The Secret Pleasures of a Migrant Dictionary

 

LECTURE #2

 

 

This paper will look at a tiny portion of Benyamin's Aadujeevitham (Goat Days, trans. Joseph Koyipally) commercially the most successful of Malayalam novels and a recipient of a number of literary awards. In the said portion, the migrant protagonist who finds himself faced with a foreign language compiles a dictionary of the words that he has learnt so far in his unforeseeably strange experience in the Arabian Gulf. The paper reads into the entries of this dictionary to speak about how migration produces a rent in the public sphere and invests it with zones of discrete communitarian pleasures.

 

 

Mohamed Shafeeq Karinkurayil is interested in the cultural dimensions of the migration to the Arabian Gulf from the south Indian state of Kerala. His papers on various aspects of the cultures of Gulf migration have appeared on various platforms including academic journals. Shafeeq received his PhD in Cultural Studies from the English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad.

 

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The Manipal Centre for Humanities is one of two Centres of Excellence under the Manipal Academy of Higher Education (MAHE)--MAHE itself was one of the six original Institutes of Eminence recognized by the Government of India in 2018. Over the last decade, the Manipal Centre of Humanities has helped pioneer in India a strong multi-disciplinary, research-driven, and India-relevant approach to undergraduate and graduate education. Its faculty are internationally recognized in three key disciplines--literature, sociology and history--and many of its students and alumni are at the forefront of South Asia research in India, Europe and North America.

 

This is the first of a series of encounters, planned for the coming years, in which research and teaching institutions in South Asia represented by their faculty will be invited the Centre for South Asian Studies to present their work, discuss shared interests, and meet and exchange as collectives dealing with the same global challenges. A series of talks by colleagues from the Manipal Centre of Humanities will lead up to a panel discussion in which the MCH and the CSAS communities will be given the opportunity to begin an open-ended conversation.