Issues of Labor and Fragmentation in Deepak Unnikrishnan’s Temporary People

Abstract

This research explores labor migration and fragmentation in Deepak Unnikrishnan’s Temporary People from a diaspora perspective. This study examines the challenges faced by South Asian labor migrants in the Gulf, particularly the Arab Emirates, where they build modern cities yet have no permanent place. While the Gulf's skylines attest to the physical labor of South Asian migrants, their legal and social status remains perpetually provisional, a paradox that Unnikrishnan captures through the trope of the 'temporary person '. Deepak Unnikrishnan shows how migrant workers' identities are also displaced when 'migrating' from one location to another in search of jobs. As a result, their identities become fragmented. Moreover, this study categorizes labor migration as driven by economic necessity and temporariness, and fragmented diasporic identity as marked by displacement, linguistic hybridity, and surrealistic paradigms. This study draws on postcolonial and diaspora theories developed by Stuart Hall’s notion of identity as a historical, continually produced position, which leads to the idea of the migrant’s divided identities; Homi K. Bhabha’s concept of hybridity accounts for the text’s in-between cultural location and linguistic mixing; and Avtar Brah’s notion of diaspora space explains how migrant, citizen, employer, state, and unequal relations of labor assemble within the same city. Using qualitative textual analysis, the study analyses the title phrase ‘temporary people’, the concept of home and passport’, ‘broken birds’, ‘modified bodies’, “chapter”, and surreal moments, and narrative fragments.