Ma fi gerger ziyada: the South Asian Character in Gulf Cultural Productions (2024)

• 1 Emirati Arabic for “maid.”

1One of the most common and recognizable elements of Gulf contemporary pop culture is the trans-peninsular figure of the South Asian barber, car mechanic, baqāla owner, or, for its female counterpart, the Indian nanny or bishkāra.1 This group of characters is likely to be found in most Khaleeji cultural productions, from highbrow to lowbrow, as well as in the gray zones in between.

• 2 Longva 2005, pp. 114-135. Also see Advani 2019: “The suppression and dehumanization of noncitizens (...)

3Since the turn of the century, sociological studies have shown how Gulf states defined a national identity and a national narrative centered on a purely Arab-Islamic identity, excluding the Persian, African and South Asian heritage, creating what Anh Nga Longva has coined as an ethnocracy.2 This suppression is a reality in many enactments of the national narrative. As signaled by Laurence Potter:

• 5 Baycar 2022.

5Although the phrase “Gulf nationalisms” is not assigned to a specific agent in the authors’ analysis, I understand it as covering a variety of actors that participate in the production of the local national narrative, from the state itself and state-sponsored initiatives to intellectuals, artists and entertainers, whether citizens or non-citizens. Very recently, Hamdullah Baycar, taking the UAE as a case study, expanded Vora and Koch’s approach, while focusing on the political level, and showed how exclusive vs. (more) inclusive approaches to national identity correspond to specific historical phases: he presents the top-down promotion of “unity through diversity,” tolerance and multiculturalism as a second phase following the “relatively successful development of an identity among its nationals” and answering geopolitical needs as well as internal agendas when some of the “privileged” citizens deplore the supposed dilution of identity.5

• 6 The novel was translated into Arabic in 2015 and published by Kuwaiti publisher Maktabat Ᾱfāq. The (...)
• 7 Lenze 2019 and 2021.

6The South Asian subaltern’s experience in the Gulf region has been a source for various cultural productions in English or South Asian languages: fiction literature, with, for instance, Benyamin’s acclaimed novel Goat Days (2008), the story of Najeeb Muhammed, an Indian emigrant to Saudi Arabia forced to become a goat herder in the desert,6 or Deepak Unnikrishnan’s collection of short stories Temporary People (2017) set in Abu Dhabi, or online skits made by “non-resident Indians” in the Gulf (i.e., not living in India).7

• 8 In their introduction to Arabian Humanities’ recent special issue on Gulf-Asia relations, the thre (...)

7But what appears to be missing is a study of the cultural productions of the region made by and for citizens that propose representations of the citizen/non-citizen divide, address the local/foreign hierarchy and implicitly question the construction of identity and the position of foreigners in the region, whether in a dramatic or comical mode. Mainstream media discourse usually manages to mix two oversimplifying analytical perspectives on Gulf cultural productions, one denouncing the suppression, invisibilization or mockery of the South Asian Other, consistent with the exclusive national narrative, while applauding any instance of supposedly positive inclusion of Indo-Pakistani characters or cultural elements in Khaleeji cultural products and hailing it as a long-awaited recognition of a diverse identity in the contemporary nations of the region.8

• 9 Al-Musawi 2014.
• 10 Hudson 2020. In his former article “Locating Emirati Filmmaking within Globalizing Media,” 2017, H (...)
• 11 Dakkak 2022.

8Exceptions are few: Muhsin al-Musawi,9 in his presentation of the historiographic value of the region’s fiction literature, devotes a small section of his chapter to the representation of foreign labor and instances of desire between foreigners and nationals. Dale Hudson examines how citizens are portrayed alongside other Arabs, Europeans and South Asian expatriates in Emirati cinema, whether in art-house productions or slapstick comedies.10 The closest work to what I am attempting to do is Nadeen Dakkak’s seminal essay11 on the comedic video representations of migrant workers in the Gulf, which carefully analyzes a group of humorous web series produced in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. Dakkak argues that the figure of the migrant worker is usually associated with two kinds of images: the “worker as a threat,” a representation deriving from the exclusivist discourse on national identity — which I will exemplify in the third section — and the “worker as victim,” an image that paradoxically deprives these workers of agency, however generous the creators’ intentions may be.

• 12 Al Hussein 2021.

10Obviously, other groups in the Gulf region can be concerned by this liminality, whether citizens or foreigners. Gulf citizens of African or Iranian descent also experience this “interpolar” position between insider and outsider. In her moving essay “Weaving the Khaleeji Fabric: Growing Up Ajami,”12 Mira Al Hussein points out that all citizens aren’t equal, and that even those who were lucky enough to be naturalized and obtain the precious Kuwaiti/Emirati/Qatari/Saudi passport can feel a bit afar from the nodal identitary pole culturally constructed by Gulf nations: “An unspoken hierarchy existed whereby the Bedouin Arab reigned supreme, while the rest of us languished in the purgatory of the ‘naturalized but never natural’ citizen.” As an Emirati woman of Persian roots, born in Dubai of parents born in the Trucial States and Oman, but whose origin could be betrayed by a single word, she concludes that:

• 14 Limbert 2014.

11But Iranian/Persian presence in Gulf cultural productions is much more discreet than that of South Asians. The reason for this, apart from the obvious political tensions between the Iranian regime and Gulf monarchies, might be that while an important number of Gulf citizens of Iranian origin “made it” into the national fabric and managed to blend in (however imperfectly, as suggested by Al Hussein), naturalized citizens of South Asian origin or mixed Arab-Indian origin, although present, remain more rare. The liminality of most South Asians is of the “outer-rim” sort, and it is the representation of this liminality that I am interested in exploring. Another “liminal” category in contemporary Oman would be citizens whose origins trace back to Zanzibar, whatever their ancestors’ status was there: Arab, Africans or Bayāsir (lower status Arabic-speaking immigrants from Oman).14

• 15 See Thiollet 2016: ”Les États du Golfe ont initié dans les années 1990 une stratégie de réponse so (...)
• 16 Vora 2013, p. 175, “In the United Arab Emirates, the category of citizen and the idea of the nation (...)
• 17 Literally “reject, scrap of the sea.” This slur is directed at Saudis of “foreign” origin. It is p (...)
• 18 “Neighborhood” in East-Peninsular Arabic, used from Kuwait to Oman.

12As I alluded to above, the dominant trend in cultural anthropology of the Arabian Peninsula argues that since the 1970s, the Gulf States have initiated a strategy of cultural response to the massive presence of foreigners on their soil by defending and creating a contemporary Khaleeji identity solely based on Arabic and Islamic elements of turāth, often emphasizing the bedouin lore, thus building the nation on an invented/reinvented tradition that partly obscures other components of the national melting pot.15 The category of citizen and the national imagined community are therefore, as argued by Neha Vora, “produced precisely against the foreign resident bodies.”16 Prior to the 1970s and the oil era, some of those who are presently viewed as “foreign bodies” were already integrated into the national, or in certain cases, pre-national, fabric, whether originating from Iran and Sind, Africa, the Arabic-speaking world, India, etc. They were absorbed and became citizens, although the common infamous Saudi label ṭarsh baḥr17— note that this slur is not used outside of the Kingdom — confirms that nationals are not a monolithic block and that ethnicity might play a role in local social hierarchies. Past the 1970s, the adoption of a strictly non-integrative model of economic development resulted in the way these new states dealt with outsourced workforces. This went parallel with a relative invisibilization of the non-Arab non-tribal element in the creation of the national narrative, making citizens complicit in this suppression. I say “relative” because published accounts of oral history frequently mention the exogenous elements and do not paint the frīj18 of yesteryear as a purely Arab Islamic universe; it does include the Irani baker and the bride from Mumbai, and even the local rabbi (in the controversial Kuwaiti TV series Umm Hārun [(2020]). Then again, the “foreign bodies” encountered in the region are quite often Arab-Islamic themselves. The definition of a Khaleeji identity is both linguistic (based on the local dialects of the region), tribal, and cultural, a set of common references in which a particular relationship with the Indian subcontinent ironically plays a part, to an extent unknown to other regions of the Arab world, in order to differentiate oneself from other Arabs. Surely, the main bulk of the “foreign bodies” encountered in the region originates from the subcontinent, but its otherness is partly blurred when speaking of the past, and much more visible when the present is dealt with.

• 19 See Holes & Abu Atheera 2011, pp 115-6, Arabic text p. 206.

16The lament over the massive presence of the South Asian working force in the region, including racist overtones and the fear of what the French far-right has labeled “the great replacement,” has been a traditional discourse found both in pop culture and in highly acclaimed and legitimate lore such as nabaṭī poetry. Clive Holes and Said Salman Abu Atheera mention that in the1970s, Sharjah poet ‘Abdallāh bin Dhībān (d. 2021)19 complained that in the old fish market:

• 20 ‘Abdallāh 2013.

17In another piece, Yā mākhidh il-hindiyya (You Who Wed an Indian), the same poet complained about Emirati men marrying Indian girls, presumably during their trade trips in long stopovers in Mumbai, for their dowry is cheaper than the large sums demanded by Arab families — a theme also mentioned by ‘Abdallāh ‘Abd al-Raḥmān in his Finjān qahwa (Cup of Coffee) oral history trilogy.20 It must be noticed that the type of interethnic wedding mentioned here is the “traditional” Arab-Indian encounter, i.e., linked to maritime commerce between the Eastern coast of Arabia and the Western coast of India, with an Arab merchant marrying a Muslim Indian girl. This type of union is different from present-day Gulf citizens marrying South Asian partners.

• 21 See Peterson 2014.

18Contemporary examples of similar xenophobia flirting with racism will be analyzed in the third section. But I would argue that such an opening gives a somewhat biased impression. A closer examination of cultural productions from the Gulf region, whether highbrow such as fiction literature and arthouse cinema, or pop media objects such as TV drama, internet satire or slapstick comedy, reveals a much more ambiguous relationship with the Indo-Pakistani Other. Unlike other foreigners, either Arab, European or South East Asian, who are also part of the daily life in Gulf societies, the South Asian character is at times conceived of as “one of us,” as a figure that cannot be dissociated from the original nodal identitary frīj. Even more so because citizens are acutely aware that their ancestors might have been linked to Sind or India, and that the subcontinent is their natural cultural neighbor on the eastern and southern side, as is the Arabic-speaking world on the western and northern sides of the Peninsula. As for citizens of Balush origin (al-Balūshī is a common family name in the region), they form a considerable part of the Omani population and have a special role in the army and the police force in most Eastern Peninsula states.21

• 22 Holes 2006.

19Indian languages are present in the colloquial Arabic by Khaleejis itself, through loanwords. As underlined by Clive Holes:22

• 23 See Onley 2014.

23(b) The influx of laborers from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh from the 1970s onward changed the perception of the “Subcontinental Other” for the generations born after what the Saudis call the ṭafra, the economic boom. This is not to say that the South Asian workforce wasn’t present before; in addition to merchants, there were numerous workers in the region ever since the exploitation of oil began, especially in Saudi Arabia, 23but I suggest that the citizens’ perception of the South Asians changed, along with the social status of the majority of South Asians in the region.

• 24 Both collections of essays edited by Lawrence Potter tackle this issue, see Beeman 2008: “The Gulf (...)

25(c) The relationship with the Indian subcontinent and South Asian cultures and people is both idiosyncratic and collective, and deeply linked with a sea vs. land identity on the Arab side. In other words, India might not mean the same thing in Jeddah, Kuwait, Dubai, Sharjah, Muscat, Manama, Aden (all ports on the Indian Ocean or the Red Sea) on the one hand, and Riyāḍ, Al-ʿAyn, Nizwa (cities of the hinterland) on the other. Individuals and creatives coming from a port city and stemming from families that have had a connection to maritime traffic at some level might not perceive India and South Asians exactly in the same way, since they were part of a common identity separating them from the inlands.24

• 25 Al-Nābulusī 2019.

26It is therefore quite expectable that the very indiophiliac novel Tamr wa-masālā (Dates and Spices),25 authored in 2019 by a Palestinian from the UAE, has as a main character a national from the port of Sharjah, a well-known point of contact between the Gulf and India. Māyid, the Emirati hero of the novel, is encouraged by a college teacher — an Emirati who reveals to him that his own grandmother was from Kerala —to follow his passion for Indian cuisine and become a cook after an initiatory journey to Kochi. India and the Gulf find harmony through cooking, and in this fantasy, the young Emirati man is ready to learn from Indian culture and come back to his homeland enriched by his itinerary and eager to work as a cook of Indian food, i.e., as a subaltern, since this occupation to this day is seldom practiced by male “locals,” except celebrities cooking traditional or modernized Arab food.

• 26 Albedwawi 2017.
• 27 Season 1 was aired in 2020, Season 2 in 2022, with a scenario authored by the young and successful (...)
• 28 Episode 1, 22’24.

27Commerce with India and month-long halts in Mumbai are regular features of oral history accounts from the region, mentioning a stable Arab community in the Indian port consisting of Eastern Arabia merchants, from Jeddah to Kuwait and from the Trucial States to Oman. The Emirati historian Saif Albedwawi has investigated “Gulfic Bombay” in the first half of the 20th century, between merchants who were permanent residents in India (tujjār) and eventually blended into the local fabric, and ṭawāwīsh, pearl merchants who would travel back and forth.26 Contemporary Gulf fiction is only beginning to deal with “Indian Arabia” or “Arabian India.” No novel, to my knowledge, takes place in Mumbai’s Muhammad Ali Road, the heart of the “Arab quarter,” and the only ambitious fiction which documents traders from the Gulf and their lives in India is a Kuwaiti Ramadan TV series which actually takes this iconic food bazaar artery, Muḥammad ʿAlī Road,27 as its title. Although entirely shot in a studio in Kuwait, the Hollywood of the Gulf region, with no actual exterior scenes filmed in India, the series opposes poverty and deprivation in the Gulf with a life of sophistication and luxury in India, and depicts Arab families adopting Indian culture in food, music and clothing habits, while maintaining their Arab-Islamic identity through language and Islamic faith. Muhammad Ali Road follows two overlapping plots, one in Mumbai and one in Faylaka Island and Kuwait City in the 1940s, before the independence and partition of the Indian subcontinent. Characters on the Mumbai side are shown as bilingual, speaking perfect Kuwaiti Arabic and remaining proud of their Kuwaiti origin, while speaking Hindi/Urdu more or less fluently. The main female character on the Mumbai side is Najlāʾ (played by Omani actress Buthayna al-Raʿīsī), the daughter of a ruined Arab merchant, ʿAbd al-Wahhāb (Saʿd al-Fajr), who is eager to marry her off to Mūsā, the son of a commercial partner, in order to pay off his debts. Najlāʾ is unenthusiastic at the prospect of this marriage with this half-Kuwaiti, half-Indian boy who wants to take her to dull Karachi, while she has lived all her life in Mumbai. Najlāʾ and Mūsā both code-switch between Kuwaiti Arabic and Hindi when talking to each other, and Najlāʾ loves to recite poems in Urdu, while the groom’s mother speaks Indian pidgin Arabic (see infra) with Najlā’s aunt, who refuses to speak any Hindi in spite of her twenty years spent in India.28 Najlāʾis mistaken for an Indian lady by the young and dashing Kuwaiti hero Ḥusayn (Ḥusayn al-Mahdī) when he inadvertently hits her with the cart he is rolling on crowded Muhammad Ali Road, probably because the young lady’s head is not covered and because she is wearing a western dress, whereas all women in the 1940s Kuwaiti counterpart of the musalsal (TV series) wear a traditional ʿabāya.

Fig. 1

Najla strolling in the streets of Mumbai on Muḥammad Ali Road (2020)

• 29 Episode 4, 8’50 and forth.
• 30 Episode 1, 23’00 and forth

28It is love at first sight between the two young people, and it appears obvious from the end of Episode 2 that Najlāʾ will sooner or later reconnect with her Arab background, leave Mūsā the half-Indian, and choose Ḥusayn the pure Arab. At her wedding party with Mūsā, during which she will flee with the help of Ḥusayn, she is wearing a traditional sari.29 Her aunt previously suggested that she wear an Arab darrāʿa (wedding gown) but Najlāʾ, who considers everything Indian more refined and suitable for her sophisticated appearance, argues that since her groom’s mother is Indian, she has no choice but to wear a sari.30

Fig. 2

Najla wearing an Indian sari at her wedding.

Fig. 3

Najla reconciled with her Arab identity in the season's finale.

• 31 Episode 4, 29’00.

30What India has to offer is partly summed up by the semiotic value of clothes in the story: the country under colonial rule is a gateway to cosmopolitanism and modernity, as well as a space allowing for an acceptable and limited exercise of self-empowerment, such as a girl’s right to freely choose her partner, wear Western clothes and ultimately to be herself, not “the merchant’s daughter or the merchant’s wide, but me, Najlāʾ.”31 But wearing a sari and preferring Hindi poems to the Arabic language to the point of blending in this foreign identity is a red line ascribed to a daughter of Kuwait, badly in need of learning her homeland’s culture and participating in the building of the nascent nation.

• 32 op. cit.

32The merchant ‘Abd al-Wahhāb’s final return to Kuwait with his household in the musalsal is in line with historical data: most of the Arab families established in India actually traveled back to the Gulf after the 1950s, according to Saif Albedwawi,32 who however mentions a Yemeni merchant, Muḥammad Bagash, whose sons are now Indian nationals and barely speak Arabic. An Emirati informant also told me that her grandfather still lives in Mumbai to that day and hardly ever visits the UAE.

• 33 Episode 28, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jHhlRFEFWs&t=2424s, 16’36”-18’00”.

33When attempting to trace the presence of South Asian characters in Khaleeji audiovisual fiction, one cannot fail to notice that “historical drama,” i.e., more or less idealized representations of the early or mid-20th century pre-oil village community living in barasti dwellings, either coastal or in the hinterland, does not suppress the South Asian element. It does suppress other elements of reality, notably the colonial or imperial presence, since an interesting feature of Khaleeji fiction is to almost never conceive of the region’s societies as post-colonial, contrarily to Middle Eastern historical fictions in which the British or French presence is always mentioned and the national identity built through opposing and defeating the colonial oppressor — but since 1978 Ashḥafān, an Emirati TV comedy taking place in an undefined “before,” there always seems to be a jovial Indian or Pakistani character in the background, as “one of ours” or at least one of our traditional universe. Another example could be found in the Emirati serial Lil-asrār khuyūṭ (2009), taking place in the 1940s, with a homely Indian merchant explaining that the price of merchandise is rising because of pressure from the big bosses in India.33 In this sense, pop culture representations construct the Indo-Pakistani character as a sort of “Ibn al-Frīj al-Hindī” (Indian son of the neighborhood). This is one of the reasons that account for the Arabic language being used for communication with the South Asian character: while the Westerner or the Eastern Asian is not expected to understand Arabic — once again, we are speaking of representations vs. realities since Filipino nannies are addressed to in Arabic — the linguistic element allows the South Asian to be a liminal character, both an insider and an outsider, as we will see in section (2).

• 34 The current emir of Sharjah (1939-), aside from his fifty-year-long reign, is also a historian and (...)

34One exception to the absence of a post-colonial perspective would be Khorfakkan [Khūrfakkān], a long-feature film produced in 2020 by the Sharjah Broadcasting Authority, sold to Netflix and also shown in theaters in the UAE and Saudi Arabia. The screenplay, written by Syrian Ghassān Zakariyyā, is based on Sulṭān bin Muḥammad al-Qāsimī’s34 account of the 1507 invasion of Hormuz by Alfonso de Albuquerque and the resistance of this small coastal town situated on the eastern side of the UAE to the Portuguese invaders. The inhabitants of 16th-century Khōrfakkān are shown as a united hom*ogeneous Arabic-speaking community (there are three soundtracks for the film: Modern Standard Arabic, Emirati dialect and English), wearing white or beige gowns and turbans reminiscent of the contemporary national dress (although not totally identical), and appearing to form an ethnically coherent group fighting the European invasion. At one point, a visiting Indian merchant, played by Emirati actor Manṣūr al-Fīlī, asserts:

• 35 English version available on https://maraya.sba.net.ae/title/1770. Some limited information about (...)

Answers the local hero.35

• 37 “From Rags to Riches, A Story of Abu Dhabi” is the title of a book by Mohammed Al Fahim (Muḥammad (...)
• 38 See for instance https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oahsGcq_x-g.
• 39 See for instance episode Al-Binghālī, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=juw8Ux2gtgE&t=1248s.

37But there is a significant difference affecting the Indo-Pakistani figure in audiovisual productions, whether the action takes place in the old times described by “historical” series or in present-time fiction. The wealthy merchant or the shopkeeper, slightly or significantly wealthier than the “Arab locals” before “rags” turned to “riches,”37 as the national narrative would have it, becomes a working class individual serving his wealthier patron in an urban environment or in a frīj that is about to become a suburb. This is the modern identity of South Asian characters that can be observed in comedies such as the famous Saudi series Ṭāsh mā ṭāsh,38 or Emirati ‘Ajīb Gharīb (2015),39 or on the drama side in Ali Mostafa’s City of Life (2009), with Basu, an Indian taxi driver in Dubai, attempting to rise above his condition by participating in a famous Bollywood actor look-alike contest.

Fig. 4

The South Asian shopkeeper in Dubai TV’s late 1970s series Ashḥafān.

• 40 Bū Malḥa 2017, p. 202.

38Emirati historian Ibrāhim Bū Malḥa40 writes that Cinema al-Watan in Dubai was opened in 1953:

• 41 It would be hard to classify this film between arthouse and slapstick comedy; a rather amateurish (...)

39Various Emirati films nostalgically portraying life in the 1960s to 1980s frīj allude to the fact that the present-day generation of Khaleeji creatives were breastfed with Egyptian and Indian pop culture. One scene from the Emirati film Frīj al-ṭayyibīn (The Good People’s Neighborhood, 2018)41 sums up this fact in seconds, with an old man switching back and forth on his television set between Adel Imam’s Shāhid mā shāfsh ḥāga (1976) to Amitabh Bachchan in Naseeb (1981). However, it is noteworthy that the one character in the film who is obsessed with Indian songs happens to be the village’s simpleton. This might be intended to signify that a local Khaleeji pop culture was coming to life at the very same time (late 1970s and early 1980s): the other young men in the frīj were already drifting away from Indian references and listening to Arabic songs from Kuwait or Saudi Arabia, consuming new regional references.

• 42 See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gLyZrzLoxQ, accessed August 2022.

40Bollywood culture appears as a common denominator for Khaleejis who grew up between the 1960s and 1980s. One of the UAE’s best known actors, Manṣūr al-Fīlī, (born in 1961), already mentioned supra, even played a small supporting role in the Indian blockbuster Dishoom (2016), thanks to his ability to speak correct Hindi. He explains his command of the language and love of contemporary Indian pop culture in a TV interview,42 stating that ever since he was a ten-year-old child, he followed Bollywood movies that he would watch at an open air Deira theater called Cinema al-Shaʿb, spending all his pocket money on films. His father worked as a supervisor at the Dubai Water Company, where all the workers were Indian or Pakistani and they also helped him perfect the language.

Fig. 5

Scene from Frīǧ al-ṭayyibīn: old man watching Egyptian comedy.

• 43 Elements on Ahmad Sharīf and analysis of some of his skits in Dakkak 2022, who analyzes his 2016 “G (...)
• 44 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96cgUoROVdQ&t=724s.

41In 2016, a Bahraini group of comedians led by Ahmad Sharīf, who has produced a number of amusing webseries,43 authored a parody of Bollywood action movies taking place in Manama among South Indian car washers, Nafar mū zēn (Bad Guy),44 with an all-Bahraini cast of actors speaking in South Indian Pidgin Arabic. All the clichés attributed to Indian commercial cinema — slow-motion fights with exaggerated sound effects, endless scenes of agony with fake blood, men discovering they are brothers from a tattoo, etc. – are cleverly inserted, in addition to a singing and dancing scene with voluntarily inane lyrics:

Parody of Bollywood dancing scene in Nafar mū zēn (2016).

• 45 Hindi and Urdu, although national languages of India and Pakistan respectively, can be considered a (...)

44The Emirati comedy Khallik Shanab (Man up, 2018) offers another instance of Bollywood fascination when Emirati actor ʿAmmār Raḥma crashes an Indian wedding in the northern emirate of Ras al-Kheima and inadvertently marries a millionaire’s daughter instead of the old geezer she was promised to, and then participates in an impromptu dance show in which he shows that he somehow masters the right moves, learned from the dozens of Bollywood movies he has watched as a child and teenager. Unlike the Bahraini show discussed above, this scene does not involve South Asian workers — who appear in other scenes in the movie, notably as angry shopkeepers after one of the heroes rummages their shop while drugged — but Indian bourgeoisie, allowing one of the actors to show his talent at speaking survival Urdu and establish communication with Hindi speakers.45 In this slapstick comedy, the Egyptian and Indian convention of inserting singing and dancing scenes that are somehow disconnected with the main plot is eagerly adopted. One here wonders whether the Bollywood dance scene in the movie is to be analyzed as a gag or as a cinematic device thought of as an enhancement of the film’s value. The song is certainly not original, unlike what would be the case in the two main referential cultures irrigating Khaleeji pop culture, but the audience certainly knows it and can enjoy the show à l’émirati.

Fig. 7

Indian wedding scene in Khallīk Shanab (2018).

• 46 Episode Aʿzab (bachelor), 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FqIz4Uwt9c&t=175s.
• 47 Dakkak 2022.
• 48 Also see 2016 Emirati comedy Ḍḥay fī Abū Ẓabī (Edhay in Abu Dhabi) with numerous SAPA scenes with (...)

45South Asian Pidgin Arabic (SAPA) is a linguistic reality that has been described in various academic articles. But it is also used as a fictional “marking device,” allowing Khaleeji actors to impersonate South Indian characters, while playing on skin color and facial traits that enable some performers who are in the gray zone between Middle Eastern and South Indian features to slip from one identity to another through costume and language. In a hilarious scene from Telfaz11’s Khambala (Nonsense) series,46 a group of young Saudi men, unduly occupying an empty villa and watching action movies while eating popcorn, suddenly turn into Pakistani cleaners and workers and twist their tongues to speak SAPA when the realtor sends two clients interested in renting the place. If citizenship is produced against “foreign bodies,” it is also because foreign and local bodies can be at times highly resemblant, and as a consequence, the difference must be all the more signified. This is a point that is rapidly alluded to by Dakkak in her excellent analysis of Telfaz11 and Aḥmad Sharīf productions. South Asian bodies are “racialized through a process of differentiation that dehumanizes them,” and therefore, “when Saudi actors play the role of South Asian migrants, they challenge racial boundaries.”47 Indeed, some Saudi, Emirati or Bahraini actors can “pass as” South Asian, provided they modify hairstyle and dress codes. The constant game of “passing as” Arab <=> South Asian that is played on comedy shows, internet skits or films48 is arguably the opposite of male <=> female travesty in pop culture. While the latter usually aims at reinforcing codes of masculinity and femininity by ridiculing the crossover, the former game proves that bodies are not the dividing frontier between nationals and foreigners, Arabs and non-Arabs, citizens and non-citizens. The true frontier is language. This is perhaps why SAPA, as a buffer zone between Gulf Arabic and South Asian languages, is such a ubiquitous and dramatic device.

• 50 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4NFAOFPulw&t=90s. If the Emirati, Saudi Arabic imitations are act (...)

48While SAPA is a real thing, I suggest that it is used in Khaleeji fiction outside of the “limited speech contexts” identified by linguists, and functions as either a comic device, as comedy can appear as a consequence of word deformation induced by non-Arabic pronunciation of certain phonemes, or a convention that immediately signals a fictitious character’s ethnic identity. Although many South Asians actually do not speak SAPA, because this linguistic device’s use is limited to a few professions where it is needed, or on the contrary, speak perfect Arabic with almost no foreign accent, while most communicate through English, South Asian characters always speak SAPA to express any subject in Khaleeji fiction. One wonders whether this linguistic cliché is not a direct inheritance of Egyptian cinema’s various linguistic clichés, from the Ṣaʿīdi (Upper-Egypt) character to the Khawāga (Italian or Greek foreigner living in Egypt), since Egyptian slapstick comedy was the template followed by nascent Khaleeji audiovisual drama. As a consequence, Indian, Pakistani or Bengali nationals with a good command of Arabic are perceived as wonders of nature, such as Ahmad al-Kashekh (Classy/Elegant Ahmad), a young man from Kerala, imitating various Arabic dialects and getting two million views on YouTube.50

• 51 See Ẓāfir 2018.

49A remarkable case of indiophilia and Bollywood fascination mixed with a puzzlingly generalized use of SAPA is Talal Maḥmūd’s comic and music play Bombay Wala (The Bombayite/Mumbaikar), performed for Eid al-Fitr of 2018 in Ajman (UAE).51

Fig. 8

Poster of Bombay Wala.

• 52 Dubai Ahly Theater, 03/03/2021.
• 53 The play’s script was generously provided by M. Ṭalāl Maḥmūd. This is a scan of scene 2, p.23.

50Ṭalāl Maḥmūd, born in Sharjah, has been fascinated by India since his youth, as he explained in an interview I conducted with him.52 Like many boys of his generation, he was fed on Indian films shown on local television and developed a passion for Indian songs. As a teenager, when he asked his parents for money to buy his first video game, his father sent him to earn his money through hard work in a plastic factory owned by his uncle, and he became friends with a Pakistani and an Indian worker who both competed to teach him the words he needed in order to understand the lyrics of his favorite songs. Since that time, Ṭalāl Maḥmūd has been traveling to Mumbai on a regular basis, and while on a serious note, he has produced a short film on street children, Bombay Wala is a fantasy play that takes place in the touristic Colaba district of the Indian metropolis, in a fantasy time mixing the present and an Arab presence in the city that is reminiscent of the pearl trade era. In this comedy, Emirati Ḥamīd Adīdās comes to Mumbai accompanied by his uncle, searching for Nūr Jīhān, his cousin. Multiple subplots involve Emiratis coming to India for treatment, Arab tourists, evil plotters of both nationalities, love stories, and even an Egyptian fūl restaurant owner who has become so Indianized that he addresses his Arab customers in mock Urdu, a source of linguistic humor:53

Fig. 9

Scan of the play’s original text, graciously lent by the author #1.

• 54 Scene 2, p. 19.

51In this very multilingual play, Emiratis speak Emirati Arabic, Egyptians Egyptian Arabic, Indians SAPA, and everybody speaks some Urdu/Hindi, in addition to English. Such plurilingualism supposes the audience has (at least partly) the same linguistic proficiencies in order to get all the puns. In another scene, it is quite necessary that the Emirati audience understands “I love you” in Urdu/Hindi, or at least the word “piyar” (love) and the dummy-verb “kerta” (to do) in order to get the joke, written like this in the script:54

Fig. 10

Scan of the play’s original text, graciously lent by the author #2.

• 55 My deepest thanks to Waleed Sardar and Muhammad Ahmad Babar in Abu Dhabi for their invaluable help (...)

52Unlike other parts of the play where Hindi/Urdu utterances are explained in the following lines, or can be passed over by the audience because they are unimportant for the plot, the expression “ham tamsé piyar kertahé” is both important and left unexplained. This “I love you,” actually broken Urdu although very understandable for a native speaker,55 is written in the script with Arabic letters but follows the phono-graphematic rules of what would be recognizable for an Arabic speaker, without knowledge of the proper spelling in Urdu, for instance joining in as single word (تمسي) what are originally two separated words in Urdu:

• 56 Directed by Ali F. Mostafa, 2014, screenplay by the renowned Egyptian writer Mohamed Hefzy (Muḥamm (...)
• 57 https://www.dropbox.com/s/a5yb49oiot8lznj/From%20A%20to%20B-ext-gerger.mp4?dl=0

54Understanding some elements of Indian languages and of course understanding SAPA is seen as a typically Khaleeji ability, as pictured in a scene from the film From A to B56 in which the Saudi protagonist, played by stand-up comedian Fahd al-Butayrī, is the only one in the group of three friends (one Lebanese, one Egyptian and one Saudi) who can understand the Pakistani body shop owner who rips them off by installing an ill-fitting windshield, while playing the Muslim solidarity card to convince them of his honesty, and closing the discussion with the famous mafi gerger ziyāda phrase.57

• 58 Bizri 2018.

55I would, however, exert more caution than Fida Bizri, who argues that:58

• 59 Dakkak, 2022.

56and Dakkak’s contention that: “Simplified Arabic in language and concepts implies the intellectual incompetence of migrants, especially when they are addressed in an “infantilizing manner […].”59 SAPA is obviously used as a cheap comic tool in most productions, and this easy choice does not coincide with this pidgin’s actual domains of use in real life. It does indeed reinforce the linguistic divide between insiders and outsiders which, as I argue in the beginning of this article, is the real line separating the foreign from the local and assimilated. But then again, Levantines are portrayed as speaking Levantine Arabic and Egyptians as speaking Egyptian Arabic in cultural productions, even when living for decades in the region, which is both a reality and an easy characterization of fictitious figures, and in the case of Egyptians, it does come, like for SAPA, with a mix of mockery and homage. The fact that SAPA can also be used in (melo-)dramatic fiction to interrogate identity and citizenship, as I will examine below, may advocate for a more ambiguous status of this language in Gulf cultural productions.

• 60 Episode Ramaḍān ṭulayṭilī, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vp1sZ49psvY accessed July 2023.

58In one of its episodes, the Kuwaiti satirical web series Shenuya3ni pokes fun at ostentatious generosity during Ramadan as an easy way to atone for total disinterest towards foreigners for the rest of the year, with a sketch in which a national selects the first South Indian-looking person on the street and films himself on his mobile, offering him food (the character is actually played by a Kuwaiti actor on the show), and gets rewarded with the rice thrown at him and the South Asian character shouting: “I’m not poor.”60

• 61 Masāmīr and other Saudi satirical shows are analyzed by El Alaoui, Alajlan & Pilotti 2020.
• 62 I thank Khadija El Alaoui for signaling this source to me, as well as other sources from Saudi cart (...)

59The famous Saudi cartoon Masāmīr (nails)61 also denounces haughty and condescending attitudes towards the South Asian workforce. In the episode Muthaqqafjī (2012)62, when a disillusioned Saudi intellectual decides to slum with “the people” and repudiate intellectualism in a cheap cafeteria, his true nature shows and he can’t help but abuse both his local working class friend as well as the South Asian waiter:

Fig. 11

Scene from Masāmīr episode Muthaqqafjī.

• 63 Episode Zaʿtar, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6v3zCbDUxM&t=29s, accessed July 2023.

60A spin-off from the Masāmīr series, Arwā wa-Laṭīfa, goes further in satire, showing how South Asian bodies are imported, used, tossed away and replaced.63 The two Riyāḍ empty-headed socialites who are the anti-heroes of the show turn a muscled-up Indian macho, who came from his homeland as a servant, into their slave. He is named Arjūn but they call him Za‘tar (Thyme), refusing to pronounce his name, in a manner reminiscent of Black eunuchs being decked out with a comical moniker in classic medieval sources. They make him their driver, and in a few months, he is almost turned into a corpse.

Fig. 12

Arjūn the bodybuilder in Arwā wa-Laṭīfa.

• 64 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7MHRRcHah0, accessed July 2023. Also see on this rap song Dakkak (...)
• 65 On this company, read Foley 2019, chapter 4 [Media companies and Filmmakers].

62The kafāla system in itself was the theme of the famous satirical rap piece Mā fī khōf min kafīl (I’m not afraid of the kafeel in SAPA),64 produced as part of its Al-Jisr series in 2015 by Telfaz11. This YouTube TV network was created by Saudi comedian Hisham fa*geeh [Faqīh].65 The skit begins with a Saudi kafīl abusing his Pakistani handyman, barging into his small room while the other is resting: “Do you think I made you come from Pakistan to read the newspaper or watch TV? Did you bring the groceries Madame told you about?” When alone, the rap (performed by a Saudi actor) begins:

Fig. 13

Mā fī khōf min kafīl rap video (2015).

• 66 See episode https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ct-YUvON2o&t=652s. Montage of significant extracts he (...)

64If the self needs to be disciplined in order to adopt more humane standards in the way it deals with the foreign workforce, some audiovisual productions suggest that this workforce also needs to be disciplined and that local society is rightly entitled to protect itself from the working-class males who, when they occupy traditional neighborhoods, quickly turn them into slums. Other productions suggest that this uneducated workforce should be exposed to the light of modernistic values. In recent productions, xenophobic overtones, when heard, are usually linked to the figure of the “foreign bachelor,” constructed as a source of danger for the traditional neighborhood’s local identity and as a menace to women. Emirati cartoon Freej, in its 3rd season episode Mira Muhalla — “Our hood” in Urdu, a wink to the title of the series — expresses this fear at its peak.66

• 67 There isn’t any branch of the Dubai police force actually labeled as such, but settling neighborho (...)

65Old Umm Khammās explains to her friends that their greedy neighbor, Umm Jamīl, rented her daughter’s house to bachelor workers and that she couldn’t sleep for the whole night because of people coming and going, people of all colors. They demand explanations from Umm Jamil, who should be concerned since she has a daughter, but she laughs off their fears since they’re all over seventy years of age and argues that she is not the only one; all local families who moved did the same: rent their properties to workers. The four friends feel menaced by these South Asian workers, and Umm Khammās tries her best sentences in Hindi before fleeing. Even the neighborhood’s traditional Pakistani baqāla owner is displeased with these new low-income inhabitants. Indiophobia and indiophilia seem to be inextricably intertwined: the South Asian local shopkeeper is a homely figure of the traditional frīj, as seen before. But for the South Asian to be considered an insider, he must be perceived as pertaining to a minority. When foreigners become overwhelming, the only solution suggested by the show is to get help from the Dubai Social Police.67 The police officers try to reason with Umm Jamil: in order to keep social order, houses cannot be rented to bachelors but to families, preferably of the same background (i.e., locals). The officer expresses himself with his administrative lingo, but outspoken Umm Saʿīd provides a frank translation:

Fig. 14

Freej episode Mira Mohalla and the menacing South Asian workers.

• 68 See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IURZCBUhtM, accessed July 2023.
• 69 Lagrange 2021.
• 70 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=StrbI5ZuBuQ.

66The UAE’s official institutions are extremely attentive to eliminate any traces of outspoken racism or xenophobia in public discourse: local newspapers regularly report the advancement of the construction of gigantic Hindu temples in Abu Dhabi and Dubai, while the vlogger Ṭāriq al-Mihyās was arrested in 202068 after siding with Kuwaiti actress Ḥayāt al-Fahd’s anti-immigrants’ rant, and explaining that she meant South Asian as an excuse. Meanwhile, influencer Khālid al-ʿᾹmirī, the “PR representative of the UAE’s shining face,”69 has a “How Indian is the UAE?” video70 saluting the Indians’ remarkable part in building the modern nation. But this does not mean that the tolerance ideology put forward by the State cannot sometimes come at odds with the “preservation of cultural identity” discourse.

• 71 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2JWUvvN557Q.

67However, Umm ʿAllāwī remarks in this same scene I discussed that “the workers did nothing wrong”: ultimately, the responsibility for the disturbance is Umm Jamīl’s, since she allowed her greed to obscure her “national good sense.” We find a similar image of “environmental dilapidation” as a consequence of a local’s supposed moral failure in the opening sequence of the Qatari series Naʿam wa-lā (2007),71 written by acclaimed scenarist Widād al-Kawārī: the camera shows an unending line of Indians queuing in front of a posh villa and buying “karak tea” and “chapati” in plastic bags from a Qatari citizen. Strangely, the Qatari keeps making sure the police are not around. The viewer understands in the next scene that what he is selling to South Asian workers is actually homemade booze… Here again, bringing the foreign riff-raff into the neighborhood is a consequence of a citizen’s betrayal of the community’s values.

• 72 Montage of scenes from final episode: https://www.dropbox.com/s/1ir5a1uswtzhqcm/Qalb%20al-Adala-Be (...)

68Qalb al-ʿAdāla/Justice (2017), an Emirati series of 18 episodes produced by Image Nation and bought by Netflix, offers rich content to examine the image of contemporary relationships with the Indo-Pakistani workforce, since the show takes place in 2017 Abu Dhabi. The image of South Asians here is necessarily different than what appears in fiction dwelling on the deep historical relationship with India, or using the friendly figure of the “Indian of the nodal frīj.” Indian characters appear twice in this judicial show: Episode 13, in which an Indian school bus driver is accused of raping a 12 year old Egyptian pupil and threatens a female Indian school employee to cover for him — she ultimately denounces him and he is rightly condemned — as well as a longer story which pans over the last three episodes of the series and also portrays the working-class South Asian male as a danger for all women, whether those of his own kind or Arab bodies.72

• 73 Black head scarf for females.

71But there are two layers of female emancipation to be observed here. The first is Faraḥ the lawyer, a role model for Emirati women watching the show. She occasionally encounters male chauvinism and clumsy attempts at enforcing patriarchal rule, but she easily overcomes these obstacles and proves the males wrong. The second layer is the Indian maid, who is faced with a coarser, unrefined version of patriarchal dominance. She can only overcome it with the help of the more advanced Gulfic model, not the Western one. The liberated Emirati female remains attached to her local identity markers: “Bring my shēla,”73 orders Faraḥ’s sister to the other Indian maid, before meeting her fiancé. Naturally, one wonders to which extent this double layer is intended as a didactic device for the Khaleeji viewer; this referential India might be created by the writers as a mirror of Khaleeji society’s own patriarchy, and the South Asian Other could be interpreted as an image of the self that the viewer is invited to repudiate and disown. This reading gives a stronger meaning to the scene in which Fāṭima shoots Asha’s father and brother: allegorically, the Emirati woman kills the remnants of a perceived traditional oppression of female bodies in the name of honor that might have been or still are in parts of the regional history — suffice it to mentionʿAbdūh Khāl’s novels taking place in Saudi Arabia, from Tarmī bi-sharar to Fusūq.

Fig. 15

The shooting scene in Qalb al-ʿAdāla (2017).

• 74 “Samīra al-Wahībī: Aftakhir bi-an takūn wālidatī min al-jinsiyya al-hindiyya,” Al-Anbā’ (Kuwait), (...)

72This subplot of the Qalb al-ʿAdāla series is also an opportunity to examine the career of actress Samīra al-Wahībī, who plays the part of the maid Asha in this mini-series. This Omani actress presents herself as half-Indian. She recently declared in an interview that:74

• 75 Directed by Muhammad Saeed Harib, also producer of the cartoon Freej, discussed above. See Hudson (...)
• 76 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8AEltoQZY0, accessed July 2023.

74In addition to Omani and Emirati musalsalāt, al-Wahībī frequently acts in Kuwaiti soap operas. Some of her roles are of Khaleeji nationals but she has somehow specialized in the roles of Indian maids: she was the maid in the 2019 Emirati comedy Rashed wa-Ragab75 who admits trying on her boss’s posh dresses, she has a part in Muhammad Ali Road, which we already discussed, as well as in many other Kuwaiti soaps, such as Iqbāl yawm aqbalat (2017), with a didactic take on the way to treat household personnel in a scene in which the main character, Iqbāl (Hudā Ḥusayn) reprimands her daughter Ḥiṣṣa and calls her a racist for hitting the maid Carona.76

• 77 Half Emirati (2012) by Amal Alagroobi [al-ʿAqrūbi], and Arasian (2017) by Aḥmad ‘Abdallāh al-Tunay (...)
• 78 Montage of significant scenes: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/rrrdr2lbwhcl3px10cdre/Ana-3indi-Nass (...)

75The presence of Samīra al-Wahībī on the Khaleeji TV fiction market and her success in secondary roles account for her parts progressively growing and may be one of the reasons why Kuwaiti popular television seems to open up to the discussion of racial issues in Gulf societies. Such sensitive issues find an echo outside this small nation’s borders, considering Kuwait’s pivotal position in Gulf dramas. The hardship lived by Gulf nationals of dual origin, men and women, has been addressed by Kuwaiti novelist Saʿūd al-Ṣan‘ūsī in his acclaimed novel Sāq al-Bambū (2012), in which the main character is the son of a Kuwaiti man and a Filipino maid. This same novel was turned into a TV series. The hardship of being “half-Khaleeji” has been the subject of at least two Emirati short films.77 The 2019 Kuwaiti Ramadan series Anā ‘indī naṣṣ (I have a script) deals with the issue in a more melodramatic mode, suitable for the Ramadan drama codes.78 Samīra al-Wahībī plays the role of Madhuri, the Indian mother of a half-Indian half-Kuwaiti man. A former Christian, she converted to Islam and tried to blend in, but cannot erase the indelible stain of being the former maid of the patriarch for members of a traditional conservative Kuwaiti family.

Fig. 16

Samīra al-Wahībī in Ana ʿindī naṣṣ (2019).

• 79 All factual elements in this section are taken from a personal interview with Mrs Samīra al-Wahībī (...)

78It could be argued that actress Samīra al-Waḥībī’s own history and family background summarizes the region’s ambivalent relation with the Indian subcontinent. According to her own narrative,79

• 80 “Ṣunnāʿ musalsal Jāyba l-īd: naṭraḥ muʿḍila bilā iṣṭifāf li-raʾy muʿayyan, wa-l-drāmā laysat tamṯī (...)

82At the time of submitting a final version of this article to Arabian Humanities (November 2023), Netflix began broadcasting a Saudi romantic comedy mini-series called Jāyba l-ʿīd (lit. “You’re bringing joy,” a common Gulf region colloquialism that is always used sarcastically ; the platform’s English title is Crashing Eid). The show follows Razān, a divorced 35-year-old Saudi woman living in London with her daughter Lamār, who has just taken the bold step of proposing to her boyfriend Sameer, a handsome but overly shy upper-class British-Pakistani. While visiting her family in Jeddah during Ramadan for the first time in years, accompanied by her daughter (who, though raised in Britain, implausibly speaks perfect Hijazi Arabic), she plans to drop the bombshell of her plans to remarry with a non-Saudi. Aiming to surprise her and under the false impression that she has already obtained her parents’ approval, Sameer crashes the family reunion. He is at first mistaken by the father for a South Indian repairman, until Razān explains who this stranger really is. It is not much of a spoiler to reveal that in the fourth and final episode, which unfolds during Eid day, Razān and Sameer finally win the hearts of the whole family, including the reluctant and conservative mother, and will happily get married in Saudi Arabia, before returning to Britain. Quite reminiscent of Stanley Kramer’s 1967 classic Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, and similarly neutralizing the racial issues with a reversal of the usual class hierarchy in Saudi Arabia between citizens and South Asians, this light comedic show takes the opposite tack of Kuwaiti novelist Saʿūd al-Sanʿūsī’s conclusion in Sāq al-Bāmbu (The Bamboo Stalk, 2012): whereas in Sanʿūsī’s novel the “imported element,” the Filipino-Kuwaiti boy, could only acknowledge in the end his personal failure to be accepted, and the impossibility of integrating into the local social fabric, screenwriter Nūra Abū Shūsha chooses a happy ending, unescapable in the romantic comedy genre. This Jeddah family turns out to be surprisingly liberal —the screenwriter admits in an interview that she would never be as bold as her character in her own family, that Razān’s family is hardly representative of the average Saudi household, and that some conservative viewers expressed their anger at this portrayal of the Saudi family.80 Nūra Abū Shūsha’s reformist intentions are obvious, as well as the producers’ (and the platform’s) aim of presenting an amicable face of Saudi society that serves the current national agenda of de-demonizing the Kingdom for international audiences and consumers (Riyadh was just announced as the host of the World Expo of 2030). Taming the racist self is only one of the many goals of this fiction which presents the cultural globalization of the Saudi family as a promising “work in progress.” Other social and cultural issues are tackled in the show, such as wearing the ʿabāya vs. jeans, covering one’s hair with a head scarf or not, domestic violence, and child custody and visiting rights. The show’s villain (Razān’s ex-husband) is a conservative who wants to impose the hijab on his daughter, as well as a racist and a wife-beater to boot. The viewer is however left with the impression that the dice are somewhat loaded on the anti-racist front. Even if the action takes place in Jeddah (Hijazis are usually pictured as less fussy than Najdis when it comes to preserving Arab ethnic purity), the show’s educational intentions come up hard against cultural and class prejudices. One cannot fail to notice that the Saudi woman that the community agrees to give away is a divorcee. Secondly, this union to which consent is reluctantly given remains a misalliance, insofar as it can only be lived abroad. The strange couple formed by Razān and Sameer is nicely invited to return to Saudi Arabia for the next vacation, but we viewers, as well as the main character, perfectly know that their real place is in England.