Between India and Germany: How Sheena Kalayil Is Rewriting Migration Narratives
Longlisted for the 2026 Women’s Prize for Fiction, The Others revisits the fall of the Berlin Wall through the lives of an Indian medical student, a Mozambican factory worker and an East German mechanic. For UK-based writer Sheena Kalayil, their intertwined stories reveal how political freedom can leave migrants facing fresh uncertainty about work, identity and belonging.
A Different View of the Berlin Wall
The fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 remains one of the defining images of modern European history. Crowds celebrated, families reunited and the collapse of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), or East Germany, set the stage for German reunification in October 1990.
Yet political turning points do not affect everyone equally. For migrants and international students whose lives are tied to a particular system of employment, education or residence, the end of one political order can create new uncertainties rather than straightforward liberation.
That overlooked perspective sits at the heart of The Others, the fourth novel by Sheena Kalayil, a UK-based writer and senior lecturer at the University of Manchester. The book was longlisted for the 2026 Women’s Prize for Fiction, bringing wider attention to a story that places people from the Global South at the margins of a familiar European historical narrative.
Set in a small Baltic coastal city in East Germany in 1989, the novel follows three young people whose lives become entangled as the political system around them begins to fracture.
Lolita Devi is an Indian medical student. Armando Dos Santos is a factory worker from Mozambique, employed through an arrangement connecting his country with East Germany. Theo is an East German mechanic who dreams of becoming a writer but has faced professional consequences after refusing to cooperate with the Stasi, the state security service.
Their lives intersect after Lolita and Armando discover a drowned young man on a Baltic beach. The incident draws unwanted official attention and complicates relationships already shaped by surveillance, social prejudice and uncertain futures.
The resulting story combines personal relationships with a wider question: when history changes direction, who gets to experience the change as freedom?
The Migrants Beyond the Headlines
Kalayil’s approach challenges the tendency to remember German reunification mainly through the experiences of East and West Germans.
International workers and students also formed part of East Germany’s social landscape. The state maintained relationships with countries across the socialist world, including Mozambique, and recruited foreign workers under bilateral arrangements.
For some of these workers, reunification disrupted the arrangements that had brought them to Germany. Workers from Mozambique who returned home after the GDR collapsed became associated with the term Madgermanes. Many subsequently protested over unpaid wages and money they believed they were owed.
This history matters because migration is not always a simple journey from one country to another. People may build careers, relationships and families in a place where their legal or economic position remains dependent on political agreements. When those agreements disappear, years of personal investment may not translate into security.
Armando’s situation brings this vulnerability into the novel’s intimate world. His employment, his identity as a Black man in East Germany and his relationship with his daughter all shape what he stands to lose. His story is not interchangeable with Lolita’s: their national origins, social positions and personal circumstances create different forms of uncertainty.
Lolita, meanwhile, experiences East Germany as an international student pursuing medical training. Her presence complicates conventional accounts of Indian migration that focus predominantly on movement to Britain, North America or the Gulf. Her story points to a less familiar dimension of the Indian diaspora: educational and professional journeys shaped by the political relationships of the Cold War.
A Writer Shaped by Movement Across Borders
Kalayil’s interest in these questions is grounded in both academic work and personal experience.
Born in Zambia to parents from Kerala, she grew up across countries and cultures. She later lived and worked in several places, including Mozambique, before settling in the United Kingdom. She has described herself as a serial migrant.
One experience proved particularly important to The Others. Kalayil was an engineering student in Budapest when the Berlin Wall fell on 9 November 1989. In a contribution published in the academic journal Social History, she recalled feeling somewhat disconnected from the celebrations as an Indian international student, even while recognising the historical significance of the moment.
Years later, while living in Mozambique, she encountered demonstrations by former workers who had returned from East Germany after reunification. These experiences helped her connect the political transformation she had witnessed as a student with the longer consequences for people whose lives crossed the boundaries between Europe and Africa.
Kalayil has a doctorate in linguistics from Lancaster University and teaches at Manchester, with academic interests encompassing migration, multilingualism and intercultural communication. Her research has examined the experiences of second-generation South Asian Britons, including heritage languages and diasporic identity.
That background informs her fiction without turning it into an academic treatise. Language, culture and belonging emerge through relationships, misunderstandings and competing expectations rather than through abstract definitions.
Why the Story Matters to Overseas Indians
For readers across the Indian diaspora, The Others offers a reminder that overseas Indian experiences cannot be reduced to a single migration model.
Some people move for better employment prospects. Others pursue education, follow family members, accept government-supported placements or build lives in countries whose political systems later change. Their experiences may involve professional advancement, but also dependence on visas, employers, institutional decisions and the recognition of qualifications.
The novel’s historical setting also invites comparison with contemporary migration debates. Governments continue to reconsider immigration rules, work permits and access to public services. Political upheaval can intensify scrutiny of foreign residents, while economic transitions may leave workers vulnerable even when they have contributed to their host societies for years.
The comparison has limits: the GDR’s political system and the circumstances of reunification were specific to their time. But the underlying question remains relevant. What protections do people have when the political arrangements that made their lives possible suddenly change?
Fiction cannot substitute for legal records, historical research or evidence about present-day migration policy. Its contribution is different: it can make the human consequences of political decisions visible by placing readers inside individual lives.
Kalayil also challenges the expectation that writers of South Asian heritage should focus primarily on India or familiar immigrant settings in Britain. Her Indian character belongs to a story about East Germany, Mozambique and the wider Cold War world. That is not a departure from diaspora literature; it is an argument for understanding diaspora as genuinely global.
Beyond the Celebration of Change
The significance of The Others lies in its refusal to treat history as a single, universally shared experience. The end of an authoritarian system can open possibilities while also dismantling employment arrangements, separating families and exposing people with limited political power to new risks.
Kalayil’s novel does not suggest that the fall of the Berlin Wall should be understood only as loss. Instead, it asks readers to look beyond the iconic images of reunification and consider those whose lives did not fit neatly into the triumphant narrative.
For overseas Indians, that perspective broadens the map of migration history. Indian lives have intersected with political and economic systems far beyond the routes most commonly discussed today. Those stories deserve attention not simply because they feature an Indian character, but because they reveal how mobility, identity and belonging are shaped by forces larger than any individual.
By placing an Indian medical student alongside a Mozambican worker and an East German outsider, Kalayil makes the margins central. Her achievement is to show that the history of borders is also a history of people trying to build a life on the other side of them.
Originally published on Doonited Overseas: Read the original article
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