Neither Old nor New: Migration and Bondage in Benyamin’s Goat Days

Abstract

Criticism of Benyamin’s Goat Days (Aadujeevitham, 2008; translated by Joseph Koyippally in 2012) has moved along two paths. One reads the novel as an exposure of the Gulf kafala sponsorship regime. The other, drawing on Giorgio Agamben, reads the protagonist’s degradation as a descent into bare life. Both illuminate how the novel renders vulnerability, yet neither takes up its more consequential claim about the way South Asian diaspora studies periodises its subjects. This paper argues that Goat Days brings into view a diasporic formation that Vijay Mishra’s influential division cannot hold. Mishra separates an ‘old’ diaspora of nineteenth-century indenture from a ‘new’ diaspora of late-capitalist metropolitan mobility, and the temporary, sponsor-bound Gulf migrant fits neither. He is not the settler-coolie who founded creole cultures in the plantation colonies, and he is not the naturalised professional of the Western city. Reading the novel’s central figure, the ‘goat life’ into which Najeeb is slowly reduced, as the aesthetic form of labour extraction under petro-capitalism, the paper proposes that his ordeal stages the return of the indentured girmitiya inside the legal and economic architecture of the contemporary Gulf. The novel’s form matters to this claim. Because Goat Days reaches its readers as a mediated and translated testimonio, the paper treats its retained legal and social vocabulary as the formal means by which the subaltern’s silence is marked rather than dissolved. It names the formation the petro-indentured precariat and asks what such a subject means for a diaspora theory still organised around the metropolitan West.