Migration has Stripped Us of Our Manhood: Contradictions of Failed Masculinity Among South Asian Male Migrants in Greece

Introduction

A man who is poor—what masculinity is he left with? His children demand money for school expenses, his wife makes demands for the household, his parents ask for money to gift. You can say I was a failure there. Migration offered me a chance to be a responsible male.

Gurmukh, ¹ 30-odd-years-old, migrated to Greece in late 2017 from a village from the Indian province of Punjab. Working as an agricultural worker in a vineyard near the town of Thiva, he hoped to overcome his failure as a farmer back home where unpredictable income due to rising costs of agricultural inputs and unseasonal rains created a precarious existence for his family.

Migration offered Gurmukh an opportunity to recoup his perceived loss of culturally defined heteropatriarchal male breadwinner masculinity due to his inability to provide for the family.

Within India and Pakistan, post the 1990s, economic liberalization and the consequent removal of agriculture-related subsidies and support prices, and the deregulation of rural credit market has created an agrarian crisis marked by declining security of tenure for small landholders, concentration of landownership and reverse tenancy, and increased alienation of rural communities from land and sources of livelihood (Bokhari 2019; Padhi 2012). The fallout has been intensely intimate and gendered for low-class, less educated rural men with marginal or nil landholdings evident by statements like, “I was caught in a bind—how to provide for the family. The masculinity of men is being killed by poverty and distress in farming” or “successful masculinity is based on economic status and well-being. Our masculinity has been crushed into the ground—to dust by failure in agriculture.”

The perceived failure of these men’s masculinity has to be situated within the region’s political economy and cultural meanings of successful manhood. Rural hegemonic masculinity in the adjoining regions of Indian Punjab and Pakistani Panjab, from where most men hail, is defined by social status, consumerist display of wealth, muscularity, and marriage (Ahmad 2016; Chowdhry 2019). Failure to attain any confers a societally “immature” status to men who are then confronted with a “crisis of masculinity.” Migration overseas often emerges as a viable option to shake off the “failed” tag and to reinstate symbolic hegemonic masculine status and prestige (izzat) within their families and communities. The material dispossession coupled with the romanticization of a “Europe filled with riches,” a history of male migration from these parts to work overseas, a culture of remittances, and conspicuous display of accumulated wealth by families of migrant men provide additional incentives for migration.

Greece is the first European Union (EU) country easily accessible both by sea or over land from the neighboring Turkey. It costs less to migrate here than other further-off European countries. Greece is also perceived as a ‘transit stop’ by many migrants who try to save money, while working in its informal economy, to pay for their onward journey to other more preferred EU countries such as Italy, Germany, or the United Kingdom. Around 200,000 South Asian migrants, mostly undocumented men, are estimated to be in Greece. ² These men are typically in their 20s; young and unmarried or with spouses back home; poorly educated, low-skilled; and from rural low-class backgrounds. With the exception of Sikhs among Indian migrants, the rest are Muslims. The presence of an estimated 15,000–16,000 regularized Indian migrants and 40,000 Pakistanis in Greece is an incentive for men from their kin or villages to migrate there.

Migrant males, in particular, face tremendous adjustment on arrival in any new country as they contend with an alien language, unfamiliar work relations, and cultural assumptions about their racialized and gendered identity (Ramirez 2011). The increase in Islamophobic and racist discourses in other parts of Europe, with the portrayal of single Muslim men’s masculinities as threatening, are used to enforce exclusionary border controls and citizenship regimes within Europe and Greece (Kirtsoglou and Tsimouris 2018; Scheibelhofer 2017). What makes Greece unique is that it is one of the most ethnically homogenous countries in the EU. Its history of liberation from the “Muslim” Ottoman Empire and the creation of an “orthodox” state wherein Islam was pitted as nation’s Other (Sakellariou 2017) has been used to stoke fear about Muslim migrants. In 2014, Nikos Dendias, Greece’s then Minister of Public Order and Citizen Protection, publicly stated that migrants from Bangladesh and Pakistan “belong to another culture,” and “come from a different world than us” (AFP 2014). ³ A far-right party, the Golden Dawn, has utilized strident anti-immigrant rhetoric to commit actual acts of violence against racialized migrants and refugees (Karamanidou 2016). Rural Greek communities also reveal Islamophobic sentiment with community-based anti-immigrant vigilantism (Petrou and Kandylis 2016). All these factors make Greece an ideal country to study how discourses of “othering” intersect with restrictive state policies to (re)shape masculinity of South Asian male migrants.

In Greece, though Indian and Pakistani men are often clumped together as an ethnically homogenous group, they often define their identity along the lines of their original citizenship and religions, and see distinct differences between the two. They face a double-bind due to migration and temporary labor regimes that institutionalize migrant “illegality,” and prevailing discourses of “othering,” based on racism and Islamophobia. The dichotomy of “us” (Greeks) versus “them” (migrants) is easier to articulate because of these men’s racial distinctiveness and their concentration in publicly visible jobs, despite their comprising a small percentage of the total migrant population. Despite Greece having the highest overall unemployment rate in the EU, standing at 24 percent in 2017 (Statista 2018), ⁴ Greeks have gradually vacated certain spaces of the labor market that they consider low-value such as in farming, construction, or in the urban informal economy to be fueled by cheap migrant labor (Maroukis 2016). It is segmented along ethnic lines, with migrants occupying “immigrant niches” marked by flexible organization of production, and inequalities in wages and harsher conditions of work (ibid). Restrictive immigration policies facilitate the continuation of this labor market segmentation by keeping the migrants in a continual suspended state of illegality. The legally disenfranchised workforce is also effectively disciplined by threats of deportation (De Genova 2002).

Theoretical conceptualization about normative masculine ideals and hierarchies reveal these to be multi-layered; relational; socially constructed; culturally specific; based on socio-economic and political statuses such as race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, and citizenship; and constantly negotiated and re-imagined (Connell 1995). While men’s hegemonic masculinity, negotiated and affirmed by their breadwinning ability, is enacted by a few men, the gendering of men emerges through relations of power between different groups of men and in relations with women (ibid). A growing body of interdisciplinary studies on masculinity and migration reveal that masculinities get (re)shaped by the process and the type of migration undertaken (Ye 2014), by gender regimes in chosen destination countries, and by social divisions in the host society including migrant status, class, race, ethnicity, religious identity, and employment shape masculine hierarchies (Charsley 2005).

Some scholars situate the masculine migratory imperative within pressures to conform to heteropatriarchal “male breadwinner” ideal (Osella and Osella 2000), as a rite of passage into manhood (Monsutti 2007), or the acquisition of hegemonic masculine status, marked by wealth and displays of consumer goods, otherwise not attainable in their home countries (Ahmad 2016).

South Asian masculinity studies positions South Asian men’s experience within the intersections of caste ideology, the colonial encounter, religious fundamentalism, and local forms of patriarchy (Chopra, Osella, and Osella 2004). Employment, marriage, and parenthood are cultural entry points into heterosexual masculine sorority while those who are unemployed or unmarried are more likely to be accorded a marginal masculine status (Chowdhry 2019). On a side note, with a landmark ruling, particularly in India decriminalising gay sex, alternate arenas for the contestation of heteropatriarchal masculinities have opened up (Mendos 2019).

In this article, I employ the framework of critical masculinity studies to examine the negotiations South Asian male migrants in Greece undertake with themselves, co-ethnic male migrants, their families back home, and with the locals to shed their failed masculinity tag. The focus also lies in understanding how relational and hierarchical masculinities, based on a shared history of colonialism, postcolonial encounters, and differing religious traditions in the men’s home countries of India and Pakistan get reproduced, refashioned, or dismantled in supposedly neutral host countries. I build upon scholarship demonstrating fluidity in masculine identities based on identities of race, class, religion, migrant status, and local gender regimes by foregrounding these men’s innovative reformulation of successful manhood. Confronted with their inability to acquire an instant upgrade to successful manhood, exemplified by legal migrant status, they adopt a series of compensatory masculine strategies by reworking themselves as the exemplar masculine ideal both in comparison to their co-ethnic males as well as local men, whose masculinity they creatively reduce to effeminacy. Working as flexible agricultural wage workers, they self-valorize their strong work-ethic, muscularity, and contribution to Greek agriculture and economy. Remittances, displays of conspicuous consumption, and lies about their undocumented status or lived reality also facilitate this re-invention. However, these strategies and their migrant “illegality” contribute to greater immobility and making successful masculine status elusive—by tying them to exploitative labor conditions or from preventing them from returning back home.

“You Are One of Us!”: Situating Methods and Co-ethnic Positionality

This article draws on 48 semi-structured one-on-one interviews, 7 focus groups, and participant observation conducted in May 2018, in Athens where undocumented Indian and Pakistani men work in the informal economy, and in farms and villages around the two towns of Thiva and Megara, where they work as farm laborers. The men came from different age groups (18–53), and the duration of their stay in Greece ranged from two days (newly arrived) to those who had obtained regular status during one of Greece’s regularization programs, the last being in 2006. I conducted interviews during the men’s lunch breaks, in cafes, in stores where they worked, and in their dormitories or rented accommodations after they had returned back from work. Gurudwaras (Sikh temples) in Megara and Athens served as other informal interview venues.

My co-ethnic insider status as a diasporic Punjabi woman with a parent each from Lahore and Patiala in Pakistan and India, respectively, and my fluency in the men’s languages, Punjabi and Urdu, proved invaluable in making contacts locally, and in conducting interviews. It also made the men repose trust in me, oftentimes phrased as, “we will tell you the truth. After all, you are one of us” or “you come from the same culture as ours, you understand the constraints (halaat) that force us to migrate.” While my heterosexual cis-gender female identity was a barrier in discussing sexuality and desire among the 20-something cohort, I found the older men opening up to discuss their sexual frustrations and repressed desires. This could be attributed to the younger men viewing me as “Bhaajee” (sister) or “Khalajaan” (aunt), both constructs framing me within rigid conservative patriarchal familial relations that made for an uneasy sharing of sharing intimate details. Interestingly, this ambiguous positionality also resulted in the men lowering their guards when discussing struggles with cultural constructs of failed masculinity. I was also an “outsider” due to my female identity and privileges of class, education, and immigrant status as a Canadian citizen. I gained initial access to the men through co-ethnic networks. The Ahmadiyya Muslim Community in Greece, the World Sikh Council, and, through them, a group of undocumented Pakistani men working for a phone app company that sold SIM cards and “recharges’ to migrant workers facilitated snowball recruitment of participants.

Confronting Continued Failure of Masculinity

Masculinity? Masculinity?? Migration has stripped us of our manhood. When awake, I spend all hours, sitting on my haunches, pulling onions out of the soil. And in the night, all I dream of is onions. Tell me, what trace of masculinity is left within me?

Both Indian and Pakistani migrant men affirm learning about culturally sanctioned ideal masculine norms from familial male authority figures such as fathers or elder brothers. Normative heteropatriarchal masculine responsibility as the protector-provider includes fulfilling familial duties maturely such as care of elderly parents, education of younger siblings, or marriage of sisters. The men’s mimetic masculinity is also based on physical muscularity embodied through hard work in the fields. Failure to adhere to any of these norms results in a loss of status and an attendant crisis of masculinity for the men within the rural communities. Hegemonic masculine status is also equated with wealth-based standing within the community defined through terms like kaamyaab (successful), rob wala (commanding), and jhidhi personality hoye or someone whose persona exudes power and confidence. Despite the move abroad, these culturally situated aspirational masculine ideals and practices continue to act as codes to affirm successful manhood, relationally with other migrant men within Greece as well as transnationally, with their families and communities.

While all men emphasize that the crossing or the “journey” has scarred them forever, they also harness it to assert masculine status. Such contradictions become particularly evident when the men meet each other for the first time on the neutral turf of Greece and ask, “What route did you take?” This simple and innocuous query is loaded with layers of meaning. The route taken depends on how much disposable capital they have, thus reflecting class hierarchies and, with it, competing displays of masculinity. The moneyed pay human smugglers more to get a tourist visa to fly out to Istanbul, and then attempt a quick overland border crossing. Others with less money are forced to take the overland route involving a long trek of 40–50 days across Pakistan, Iran, and Turkey with great risk-taking due to multiple border crossings, lack of food and water, physical exhaustion, and sleep deprivation. The trek, by denoting low-class status, places such men at a lower hierarchical ranking relationally to those with more capital. However, the former subvert this material failure by underlining the trek as a test of masculinity, by exalting qualities such as courage and endurance in face of exposure to risks, and by downplaying dependency on human smugglers. The deliberate “strutting” of machismo also involves caricaturing moneyed migrant men as “soft,” and “less manly” due to their avoidance of the trek and, by association, a journey-laden baptism into macho manhood. The lacing of a new iconic representation—a heroic male—is strategically deployed to shed off the stigma of emasculation:

We reached a thick jungle and were told to start walking. It was pitch dark. We were not allowed to use our cell phones to light our way. It was mountainous—I slipped, fell down and hurt myself. None came to help. I continued walking but fell again, this time on thorny bushes. My hands were lacerated. I left my life in the hands of Allah Pak. After eight hours, we finally reached a small village. My legs and feet were swollen from the wounds but I had survived. (Undocumented Pakistani male, Athens)

On a daily basis, how do the men, coping with multiple layers of “failed masculinity” negotiate their encounters and interactions with other men, either Greeks or South Asian descent, or with their transnationally located families? Within the migrant male fraternity, hierarchies of masculinities, based on immigration status, years of stay in the country, age, and class, defines relationships and interactions. Regularized male migrants instantly acquire hegemonic masculine status and, by association, implicit dominance among all migrant males, while others, irrespective of age, class, or skill-sets, in one fell stroke, get relationally reduced to a marginalized masculine status due to their dependence on such male co-ethnics. Arjan, a supervisor on a sprawling onion farm in Thiva with 45 men under his employ admits, “As an older man, I can pressurise a new ‘boy’ to fall into line here. He is a weaker position—undocumented and desperate for work—and so has no option but to listen to me.” Men like Arjan, who have a regular immigration status and can command better jobs and income, wield a more traditional authoritative masculinity over men who are recently arrived, have precarious undocumented status, and are younger in age.

In rural Greece, the men’s racialized bodies render them highly visible to the authorities and to potential deportability. Fearful of arrests and deportations, undocumented men self-surveil their movements after work by cloistering themselves in dormitories (see Kukreja 2019 for more). This constant and palpable sense of fear rubs in their failed masculinity harder. In real terms, these men have to be in the continual good books of a small set of regularized mento facilitate jobs and accommodation, to remit money back home, or to make purchases for food, clothes, and cell phone recharges from ethnic stores located in the towns. This dependency and marginal status, highly resented, is evident through comments like, “[h]e has papers. I don’t. That changes the equation—in the way we interact with each other, or how they look down on us,” or “I have to beseech them for jobs or for help in securing a footing in this country (tarla sharla karni paindhi hai). It is demeaning but circumstances force me to do so.” While the men try to rationalize by stating that, “in difficult times, one is forced to call a donkey one’s father,” such dependency is interpreted as emasculatory. Even those undocumented men who are older in age and, by association, have a culturally higher masculine status and respect within home communities, feel a loss of status: “Though they [regularised men] do not refuse my requests, I find myself burdened with the weight of this gratitude. Incapability to fend for myself here makes me feel less of a man. My head hangs in shame” (undocumented Indian male, Megara).

Masculinity is understood as a social construct that organizes behaviors and actions as much as it constitutes stylized performances by men to inform peers on ways of “doing” masculinity (Butler 1990). With farms or dormitories, as homosocial spaces, operating as arenas where men assert and perform masculinities, migrant men consider complaining about the harsh conditions or long hours of work as “feminine.” According to an undocumented Indian man, “I keep silent about the indignities that I suffer at work. If I complain, others make fun of me. They say that I am ‘soft’.” To offset this, performances of muscular masculinity are verbalized through statements such as, “I am used to this type of hard work,” “our bodies are built to work hard and rough,” or “I work uncomplainingly.” Ironically, this muscular posturing that includes a carefully enacted nonchalance about harsh working conditions or long hours of work result in the men’s self-exploitation, much to the benefit of their Greek employers.

The relative strength of Greek employers, almost always male, in relation to these racialized migrant workers, is derived both from the men’s undocumented status and their national and religious identities. The resultant forced subservience, demeaning for the workers, is evident through comments like, “we have to work with our heads lowered. After all, we are in a weaker bargaining position. We do not have papers [status].” A delicate balance of hypermasculine posturing has to be enacted out between Greek farmers and their workers. Inordinate flexing of muscles and bad-mouthing creates a “bad employer” buzz that then deters other migrants from seeking his employ. This “buzz” allows the men to wrest agency and reclaim some measure of self-respect. Paradoxically, Greek male farmers’ economic success and, by association, their successful masculine status is conditional on the continual extraction of sub-market wage labor from the migrants. The men’s disposability is articulated as, “the farmers are only interested in wringing value from our bodies, nothing else. Once we become useless, they flick us away as flies. If they cared for us, would they house us in terrible rooms with no water or heating.”

Emasculation through “Othering”

Given that masculinities are fluid, multilayered, influenced by local cultural and political contexts, and are continually negotiated in encounters with the locals, the masculine status of all South Asian men in Greece, irrespective of their class, educational attainments, or skill-sets, gets marginalized due to their racialized othering. Even regularized men like Arjan, the supervisor, who exude masculine success within their community and on whom the Greek farmers depend on for their own economic status, experience this contradictory reality as evident in his comments that, “we will never be considered equal to Greek men. However successful we might be, we will always remain one notch below them.”

Racial slurs such as “mavros,” literally meaning black or dark and equivalent to the term nigger in hate value, are commonly used as tools to both inform the men about their inferior “othered” status as well as to erode their resistance against workplace exploitation as evident in comments from Indian and Pakistani men like, “if we demand our held-up back wages, the farmer says, ‘you mavros are always creating trouble’.”

The imaginary of Europe as liberated or azaad and as a site for fulfilling sexual fantasies hitherto curbed by conservative familial and social values (Ahmad 2016) also unravels with the framing of “dangerous masculinity” (Scheibelhofer 2017). Here, tropes of terrorists, sexual deviants, and misogynists commonly ascribed to Muslim men create a toxic mixture of behaviors and attitudes shaping encounters of Greeks with these men. A 25-years-old undocumented Pakistani migrant in Athens relates the humiliations that he and other South Asian men face on an everyday basis: “Whenever we enter the subway, I notice that people move away—like they want to get away from us. Women clutch their purse straps a bit tighter. We are not thieves. We will not hurt them.” Encounters with local women also strike at the very heart of the men’s understanding of heterosexual male sexuality. Regularized South Asian migrants state that, “no local woman will think of even being friends with us. No way.” In rural areas, with the men’s self-regulation of movements and sequestering in dormitories after work to prevent deportation (see Kukreja 2019), opportunities to interact with local women are rare and often limited to sex workers. Even in the purchase of sex, they feel emasculated as, “the sex worker shouts from behind the curtains, ‘only Greeks, only Greeks’. We are considered dirty.” (regularized Pakistani male, Athens). Such pervasive prejudices, enacted continually and on a daily basis, erodes the men’s sense of self-esteem and adds more layers to their accumulated sense of failed masculinity.

Relational masculine hierarchies also get created between Indian and Pakistani men, bound together by their undocumented and low-class status. For example, a group of Pakistani and Indian men, escaping from drugs-related gang wars in Omonia, Athens, found cab drivers refusing to give them a ride until one showed a photocopy of his Indian passport: “it worked like magic. My Pakistani co-workers silently clambered into the cab after me, pretending to be Indians. I know they felt demeaned” (undocumented Indian male, Athens). In recent years, the anti-immigrant belligerence of Golden Dawn cadre also has selectively targeted Pakistani and Bangladeshi men, incidentally all Muslims: “The assailants nab us and demand that we show our papers (short-stay permit cards or passports). An Indian is let off immediately but Pakistani or Bangladeshi men get beaten up” (regularized Pakistani male, Athens). This dual treatment by the far-right assailants is corroborated by statistics of Hellenic Police showing that, by 2017, the number of hate crimes against migrants, refugees, and Muslims in Greece had nearly tripled (Strickland 2018a) ⁵ with Pakistani laborers and Afghan refugees emerging as visible targets (Strickland 2018b). ⁶

The discourses of hate and fear about the Muslim other also get reinforced through partisan state policies, two of which I will briefly elaborate here. The Greek immigration system is perceived to discriminate against the Pakistanis on Family Reunification (FR). Pakistanis contend that the time taken to clear FR applications of regularized Indians is faster and that the percentage of reunions is much higher than for them (focus groups Megara and Thiva). They ascribe it to “the climate of hate against Muslims and Pakistani men in general. Our applications get stuck in the Greeki consulate in Islamabad for years while we see Indians who applied at the same time as us getting their families here” (regularized Pakistani male, Megara). Such perceptions sow bitterness among Pakistani men about feeling “less than equal to the Indians” or that “we are not worthy to have our families brought here.” Additionally, Greece’s deportation regime, under the EU-Turkey deal of 2016, with Pakistani men topping the list of those deported (Afanasieva 2016), ⁷ has not helped either.

The second relates to the practice of one’s religion. All prayer houses, other than churches, require special permits from the Ministry of Education and Religious Affairs to get built. The Greek Orthodox Church, constitutionally considered the “prevailing religion,” has consistently opposed building any mosque in the country (Triandafyllidou and Kouki 2013), and Muslims are forced to rent warehouses or apartments to serve as makeshift mosques (Hatziprkopiou and Evergeti 2014). Restrictions against the construction of domes and minarets, visual signifiers of mosques, prevent publicizing these rented spaces as spaces of worship. Meanwhile, the Indian Sikhs appear to have had a relatively easy time in buying land, getting clearances, and constructing Gurudwaras, with all architectural elements intact, in towns with significant Sikh population such as Schimatari, Scala, or Megara. Resentment against this discrimination is articulated as, “we see them [Sikhs] going to offer prayers in their big temples whereas we have to pray in our dormitories” or “we have to slink like thieves to a room to offer namaz.”

Interviews with migrant men reveal that Greek farmers appear to borrow Islamophobic tropes and a policy of “divide and rule” to discipline and divide workhands resisting heavy workloads or delayed wage payments. The men’s national and religious identities get merged into one, with Pakistani men portrayed as troublemakers, a trait attributed to their Muslim religious identity while the Indians are projected as “docile” and “peaceful.” It is here that I examine how the corrosive rhetoric of Islamophobia, present in Greece influences the mind-set of migrant men. What role do internalized beliefs, and prejudices, carried from home countries, play in the men’s interactions with each other? There are contradictory messages from the fieldwork. When asked whether the geopolitics of the subcontinent (re)shapes their masculine encounters on the supposedly neutral turf of Greece, the men often eloquently state that, “earlier, we were one [people]. We were ripped into two by siyasat [colonial masters]” (undocumented Pakistani migrant, Megara). The men underscore a shared history of Punjabiyat—cultural and social norms and customs—that the Partition of 1947 could not fragment, as one that unites them despite current geopolitical realities, best summarized by an undocumented Indian migrant:

Here, men from Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh live together as one. No one is labelled differently. Back home, politicians and the state (hukumatan) create tensions and rifts between us. Neither the Indian nor Pakistani politicians are any good. Here, I would say that we live as brothers. We break bread together. There is no tension whatsoever.

The hypersexualized Muslim male trope too gets evoked by Indian workers through comments such as, “a Pakistani man did ‘bad things’ with a Greeki woman” or “they [the Pakistani men] create trouble by teasing local women.” When probed more deeply to provide exact instances, the men respond, “I heard it from others” or “the rape of a local woman happened, one time, six years ago.” Such hearsay examples of Pakistani male’s presumed sexual rapaciousness and misogyny, narrated by Indian migrants act as counterfoils to assertions about their own respect for women.

Recouping Manhood through Self-Valorization

Continually emasculated, marginalized, and othered in various encounters, men attempt to recast their masculine status through “manhood acts” (Schwalbe 2005) enacted relationally with each other. Ingvars’s (2019) work on male refugee reveals that alternate masculinities get articulated through constant negotiations with self and other males, both co-ethnic and locals. In the case of the South Asian men, the crafting of an alternate subjectivity is done through a “self-valorizing” masculinity. It is predicated on self-sacrifice defined as “the choosing of the indignity, the embracing of the difficulties and impositions of paid work, for the sake of one’s family, that gives meaning to the paid work that men undertake. There is honour in self-sacrifice for the family” (Donaldson and Howson 2009, 212). Self-valorizing, as a strategy, is aimed to resurrect and reinstate adult masculine status among co-ethnic male migrants, in relation to their Greek employers, as well as in the eyes of their transnational families. It allows the men, undermined by precarious migrant status, deportability, and discourses of otherness, to displace their marginal status within Greek society and in the labor market on to the Greeks themselves.

Marked by multiple precarities, these men craft a new narrative of their indispensability to the Greek nation and its rural economy as evident in statements like, “agriculture here would have collapsed if it were not for us,” or “the farmers here know that without us, agriculture will come to a standstill.” Such strategic agential framing of migrant male’s muscularity and work-ethic against that of the Greek farmhands contests dominant narratives of migrants as “free loaders.”

I sit on my haunches from seven in the morning till one pm—uncomplainingly—pulling up onions. One hour of lunch break and I am back in the same position till five pm. Not a slightest murmur of complaint do I make. A Greeki is not capable of doing this exacting work. (Undocumented Pakistani male, Megara)

The Greeki cannot work like we can. They come to work at nine with a coffee, cigarette, and a tiropita (cheese pie). Work for an hour and a half, then take a break for another coffee. We are used to hard labour and so, we can work from morning till evening without taking many breaks. Greek farmers know we have a strong work-ethic and capable of doing hard work. (Regularised Indian male, Megara)

In relation to the family, the men underscore “personal sacrifice” that they undertake for its larger good through statements like, “I strangled my personal ambitions and desires for the family” (armanaa da sanh ghot ditta); “I am silently suffering my life here so that my children have a better future;” or “I am doing this [migration and precarious work] for the happiness of my family.” Evocations of self-sacrifice and denial of individual aspirations provide the men an opportunity to circulate the ideal of a heroic self-sacrificing male to their transnationally located families. This is further underscored by habits of frugality and higher remittances back home: “I try to save as much as I can. I have been wearing these old clothes for two years now. I would rather send money back to my mother” (undocumented Pakistani male, Megara). Such assertions are often comparative and involve critiques of co-ethnic men: “I came here to earn for my family, not to spend my earnings on branded clothes and beer like the others;” “they [spenders] have forgotten their duty (farz) towards family;” or “I am fulfilling my duty as a responsible man.” This emphasis on male breadwinner ideal creates hierarchies between co-ethnic males with the “self-sacrificers” seeking to position themselves as exemplars of hegemonic masculinity.

A turn to fervent religiosity, while offering spiritual comfort, also allows some Pakistani men to express a collective identity as Muslims (Leghari 2012) and, in turn, claim a relationally higher masculine status, based on their piety, vis-à-vis other Muslim men. Most Muslim migrant workers state that praying five times a day is often not possible due to the very nature of agricultural or informal wage work that they do. However, keeping the dawn to dusk fast during the holy month of Ramadan, often occurring during summer months, is often deployed to flaunt masculine self-restraint and maturity. Men not observing the fast are chastised through barbed comments like, “like a child, you lack self-control” or “you are not worthy of being called a ‘pure’ (pak) Muslim.” Despite such assertions of relational “pious” and adult masculinity, Islamophobia collectively stigmatizes all Pakistani men as marginal and dangerous.

The second strategy of reinstating hegemonic masculine status involves faking economic success, through lies and fabrications to families, about migrant status, work conditions, or low wages. Performances of successful masculinity, embodied through donning of latest menswear fashion, branded clothes, flashy sunglasses, and/or using latest models of smartphones, often occurs through cellphone mediated video calls or “selfies” boasting their individual success. According to a Pakistani origin regularized migrant who has an electronic shop in Megara:

Often, migrant men come and ask, “Uncleji, can we sit on your chair for a minute to take a photo? Can we take a picture standing outside your shop?”…. I realised that they were sending these pictures back home—saying that they owned the shop or were employed here. In reality, they do not want to tell the truth of their harsh life here. They want to show that they are rich. It creates a false impression in their families’ minds that the men earn a lot.

Stigma and Masculine Dishonour in Returning Back

Strategies of faking success backfires on the men as returning back, without legal status, voluntarily or through deportation, epitomizes masculine dishonor (Ahmad 2016). Additionally, the 2016 EU-Turkey deal allows Greece to deport to Turkey all people who lack a right to international protection in Greece. The International Organisation of Migration managed “voluntary repatriation” scheme, funded by the EU and Greece, offers a return plane ticket and 300 Euro. While all men contend with continual fear of deportation, reports and statistics reveal a greater percentage of deportations for Pakistanis (UNHR 2018). ⁹ Such selective deportations, attributed by migrant men to stereotypes about Pakistani men as terrorists, is increasingly causing Indian men try to distance themselves from the former (Focus group Indian men, Megara).

The cultural symbolism associated with repatriation and voluntary return includes communal shaming and reinforcement of failed masculine tag. A young Pakistani migrant who had seen some of his friends deported stated that, “If I return ingloriously like them, people will make sarcastic barbs such as ‘you made a lot of money there, didn’t you? Yet you got thrown out’.” Some men privately acknowledge that if the stigma of masculine dishonor was not associated with voluntary return, they might have thought otherwise: “I will be the laughing stock of the entire village. Everyone, including my own wife, will taunt me that I failed as a man. That I could not tough it out like other men” (undocumented Indian male, Megara). Return also implies acknowledging one’s failure to acquire hegemonic masculine status overseas as much as the ability to bear, “the hardship and loneliness” that accompanies migration. For the returnees, such attitudes bear ominous portends as their attempts to reinstall themselves as patriarchs within the familial gendered hierarchy of authority gets undercut by the stigmatizing tag of “failed masculinity.” Additionally, pre-existing structural constraints that initially spurred the migration make the migrant men fearful of becoming dependents of other family members and hence getting demoted to a subordinate masculine status. These layered contradictions are summed up by a young undocumented Pakistani man from Megara: “Thinking of what awaits me there has forced me to stay back here. Only when I get my papers, will I return back, not otherwise.”

Conclusion

The continually shifting goalpost of successful masculine status underscores its very elusiveness for low-class, and low-skilled undocumented South Asian migrant men: “Being undocumented here is a scab that continually reminds me of what I cannot be—my failure as a man—to earn well or obtain status, either in Pakistan or here in Greece” (undocumented Indian male, Megara). Agrarian distress caused by the neoliberal accumulative process in South Asia has profoundly impacted rural masculinities within their home regions of Pakistani Panjab and Indian Punjab. Consequently, migration with its promise of instantaneous reinstatement of successful manhood makes many men burdened with the “failed” masculine tag opt for it as a quick-fix solution.

Migration, however, deals additional dents to their bruised masculinity as legal status in Greece becomes the next shifting yet highly elusive “successful masculine” goalpost. Precarity caused by Greece’s restrictive migration regime, in one fell swoop, marks all undocumented migrant men as “failed.” Confined to low-paying and low worth jobs, and confronted with societal discrimination, these men find their masculine status further eroded. Their “othering” based on religion and national identity, reinforced by Greek state policies on Family Reunification, or the ability to publicly practise one’s religion, shapes relational male hierarchies among Indian and Pakistani migrant men who are otherwise bound together by their common racialized identity.

Emasculated at multiple levels on a daily basis, such “failed” men seek to rewrite, on their own terms, masculine expectations and norms by self-valorizing their masculine selves. Self-valorization should be understood as a compensatory masculine strategy to fend off their presumed failed masculine tag. These acts of agency include foregrounding their conscientious work ethic, physical muscularity, indispensability to the Greek economy, and caricaturing Greek men as emasculated due to their inability to undertake hard labor. Such strategic repositioning of self as indispensable for the Greek nation and playing up the element of personal sacrifice for the sake of the family provides an opportunity to transform a masculine “makeover”—from inadequacy and failure into mythic heroes. Such subversions enable these multiply-marginalised migrant men to relationally reconfigure dominant frames of masculinity in their favor.

Despite such agential measures, migrant precarity makes the “male breadwinner” ideal unattainable for a majority. In this context, migration of rural South Asian men and migrant masculinities needs to be situated within global and local political economies, discourses of otherness, and securitization of borders that act as barriers for migrant men from realizing cultural norms of adult masculinity, thus forcing them to be in a continually compromised and subordinate masculine position as their labor is efficiently extracted for the greater accumulation of capital.