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IMPOSSIBLE CITIZENS
DUBAI'S INDIAN DIASPORA
By NEHA VORA DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2013Duke University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-5393-5
Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
A TALE OF TWO CREEKS
COSMOPOLITAN PRODUCTIONS AND COSMOPOLITAN ERASURES IN CONTEMPORARY DUBAI
On my first visit to Dubai, in 2004, Gautam, a family friend who would come to be one of my primary interlocutors, picked me up from my hotel on Al Rolla Street in the downtown Bur Dubai neighborhood and drove me out to a newly constructed hotel complex named Madinat Jumeirah on the edge of town, in an area that was beginning to be called "New Dubai." It was the beginning of September—the hottest time of the year—and the resort had only recently opened. A megacomplex consisting of two hotels, an indoor mall, a theater, and several restaurants and nightclubs, Madinat Jumeirah was styled as a "traditional" Emirati village surrounding a reproduction of the Dubai Creek, the main body of water that divides the emirate of Dubai and that has until recently been the historical center of the city's maritime trade. Madinat Jumeirah's creek reproduction was complete with abras (water ferries) to shuttle hotel guests to private villas, and it boasted a stunning view of the sail shaped ultramodern Burj al-Arab hotel in the background (see figure 1.1). Even with many of the storefronts empty and the restaurants not yet open, the place was breathtaking. Gautam and I spent hours walking around the complex, ducking into narrow alleys in the indoor souk (market) to see what we would find, having a drink "creekside," and convincing an Indian security guard to grant us access to the even more posh area reserved for hotel guests. I was enthralled by the perfect beauty of the architecture and by the air-conditioned luxury that surrounded me, a stark contrast to Bur Dubai and the other neighborhoods surrounding the actual Dubai Creek, where I was living and conducting research.
For that short first visit, I stayed in a "business" hotel, rather upscale for the mostly working-class neighborhood and also newly constructed. Every day I walked the seemingly endless blocks to the nearest Internet cafe, or even farther to the souks surrounding the Dubai Creek, soaked with sweat by the time I got to my destination from the searing 45° C sun, which not only bore down from above, but also reflected up from the empty sand lots separating buildings. I was jetlagged and having trouble adjusting to the different paces of life in Dubai: corporate and government offices were open from 8 AM to 4 PM, while small businesses in my neighborhood closed for hours in the middle of the day and stayed open late into the night. Therefore, I was often out and about during the hottest hours of the day, when others were resting, and asleep by 9 PM, when the neighborhood came alive. The temporal differences between corporate and government office hours and the street-time of the retail venues within souks coincided with a growing geographic distance between the neighborhoods in downtown Dubai where I spent the majority of my field visits and the newer parts of town that I visited as a tourist and occasionally as a researcher, like the offices and malls near Madinat Jumeirah. Despite concerns about drugs and commercial sex-work on Al Rolla Street, I decided that the business hotel was worth the money for me to stay in when I came back for long-term research, in 2006. Unlike the high-rise buildings and commercial complexes in newer parts of town, downtown Dubai was mostly walkable, and the predominantly South Asian population (though mostly male) allowed me to blend in more easily than I did elsewhere. My hotel was close to Indian, Arab, and European grocery stores, surrounded by South Asian beauty salons, shops, and restaurants, and easily accessible to most of the Indian-dominated areas of the city where I planned to focus my research.
The Bur Dubai I found when I arrived in January 2006, however, was very different. The hotel that had cost $50 a night just eighteen months before—and even less if one paid monthly—was now over $200 a night, and thus out of my budget. I had been unable to secure an apartment from overseas, so Gautam suggested I stay with him and his family until I got on my feet, but he warned me that space would be limited: his family had been evicted from the three-bedroom apartment they had been renting in a prime area of Meena Bazaar, because the building was being turned into studio apartments for executives, and they had recently relocated to a more expensive but much smaller one-bedroom apartment behind the Khaleej Center shopping mall, very close in fact to the hotel where I had been hoping to stay. Gautam's apartment was even smaller than I had expected, less than five hundred square feet. Gautam, his wife, Reshma, and their young son shared the bedroom. The living room had a small mattress where they sat to watch television and eat meals and where I was to sleep during the few weeks I stayed with them. Looking out over the buildings that surrounded Gautam's from the one small window of the living room, I could see laundry strung outside windows, men in lungi lounging on rooftops, and several children running in building parking lots while women clad in saris and salwar kameez supervised them and chatted among themselves. The streets were cleaner than I remembered, and more businesses had opened in the area. There were also fewer empty spaces between buildings and little sign of the commercial sex-work and nightclub scene that had previously flourished around Al Rolla Street. This was now a solidly middle-class South Asian neighborhood, one that left me wondering what had happened to the lower-income people who had occupied it just eighteen months before, and how middle-class people like Gautam and his family were coping with the rising costs of living in this boomtown city.
While foreign-resident Indians in downtown Dubai were in many ways substantive citizens of the city-state, their existences were becoming increasingly tenuous with Dubai's boom at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Two distinct Dubais were being produced at that time, the two "Creek worlds" I moved between during my research: one was the new "global city" of cosmopolitanism and heritage-for-consumption marked by Dubai's boomtown development projects, like the Madinat Jumeirah and its reproduction of traditional Dubai; the other was the increasingly segregated downtown core of what I call "old Dubai" and the forms of mercantilism and Indian Ocean cosmopolitanism it represented. In this chapter, I explore the physical reorganization of the city into these distinct spaces and delineate my particular "field" and the interlocutors that occupied that field in relation to this shifting geography. The particular elisions built into governmental rhetorics and technologies of Dubai's boom illuminate the lived experiences of belonging and exclusion among the Indian communities of downtown Dubai.
The process of circumscribing and producing an anthropological field through daily activity and movement within space highlights how spaces themselves are products of social invention and interaction, and how "cities," as seemingly bounded entities, in fact contain within them a multitude of sites that are experienced differently by differently situated actors, and that in turn interpellate different citizens. At the time of my research, the signifiers migrant, expatriate, and local circulated widely in Dubai and other Gulf cities to mark particular spaces and who could occupy them, who was visible and who was invisible, who was new and who was old, who was permanent and who was temporary, and which bodies contributed to national development and which ones threatened it. While most residents of the city were considered to fall into the triptych of local, expatriate, or migrant—and most of the city's emerging geography delineated dist
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Excerpted from IMPOSSIBLE CITIZENS by NEHA VORA. Copyright © 2013 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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