A Film About a Goatherding Indian Migrant Sparks a Gulf Controversy
In 2008, the Malayalam writer Benny Daniel, known by the pen name Benyamin, published his first novel “Aadujeevitham.” Later translated into English as “Goat Days,” it punctured the image of the Gulf Dream for many in southern India.Starting in the 1970s, the southern Indian state of Kerala experienced a “Gulf boom” as people migrated to the region en masse in search of work. In the popular imagination, the Arab “Gulf man” was someone affluent and the Gulf was a land where people fulfilled their...