Between dreams and ghosts: Indian migration and Middle Eastern oil By AndreaWright. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2021. 288 pp.

There exists this city built by labor, mostly men, who disappear after their respective buildings are made. Once the last brick is laid, the glass spotless, the elevators functional, the plumbing operational, the laborers, every single one of them, begin to fade, before disappearing completely. Some believe the men become ghosts, haunting the facades they helped build. When visiting, take note. If you are outside, and there are buildings nearby, ghosts may already be falling, may even have landed on your person. (Unnikrishnan, 2017, p. 4) Andrea Wright's Between Dreams and Ghosts offers a poignant narrative of the poetics and practices of Indian labor migration to the Gulf. Based on archival and ethnographic research on migration from villages and cities in India to oil projects in the Gulf and back again, Wright's book examines government and corporate polices and international discourses on migration together with how migrants, recruiting agencies, and others involved in labor networks shape practices and policies on migration. This process is made possible through poetics: if those who build the United Arab Emirates become ghosts, as Deepak Unnikrishnan movingly writes, their dreams of the future are haunted by ghosts from the past, even as invisible migrant laborers build oil infrastructures in the present. How do these would-be ghosts dream? Wright examines how migrants and other participants in labor migration evoke the poetics of ghosts and dreams as they move cyclically between India and the Gulf. For migrant laborers, visions of the future emerge through “dreams of modernity, material comfort, and expanding capitalist frontiers” (p. 10). With dreams of the future, there appear ghosts, reminders of the past: traditions, histories, and familial obligations. This past disrupts the present. Grounding her powerful ethnographic analysis of these poetics of dreams and ghosts, Wright uses them as an entry point into understanding how capitalism, laws, and labor practices build on noncapitalist social relations. The poetics of dreams and ghosts is used to examine not only migration to the Gulf but also processes of dispossession and marginality that produced the conditions of their migration to begin with. Migrant laborers understand their migration as framed by past, present, and future. Similarly, Wright's analysis crosses temporal and disciplinary bounds, and it uses anthropological and historical methods to examine how categories and processes in labor migration transform over time and are weighted by the past. To understand labor migration in the present, she turns to histories of labor migration in colonial and precolonial India. Wright examines how Indian emigration laws today draw from colonial policies in the 19th century that regulated the movement of labor across the British Empire. Central to her analysis is the category of “vulnerable” citizens, typically men and women from lower-caste and class groups. Rooting this narrative of “vulnerability” in the history of slavery and indenture, she outlines how labor migration in colonial and postcolonial India classified laborers in three broad categories: unskilled, skilled, and professional workers. These classifications mapped onto viewpoints of mobile citizens as either free or vulnerable. Together with discourses and regulations on trafficking, colonial legacies continue to shape neoliberal Indian laws. If the dyad of dreams and ghosts holds the book together, the history of emigration is framed through the binary of free/vulnerable, which has shaped discourses of surplus and scarcity in the Gulf's oil industry. As Wright states, “Popular media and government officials argue that the Gulf has a surplus of oil wealth but a scarcity of labor. In contrast, India is described as having a surplus of labor but a scarcity of wealth” (p. 4). These narratives of India's surplus labor are rooted in colonial discourses, a legacy inherited by the neoliberal postcolonial state, recruiting agents, and oil company managers. She argues, however, that these narratives make labor migration appear to be frictionless and to transform migrants into rational, calculating entrepreneurs, obscuring structural inequalities, social practices, and the everyday life of migrants. Through an ethnography that tacks back and forth among migrants, recruiting agencies, and government officials in India, and oil companies and labor camps in the Gulf, Wright examines migration as a disarticulated social process in which subcontractors play a central role in networks of labor migration. The first part of the book focuses on how laborers migrate. Based on fieldwork at a recruiting agency in Mumbai, and archival work on the history of government policies on emigration, Wright shows how neoliberal “brand India,” as a labor exporter, comes into being through recruiting agencies’ disciplinary practices. What emerges is how migrants become commodities that can be improved and turned into entrepreneurs. Wright examines how recruiting agencies train migrants on communication and attitudes toward work that aim to improve India's brand image. This image is based on upper-caste Hindu values that perpetuate casteist discrimination. Although the India brand is cultivated through neoliberal practices, recruiting agencies also request greater state intervention in the education of laborers. Yet, as Wright shows, labor migration functioned not only through state intervention but also through the cultivation of networks, whether on the local, community level or at the level of the recruiting agencies. Migrants relied on village-level relationships to access subagents and recruiting agents, and while their relationships to these agents made migration possible, social hierarchies emerged within these networks. Wright argues, “Unlike networks mobilized around caste and politics, the networks created as people migrate to work on oil projects are composed of groups thought to be quite different—different religions, castes, nationalities, and classes” (p. 66). The assumption that these networks are distinct from caste or political networks leads me to consider how the caste form is reproduced in the social hierarchies through networks. Might the hierarchies being built through these networks draw on the logics of patronage, a form of relation integral to caste formation and relation? Similarly, while Wright is deeply attentive to class, religious, and caste difference among laborers and recruiting agents, “Muslim” emerges as a singular category rather than one that is itself variegated according to caste, region, class, and other differences. Nevertheless, by examining how migrants and recruiting agents relate to one another within these networks, Wright's analysis offers a dynamic view of processes of gift-giving, exchange, and circulation within these networks. Her analysis then shifts in part 2 from migration to migrants’ motivations and how they navigate labor and kinship relationships. Laborers migrate to support kin at home, especially to pay for gold as a dowry for their sisters’ marriages, improve the status of their families, and fulfill gendered roles in the family by becoming “good sons.” Gold, she argues, becomes a substance of kinship, beyond bodily or biological substances typically seen as central to the making of relations. The responsibility to provide gold for kin underscores men's migration even as the migration of women is more tightly controlled through discourses and laws around trafficking, as well as through locating women's work in the home. Dowry, however, is understood differently in Hindu and Muslim homes. Given the diverse religious backgrounds of the migrants that Wright works with, attending to differences in how ideas of dowry play out would thicken her analysis. Similarly, how might such religious and caste differences shape ideas about migrants’ belonging to the Indian nation-state? Wright argues that migrants viewed oil rigs in the Gulf as akin to temples. Both are symbols of modernity that allow migrants to make claims to membership in the modern Indian state. While her Hindu, lower-caste, and Muslim migrant interlocutors described oil rigs as temples, she might have differentiated their variegated claims to belonging, especially in the face of Hindutva. In the final part of the book, Wright focuses on the migrant experience of working and living in the Gulf. Examining the kafala, or the sponsorship system for migrant labor, Wright convincingly argues that the experience of migrant laborers in labor camps and the dangers they face at work are shaped by colonialism and neoliberalism. The risk of death on the job is individualized through an emphasis on safety standards, even as the practice of subcontracting creates a mobile workforce. The Gulf then emerges not as an exceptional space but as deeply embedded in the ghosts of the past and dreams for the future. The book is carefully researched, and it astutely tackles the complexities of labor migration without slipping into existing paradigms in studies and popular discourses on the Gulf. It should be compulsory reading for anyone interested in migration, labor, contemporary capitalism, South Asian studies, and Middle Eastern studies.