I wonder if there is a public ‘Retirement Day’ also. A few really want it, but mostly people fear it. Possibly, it is a phase before final departure, hence, people shred to talk about it. In our generation past fifties, we hardly relish the comfort of celebrating ‘Father’s Day’ ‘Mother’s Day’ or ‘Valentine Day’.
The very talking about it makes us feel uneasy. It is a recent phenomenon. It gives us a sense of increasing cynicism about human relationships; especially about reversal role of primary groups. The primary groups are in pieces coexisting with secondary influences.
Primary groups mean family, neighborhoods, kinship, schools and other known links. These were our established socializing agencies. It used to generate cultural capital that would guarantee our security and stability.
Moving out from homes, settling in new environment and struggling for career making, this invisible capital manifested through language symbolic or otherwise needed this inherited capital to face the challenges of life. Each one of us keeps this standee memory.
In Europe, the rise of capitalism in the middle of sixteenth century slowly affected these groups of mechanical solidarity and brought in the formal organization to maneuver the relationships. The primary groups could not be replaced, but its role was gradually narrowed to go through the transitory periods of formal institution making.
The transitions were systematic by patterning the social structures and formulate the systems of functionality, devoid of nature. Gradually, disintegration of families and marriage failures were patterned in the system. This shaped calendar formation, while holding to the modernity with an accolade to the Christian centrality.
Public realm and private sphere were divided. Private became too personal and public sphere overwhelming dominating, hence legitimacy to public sphere was provided by the conversion of private morality into public sphere. In Europe Pope Gregory X111 in 1982, reestablished January 1, as New Year Day.
The process of conversion of cultural capital into formal organization and public sphere in replica mode, in fact was to bring the essence of Christian value system into public realm, so that it became a part of western calendar structure. Steadily, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Valentine Day by early twentieth century became a part of national celebrations. For by 1920s, the west had lost the conversations of the primary groups.
They legitimized its symbolic presence and memory without troubling public sphere institutions through this category. These inclusions in a collective consciousness were included as result of diminishing populations, birth control and awful consequences of wars and dismantling of social, which turned to be the pathology of modernity.
The change in the values and norms had to happen with the change in material advancement. Cultural lag is emerging phenomena due to rapid development of material culture, while non material culture takes time to follow the material culture. The resistance to change generates different forms of no material culture that goes through multiple social points of intersectional ties. In our case, it has been blind following of western culture.
The processes of globalization and migration have weakened our cultural capital to the extent that even its kernel is also exhausted at our origins. In the absence of prerequisites that is needed for our spiritual cultural capital, the replica celebrations of Language Day, Mother’s Day or Father’s Day hardly invoke our historical memory.
Our memory is summation of blending of nature with tradition. It was as it is with other historical societies in the memory of crops, with change of seasons with the mode of defining surroundings that would bring in social cultural capital to make it lasting and substantial.
People, places, their sharing with nature and blending of traditions were the structures of our spiritual and social capital. Its agencies were persons who neither were Muslims nor Hindus, but representative of common mode of existence for common welfare.
They were passionate devotees of humanity. The human miseries would bleed them and they had solutions for it. We have renounced those traditions, broken spirituality through religiosity, cults and dialects of language. Hence our memories of history or immediate past are not holistic memories. Despite we visualize it alive.
These historical memories miss interconnecting glues, which we have willfully refused to reclaim in the wake external domination. We eulogies Kashmiri language, but avoid it in our child grooming. We appreciate pandit-Muslim coexistence, but dislike its blending traditions. For, we have history of estrangement since Zoon along with dominant non native culture that we thought was a savior culture. In reality, it was only to bruise us unendingly.
Our identity is our memory and that historical memory is a painful narrative of how our Kashmiri rich repertoire formation of ‘Lal Ded-Nund Reshi Ttradition’ remained a subdued tradition. The effort of centuries, even after independence, through distant mystification was to dismantle it completely. It was so rich and substantial that it could not be erased from our existence. But it spilt into pieces.
The pieces that saved our extinction, in fact was mimicry, laughing at ourselves, confession of self mortification. It was picked up in our prized literature, while the other part of classics was willfully neglected. Everyone knows ‘ladishah and Bandpether’, but who knows Pramanad, Krishenjue Razdan, Suchhkral, Samad Mir, Shams Faqir, Ahad Zargar,Vedlal Raz, Gh. Rasool Nazki , Naema sahib and scores of others, in whose poetry you find overarching of ages and images of timeless wisdom.
Our children are deprived of this poetry for it requires matured Kashmiri language to understand it. They do not know the historical necessity of ‘Ladishah’ and ‘Bandpather’, but they take its face value, which is a self ridiculing poetry of weak. They do not want to be part of it. Its empowerment without historical context is the disempowerment of the community.
Our young parents run away from it. Unless Kashmiri power and social elites come to terms with their clear-cut political agenda, language will remain in a state of suffering. For real poetry is in classical poetry, connected with Lalded Nund Reshi humanism. It cannot be comprehended in binary. It is rich in contents and form with continuity of identified tradition, but willfully neglected.
Our self degradation is eulogized, while our powerful poetry of hope and aesthetics is ignored. It has been political exigency of dominant power elite since the estrangement of ZOON. Even, after independence through distant political mystification, it has been rendered untouchable, introduced through self humiliating literary stance. The self laughter traditions have significance of escape from subjugation. It has background of sustenance to live in little traditions. It is to be seen with the context of power and domination.
Since, we have picked humiliating traditions in language and symbolism at the cost of relinquishing blending traditions, our primary groups only produce reversal negative capital. You sense interactions in primary group only conversations about relative deprivations, immediate comparisons of material exhibitionism, and blame game solaces.
This is how inferior streak of our language it’s subjectivity against nonnative rulers has come to our homes now. The other is produced in the family; a relative, a neighbor, spouse or even a member of kinship. The self is not enlightened with illumination, but degenerated with the glare of the ‘other’. Nobody wants to share good or bad things with the family members or with kinship. He or she may prefer distant unknown persons for intimate conversations. The social media has further diluted the warmth of primary groups.
The trust and dialogue from the primary groups have gone. It is measured conversations among family members, like in diplomatic postures. The abrupt material changes with globalization and migrations have created cultural lags .Its causality is moral trust replaced by strategies of deceit, foreseen as shortcut for materiality.
Thus, primary groups which were mirror of transparency have become opaque with suspicion and distrust. There is no wonder; the newspapers are full with murder by own member in the family, thefts, divorces and day to day happenings full with frauds and heart wrenching deeds. In our case, when we celebrate Mother’s Day or Father’s Day, it means we are paying requiem to the finer traditions that once we had, not before long.
Our citizenry formation needs empowerment of common person and regenerative politics to strike roots. The brilliant literature has come in history from literature of illiteracy and from the life events of common persons.
That has to be our agenda for political leadership, rather than dwelling on political disputes and listening to the distant voices. Political clarity will alone regenerate positive cultural capital that needs courage and vision. This should be our new years’ resolution.
Retired Emeritus professor in Sociology at Banaras Hindu university
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