Book Review: Between Dreams and Ghosts

Between Dreams and Ghosts: Indian Migration and Middle Eastern Oil, by Andrea Wright (2022). Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press.

For decades, Middle Eastern oil fields have drawn Indian workers seeking to escape rural and urban hardship and realize what one labor-recruiting agent calls “their dream” of lucrative employment (1). As Andrea Wright demonstrates, these dreams are haunted by “ghosts” of past practice. Based on Wright’s extensive ethnographic and archival research in India and the United Arab Emirates, Between Dreams and Ghosts traces the movement of Indian migrant workers as they navigate government bureaucracy and recruiting agents through informal networks and pursue meaning in their lives and work in the Middle Eastern region referred to in the book as “the Gulf” – a term commonly used for describing the countries situated in the Arabian peninsula along the Persian Gulf.

The first part of the book, situated in India, analyzes the key actors shaping labor migration to the Middle East. Chapter 1 focuses on the Indian emigration bureaucracy, whose mandate to protect “vulnerable” workers reflects a persistent British-colonial logic central to emigration governance. Wright examines the evolution of this state-centered logic of protecting vulnerable workers, which often racializes and genders migrant workers through an arcane, bureaucratic “Emigration Check Required” system (26).

Chapter 2 provides insight into labor-recruitment practices, especially the identification, categorization, training, and placement of workers in the Gulf. This chapter shows the tensions between the recruiters’ focus on efficiently sending workers to the Gulf oil fields with the Indian government’s emphasis on protecting the very same workers. The author demonstrates that both actors rely on similar racial and regional stereotypes to promote the ideal of the “entrepreneurial” worker—to exemplify the new image of the Indian worker in the neoliberal era.

Chapter 3 highlights how migrant workers utilize informal networks to negotiate both government regulations and recruiting agents to secure the best route to the Middle East. Wright examines how workers build and sustain extensive networks of contacts—including colleagues, recruiting agents, sub-agents, government officials, and oil company managers—through gift-based exchanges that are crucial for securing employment. She emphasizes that this exchange of gifts is not a one-time event, but rather a continuous process that prospective workers use to secure repeat employment.

In Chapter 4, Wright unpacks the gendered nature of Indian migration to the Gulf. As women’s migration for work is curtailed both socially and administratively, it falls upon men to maintain kin connections through their migration. Wright shows how these connections are maintained through the purchase of gold available at many Middle Eastern souks. Through the exchange of gifts, especially as dowry, she demonstrates how “gold transmogrifies into kinship networks” (107). She argues that for men working in the Gulf, purchasing gold for their families is a socially mandated practice that sustains kin networks and reinforces social status. In contrast, women’s roles in maintaining these networks are largely confined to facilitating men’s migration.

Chapter 5 considers how workers in the Gulf connect their lives with the Indian state. Wright explains that workers describe the oil rigs as “temples,” viewing them not only as a source of livelihood but also as a key link to India’s development through remittances and contributions to large infrastructural projects, long regarded as symbols of modernity. This connection is essential as the workers’ contributions are often overlooked due to the perceived low-class status of their jobs. However, Wright notes that this conception of development mirrors discourses around the Hindutva ethnonationalist politics of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party—to the exclusion of Muslim and lower-caste migrants and their families in India. This India-specific discrimination is also mirrored within communal gatherings within the diaspora in the Gulf. Through this narrative, Wright complicates both India’s transnational connections and the concept of inclusive national development.

In Chapter 6, Wright begins by arguing that the integration of workplace management practices with state control and the securitization of oil production is fundamental to understanding labor conditions in the Gulf. She then focuses on the employers and managers who maintain control over oil production by overseeing fragmented worksites and living arrangements to meet strict project deadlines. Wright emphasizes that these arrangements are significant for maximizing labor exploitation and minimizing collective industrial action.

Worksite management also involves the transfer of responsibility for safety protections from the employers to workers. In Chapter 7, Wright shows how workers mitigate occupational risks within an otherwise-limited recourse to labor action. They often resort to embodying managerial safety protocols by “engaging in neoliberal discipling,” invoking religious totems in the process—demonstrating the neoliberal regime’s “capacity for mutation” through “[its] own objects” (174). The book’s conclusion expands the analysis on worker agency and resistance, as well as the historical and future trajectories of the oil industry in the Middle East.

Throughout the book, Wright guides the reader through the fragmented and discriminatory systems of migrant-labor recruitment in India, the meanings of life and work for migrant workers, and their complex connections to the homeland. Importantly, she places migrant workers at the center of global oil production, emphasizing that they are not merely passive recipients of capitalist exploitation but are instead active participants negotiating their way through it. Between Dreams and Ghosts is essential reading for scholars in economic and cultural anthropology, migration studies, public policy, labor sociology, and South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies. Indeed, the book represents a significant contribution to the growing literature on the complexities of migrant labor and social life in an increasingly interconnected yet polarized world.