mus-lims themselves characterised pressure from such groups as ’fundamen-

talist’. In this context, one of the progressive males of the village, a reputedshort story writer named Haniffa, commented that one of the best thingsthat Tamil nationalism had done to the Muslims was to restrict employ-ment opportunities for the Muslim community, allowing Muslim womenthe opportunity to liberate themselves from the restrictive norms of thevillage. Today, according to him, women are in greater control of theirlives and this was due to the opportunities in the Middle East.

6 In the 1980s, the Iraqi government donated a housing project along with a mosque.The village is known as Saddam Hussain Village.



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Bemal (1994) has argued that new restrictions placed on Sudanesewomen cannot be ascribed to fundamentalist Islam alone, but to widersocio-economic processes. It is within this context of ’shifting their placesin the world economy’ that a new understanding and interpretation isbeing developed of ’what it means to be Muslim’. A similar transforma-tion can be seen to be taking place in Ullur. While women may appear tobe becoming more orthodox, they are actually engaging on their ownterms with aspects of what may be seen as Islamic fundamentalism, ma-

nipulating the symbols of restriction as a means of acquiring social statusand religious respect.The modem styles of dress and houses also seemingly restrict the

migrant women. On their return they get married and become idealhousewives,s confined within the private spaces of the houses they them-selves have built. Women go from being the economically recognisedproducers of capital to diminished economic roles in the unrecognisedsphere of household labour. But I have suggested here that, notwith-standing these social expectations, women have their own agendas andexpanded domains of control and power, reflected in their new knowledgeand familiarity with the new and modem commodities of the globalmarketplace.

These new forms of what is perceived to be appropriate feminine be-haviour express the changing roles that women have been defining forthemselves within emerging perceptions of what is prestigious andfashionable (Goldberg 1991). Unlike other cases of Islamisation, thepresent situation is not a reaction to westernisation. It is a redefinition of

identity within the ’modern’, leading to redefined practices that are con-servative and restrictive in character. Appadurai suggests that globalisa-tion de-territorialises through a new imagination of social life (Appadurai1997: 55). But in this case one can see that globalisation also leads to areterritorialisation and re-demarcation of spaces to create new identities,redefining appropriate forms of behaviour and everyday practices inkeeping with these reoriented identities. Within these redefined sites,new forms of social and cultural practice are reproduced through engagingwith specific social, religious and cultural practices that are already inexistence locally.

Within this context, what are perceived as ’prestigious’ forms of culturaland religious expression gain primacy over others that are seen as non-modern within the reconfigured power hierarchies of the global terrain.It is my argument here that orthodox traditions are absorbed not becausethey are orthodox per se, but because they are perceived to be part ofmodernity.



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