REVIEW OF WOMEN’S STUDIES october 27, 2012 vol xlviI no 43 EPW Economic & Political Weekly 56 Protecting Women or Endangering the Emigration Process Emigrant Women Domestic Workers, Gender and State Policy Praveena Kodoth, V J Varghese The paper discusses the case of emigrant women domestic workers from Kerala, a state which has had a long history of migration of workers in this segment. It draws attention to the critical failure of the social science scholarship to address the question of poor women migrants. It also provides an overview of state policy on migration and underlines its complicity in generating regulatory gaps. The paper engages with the gendering of citizenship and sovereignty through a comparison of the state policy on migrant women workers and the experience of three segments of this workforce – emigrant nurses, domestic workers and outmigrant fish processing workers. It then considers the question of agency in the context of women workers who are thrust into the position of breadwinners for their families and, finally, the question of responsible state intervention. This is a revised version of a paper presented at a workshop on “Transnational Flows and Permissive Polities in Asia” at the University of Xiamen, in Xiamen, 12-14 January 2010. We are grateful for the comments received from the participants, especially Diana Wong. We have also benefited from Padmini Swaminathan’s suggestions. Praveena Kodoth (praveena@cds.ac.in ) is with the Centre for Development Studies, Thiruvananthapuram. V J Varghese (vjebee@gmail.com) is with the Centre for South and Central Asian Studies, Central University of Punjab, Bathinda. T he Indian state restricts the emigration of women domestic workers through a prohibition on women below 30 years and through complicated and opaque procedures, but looks on favourably at the movement of nurses. This divergent approach finds strong resonance, interestingly, in two recent Malayalam films – Gadhama (from the Arabic Gadima for servant) and 22 Female Kottayam. The convergence between state policy and the film representation provides a useful entry point into the nature of victimisation of women that is used to justify the need for “protection” through restriction. In Gadhama, Aswathy, a young widow from Kerala, goes to Saudi Arabia as a domestic worker. Abused by her employer and cut off from the outside world, she manages to run away but barely escapes rape and death before landing in prison where- from she is rescued and sent home through the intervention of a Malayalee “social worker”. The film depicts Aswathy as “innocent” and unlike, for instance, her Indonesian co-worker who has an affair with the Malayalee driver working for the same sponsor. Aswathy is a stereotypical victim whose journey simply fails to make sense. Indeed, the film provokes you to ask, should people like Aswathy be permitted to go overseas at all? Quite by contrast, 22 Female Kottayam does not arouse “protective” sentiments. Tessa, a nurse working in a hospital in Bangalore, is deceived and exploited by her recruiting agent- boyfriend, who makes money out of trapping prospective nurse- migrants like her and allowing them to be raped. Yet, Tessa is no stereotypical victim. She is at ease with “liberal” sexual mores, engaging in a temporary relationship with the recruiting agent as if it were normal. 1 Her determination to go abroad is at first stronger than her will to pursue her assaulter, but she hits back eventually with extralegal tactics sourced through a nurse- friend’s lover who she pays in kind, with sex. Tessa’s story is set entirely in the “pre-departure phase” of migration and so we know nothing about her experience as an immigrant; but we are left in no doubt about her ability to protect herself. Significantly, these two films show the Indian state as either a disinterested bystander or complicit in corruption, in either case as having abdicated its responsibility for its citizens, but they do not make any move to demand accountability from it. Government Approach We characterise the Government of India’s (GoI) approach to women’s emigration in categories such as domestic work as pro- tectionist as it relies on restrictions that are justified as measures