The Existential Circuits

There are instinctual theories in ordinary conversation, but we do not pay heed to it. Long back thirty years ago, while travelling from abroad waiting for my luggage at International airport, New Delhi, suddenly the baggage carousel stopped. Those days it used to be old wooden fitted planks in that circular chain. An elderly fellow, who instantly got introduced to me, while waiting for his bags was Professor Qureshi. Professor Qureshi, an elderly person from Canada had to go to Lucknow to his native place after ten years. Somebody by his side irritatingly said, “It is how our India is, irritations right from the arrival. It has been fifteen minutes the baggage carrier does not move.” Professor Qureshi with a waned look at him, casually replied, “Our sins are weightier that this carrier could hold, so it stopped”. I got curious to know what he meant by it. I politely requested him if he could say more on it. I knew Professor Qureshi was a name in Edmonton University. He looked at me beamingly and said,” young boy, we are carrying the trivial consumer items, as gifts for our people.

These items are simply sinful to society that still values the contentment and simplicity. We are culprits of our public to change their customary religiousness. The carousel has turned motionless.” The moment he finished his sentence, it started working. As if, it wanted the confession. After a few minutes, it brought our baggies and we parted. India had opened out to liberalization and privatization. The subsequent years witnessed emergence of rampant consumer culture and unquenched greed for materiality, which became the cause for our moral degradation. Besides many other factors, he role of non-resident Indians in raising material thirst cannot be undermined.

The Second Wave Immigration of South Asians to America in 1960s was in huge numbers. It started questioning the assimilation thesis. While acquiring new language, new political loyalties, they remained conscious of their politico-religious identities. The abrupt increase in their class status in the new country, the classic assimilation theory perhaps could no longer hold ground. The implications of the social, intellectual and political movements in 1960s all over the Europe and United states of America gave new thinking to the immigrants of this decade. While they were struggling to understand who they were, whether to carry on the traditions of their native countries in their private realms or to get immersed in the normative order of their new country? They were after initial material success, tacitly in search of their identities.

This they tried to meet with original identities by raising image identity with gift transmissions through cash and kind. It linked them with new cult and religious movements, enforcing their role with western notion of materially. Without erasing their primordial loyalty and overlapping it with the very contradictory mode of life was a process of hybrid breaking socialization for their children. Hence, they became critical of both the traditions. While in the emigrant country, they would glorify the native traditions and when in their native places, they would criticize their own traditions and eulogize western professionalism.

Guise hybridity developed in their personality. In the subsequent years, their children were led by the global transformations. Instead of inheriting family values, they became critics of their parents, their mode of parenting and their traditions. The classical native-outsider shifts of 1960s in cultural and social distances turned into what Blau says ‘opportunity Principle’, implying to network of ethnic social capital, its making and erosion simultaneously.

The second quarter of this century saw the transfer of materiality and material power in multipolar centers, China, Russia, pockets of Europe and United States of America. Its impact through image media and informational technology, undoubtedly created individual radicalization with searching anchor in the traditions and in the nativity. Possibly, it is why there is ‘compelling historical evidence that Immigrants to America in all waves of successive immigration became increasingly more religious, not less as they settle in new country. Identity and the acquisition of identity capital became linked with religious resources rather than with its texts or messages. The religious movements with cult formations became resource agencies to overcome the failed ideological overtones. It is how money pouring from the overseas was not for civil development, but undercover for spreading the notion of religious affiliations, which would contradict the median of nation building.

However, generation after was influenced and structured by late modernity. Religion reshaped in revitalization, linked with resource and spirituality. What Habermas calls ‘post secular society’. The economic insecurity connected with high level of economic inequalities, as a global phenomenon found inroads in new anchor making. It is how the trust of primordial loyalties generated interest in multi corporations for business deals, for enhancing social global networking and shifting it to data acquisition. The immigrant willfully gets hooked in this chain, a new allure with money and entertainment. Though it has limited endurance and inherent perish in it.

Until the end of previous century the south Asian immigrants to America would have firm traditional roots in their own countries; their separation from family, language and community would take them to the reinvention of that tradition, privately. The religious participation and renewed love for rituals would give them notional meaning and stability. Since American pluralism would encourage individual choices, religious meetings in private homes became potential sources for socializing in each other’s homes, singing, praying and taking on political affiliations in gradual mode of new orientations.

The toss between the universally unable language, social relations beyond ethnic limits and the human capital enquired in modern competitive system and new religious connections through global movements have made an emigrant a person of lost hybridity. No wonder, when in 2018, I met a young person at Indira Gandhi International Airport, unlike 1990s, it has become all modern. There was hardly any time to talk, still waiting for our baggage, he was brooding over his working in U.S. In in my own way, I asked him what keeps him to be in America, if he wanted to be back. His reply was different than I expected. I thought that he would say that It was American professionalism and easy day to day life. He did not say so, but grimly answered, “our defects and smoky lives need cover that would only be provided and shielded in the foreign lands, where we have settled in”. It is how individual radicalization, breaking of traditional order, split in consciousness and morality and compression of time and space have made us all floating leaves. The immigrants or locals remain wanderers, affected by multi-sectional factors to manipulate their day to day lives in the multiple identities.

The recent armed hostilities across the globe, Russia versus Ukraine, Israel and Iran, and India against Pakistan have shown the shift of modern warfare from traditional army expansionism, valor ad slogan raising to online war room cyber digital settings with effective machinery and minimum noise and human force. The old discourse of religious narratives has shifted to multilevel event history data analysis across so many settings of economics, resource and technical basis. Who cares for populace and their religious professing! Devoid of institutional bindings, the new individual is radically interested in his or her quality of life; what they perceive individually. It is mainly materiality and quality of life.

With little sacrifice and diminutive tolerance for institutional encroachment, including religion and their family attachments, they live as individuals chained by market and accessibility to resource. AI will further dehumanize them. We have to accept it, as a calamity for our future generations, unless prepared with moral intrinsic requirements. It is to be negotiated with the process of socialization of our children at school age with a notion of spirituality essential in seeking to materiality of affluence, so that they build definable boundaries for themselves with full awareness of their capacities and understand the limits of their empowerment.

Prof. Ashok Kaul Retired Emeritus Professor in Sociology at Banaras Hindu University