Naram

This chapter focuses on a gendered discourse of South Asian women’s malleability or being naram, understood as the intrinsic capacity and also learned capability of South Asian women to accommodate themselves to different sociocultural circumstances. By virtue of being naram, many domestic workers perceive themselves to be ideal transnational subjects, able to adjust to the temporariness and suspension that characterize their migration experiences, and also to have the underlying capacity to develop the skills necessary for the work they undertake in the Gulf. Being naram not only enables these migrant women to be involved in the reproduction of subjects, households, and ethnonational formations in both the Gulf and South Asia, but also to simultaneously develop newfound abilities, dispositions and subjectivities, forms of everyday conversions that, as this chapter discusses, they try not to make apparent when visiting and adjusting back to their families and communities in South Asia.