Building Identities: Immigration and Integration Experiences in Berlin and New Delhi

Commonly denoting the complex interplay of different cultures in hope of attaining constructive integration, Transculturalism, for a social scientist, is a social phenomenon that extends through the paradigms of culture and it’s varied interpretations across disciplines, and thus, can be a potential solution to problems that arise relating to one’s identity. With the advent of everyday disappearing borders, movement of people for varied reasons has become easier and more frequent, while the “old” immigrants are still looking to escape the “other” and be a part of the larger “we”. With the paucity of relevant information, it is difficult to gauge into the magnitude of problems that arise relating to immigration and the following integration process. In India, particularly, immigration into the country has remained a topic of ignorance. Thus, the concerned research paper essentially discusses the two case studies done in New Delhi, India, and Berlin, Germany. Immigrants from two categories, “old” and “new” were interviewed to figure out what are the prime socio-cultural challenges that they face in order to identify themselves with the larger identity, and not remain in the periphery of being the “other”. The reason for picking old immigrants, like Turkish people in Berlin, and Bangladeshi people in New Delhi, was to address that what keeps their identities contested despite of having existed in a society for generations. And on the contrary, the reason for choosing relatively new generation immigrants, like Africans in both Berlin and New Delhi, was to further try to comprehend that if despite having existed in a society for generations, old immigrants don’t yet feel a part of the larger national identity, in that scenario who do these new immigrants find themselves placed? Immigration is only increasing with time, and in that case, if the issues of identity and integration remain largely ignored, then the host nations will find themselves standing a conflicting stage. This also leads to fragmentation of a society at various levels, creating multiple internal boundaries. The paper also makes a conscious effort to sediment the understanding of transculturalism in the social practices and talk of it as a potential panacea to some of the crucial problems like integration, while identifying the identity crisis that the immigrants experience. It investigates the plurality of Berlin and New Delhi, and studies the patterns of immigration and the issues faced both by the host country and the arriving communities. The research scrutinizes the aforementioned cities because, at this point, both Berlin and New Delhi are ethnically very diverse metro-cities, and yet lack the will to include immigrants for better integration. Studying these cities is a part of the larger PhD project that aims to analyse the immigration and integration policies of Germany and India, for better assimilation. Encompassing the broad themes of identity, internal boundaries and transcultural exchanges, the paper proves to be pertinent to the panel, “Who are ‘We’? Drawing Identity Boundaries and their Consequences”.