Nammakam, wasta and the cultivation of differential mobility capital between South India and the Gulf

Abstract

This ethnographic study, which draws from critical mobility studies and puts it in a productive conversation with migration infrastructures literature, foregrounds the cultivation of and access to differential mobility capital by Rayalaseema inhabitants chain migrating to Kuwait. By fostering embodied and affective relations of trust with different set of actors throughout the migration trajectory, temporary migrants instrumentalise namakkam (trust) and wasta (connections), in both the region of origin and destination, to build their highly variegated mobility capital. In this way, they sustain a transregional licit, if illegal, visa-centered migration infrastructure. Migrants use their mobility capital to buy visas, prolong their stay and embed themselves in the migrant lifeworld of Kuwait, but its full value is realizable back in their region of origin, the socio-economically intractable Rayalaseema, to attain upward social mobility. Requiring considerable social, economic and affective investments over a long period, mobility capital is highly uneven and asymmetrical and often reproduces gendered, caste-based and racialized hierarchies even as it becomes a vehicle for social and spatial mobility for some migrants.