Synopsis

​

“It is not one or two people… Thousands and thousands of people are inside.” In the United Arab Emirates, several thousand South Asian migrants continue to languish in the country’s central prisons for “crimes” ranging from bounced checks to drug peddling. With no infrastructure to support them, their loved ones on The Outside form the corroded backbone of their legal, financial, and emotional care.

Who Cares for the Caged Bird? thus offers a reflection on what "counts" as work in the context of South Asian migrant women who care for loved ones incarcerated in the state. Through recounting conversations with a group of caregivers and thematic analysis, the e-zine explores: What is work? What is (in)visible? And why? It maps the relationships they share with the institutions of police, court, and market, plotting the nuanced axes of power in the UAE.

Examining the degrees of freedom that caregivers navigate in a carceral world, Who Cares for the Caged Bird? peers into the lives of migrant women who give up dreams and opportunities—women who shrink—because of a system that grinds people to dust. It unfolds the binary of freedom—free and unfree—and asks whether freedom can be a spectrum.

​

Artist's statement

​

In 2015, when I had just begun my undergraduate degree, my grandfather, mother, and stepfather were imprisoned in Dubai’s Al Awir Central Jail. My grandmother informed me over a long-distance phone call, her voice weighted by fear. I had spent the first 18 years of my life in the United Arab Emirates, and I tasted bile on my tongue from the thought of returning. Nonetheless, abandoning my degree, I returned.

I quickly became trapped between the country’s dungeon economy, its jester’s stage of courts, and my grandmother’s and baby brother’s outstretched palms. I watched as my grandmother traversed a legal system she was foreign to, helping when and where I could. Her care was inexplicable to me—she negotiated with lawyers, packed sandwiches, sat handcuffed on long bus rides, and flirted with gray legalities. Banned from travel and with little financial support, she secured my grandfather’s release in 2018. Since then, he has passed. Yet my grandmother’s travel ban remains. She lives today both free and unfree; her home, a cage, her cage, a home. It is a strange experience, watching her build a nest inside her cage. I wanted to do justice to this story—our shared memory of losing our family to prison, and reclaiming the fragments of what we have left.

As I forged a closeness with abolitionist theory and the atomised manner in which other families navigated the UAE’s prison system, I became acutely aware of the lack of depth in the way we talk about the region and its underbelly. In Who Cares for the Caged Bird?, I seek to bring nuance to the narrative of Gulf migration from the Indian subcontinent. I explore themes of migration, care, and incarceration from an intersectional feminist, abolitionist lens, unravelling the complex entanglements of carceral systems of work, criminality, borders, and gender through narrative and image. My methodology is rooted in grounded theory and participatory action research: I speak intimately with other women whose lives overlap with my own.

​

​

About the artist

​

Chandni Sai Ganesh is a researcher working on caste, gender, and abolition. Her grandparents migrated from Kerala, India, to the United Arab Emirates, where she was born and raised. She is currently pursuing a master’s degree in gender and development. 

​

​

Credits

​

Research and Words | Chandni Sai Ganesh

Design and Illustrations |  Pavithra Ramanujam 

Images | Sutirtha Chatterjee