They were born in Sharjah or Abu Dhabi or Riyadh. They went to CBSE schools where half the class was Malayali. They ate puttu for breakfast and shawarma for lunch. They spoke English at school, Malayalam at home (sort of), and Arabic only during Islamic Studies class. They are the second generation of the Gulf Malayali diaspora, and they have a perspective that their parents do not always understand.
Ask them where home is and you get a pause. Kerala is where ammachi lives and where they go for summer holidays. But it is not home the way their parents describe it, with the wistfulness and the idealisation. The Gulf is where their friends are, where their memories are, where they learned to ride a bicycle in the parking lot because there was nowhere else. But the Gulf does not give them citizenship or permanence. They belong everywhere and nowhere.
This is not a complaint. Most of them see it as an advantage. They are culturally multilingual in a way that their parents’s generation is not. They move between worlds with a fluency that comes from never having had just one. They can eat a sadya with their hands on Onam and host an iftar for Emirati friends during Ramadan without feeling any contradiction.
What they wish their parents understood: the attachment to Kerala cannot be inherited through guilt or obligation. It has to be built through genuine experience. The cousins they barely know, the village they visit once every two years, the language they speak imperfectly — these need positive associations, not pressure.
The second generation is not losing their Malayali identity. They are building a new version of it. One that includes the Gulf, that includes English, that includes influences their grandparents never imagined. It is different, not diminished.