A Tale of Two Communities

Abstract

Sometimes it is a sense of bewilderment like the character in Jhumpa Lahiri’s (2000) short story or a sense of restlessness vividly captured by Salman Rushdie’s novels that characterize the minds of an immigrant. However, is this reflexive self-assessment an attribute of all the migrants? Should we revive the moribund — if not fully defunct — concept of class and assert that most often it is a sense of ambivalence with which the middle class migrant self copes with his realities. He is, sometimes, a fugitive away fiom home, he is a permanent stranger in his new setting as he becomes one in his own country. He feels nostalgic about the country of his origin, but he misses the convenience of his ‘new home’ while he is returned to his home on a yearly sojourn, a ‘secular pilgrimage,’ to borrow Aguilar’s phrase. Contra Aguilar, I think the notion of pilgrimage better captures the yearnings of the middle class professional migrants who not only like to return to their homeland and sacrifice their temporary conveniences of the comfortable overseas living, they also teach their children the value of culture, a religious indoctrination¹. His life becomes contingent, a perfect icon of modernity.

I am not the only man to seek his fortune far from home, and certainly I am not the first. Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination — Jhumpa Lahiri (‘The Third and Final Continent’ in Interpreter of Maladies, 2000: 198) ... by modernity I mean the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent. - Baudelaire (The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, 1964: 13)