Manu Joseph: Gifting isn’t really the noble act it seems to be

Some cars were piled with gifts and driven by unhappy drivers who would drop them off one by one. All around me, there were gifts going some place that would make people happy—nominal gifts, useless gifts, gifts bought in bulk, lots of sugar, surely, glassware and some silver here and there. These were obligations inching along jammed streets.

Gifting is not a noble act. Or at least not as noble or simple as it appears. It is a force exerted by society to make individuals participate in herd activity. 

A collective, any collective, is always contemptuous and fearful of the free individual; in response, it promotes rituals to strengthen bonds and fellowships. All festivals torment the solitary. If nothing, at least in the form of a traffic jam.

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Inside the cars, I noticed most people were heroically patient. As if they were in the crush of a religious procession. It was as though they knew this was not commuting, but the concourse of a festival that everyone was part of. 

Only the paid drivers were miserable, apart from a few people who did not think bonding with people was worth being stuck in a jam for hours. Here and there, a driver would leave the car to go urinate in full public view.

Gifting is an ancient code. And it is as it always was, something that occurs between peers, between equals. Exactly like envy.

We primarily give gifts to people who do not need them, who have everything. And what must you give people who have everything? Humans have probably wasted much time trying to answer this. Not many have solved it, as we know from personal experience, though we are too polite to say it and people we love are too polite to tell us.

Gifting is also a caste system. People give expensive gifts to rich peers and relatives, and cheaper gifts to poorer friends and relatives. Gifts can broadly tell you what others think of your status.

Some people spend a lot of time trying to find meaningful gifts. They probably fail, but to them the real gift is the time they have spent. Of what use is such wasted time? I would not want people I love, and who love me, to waste time on my behalf trying to get me what I don’t need or what I can buy easily. 

My way of loving people is to give their time back to them. But, I know, most people do appreciate the time and effort others put into expressing their love, or their obligation, as is usually the case.

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I would not mind at all if you gave me very expensive things that I would not normally buy. But then, they would not be gifts. Gifts, by practical definition, are something you don’t need or need someone else to buy for you. Anything too expensive is actually a form of payment; a fact that is so plain, even the income tax department knows it.

Gifting to people who cannot afford the gift, in reality, is not gifting. It is alms. What is modern about this is that it is called ‘gifting.’ And what we ‘gift’ to the poor is often an instruction to them on how we expect them to live. 

We fill the lives of our friends with pretty things, and useless things that will be recycled, but when we have to gift the poor, we buy them stuff that we think they ‘need’— like food. We don’t ‘gift’ them money because we presume they will ‘waste’ it. 

People somehow cannot bear the idea of urchins using their money to go watch a movie. Somehow, that is wasteful in a way feeding them cheap burfi is not.

J.D. Vance, Donald Trump’s running mate, in his book Hillbilly Elegy talks about how his experience of poverty made him see through how ridiculous it is when the rich attempt to give gifts to the poor. 

Once, when Salvation Army gave him a list of gifts to buy for the poor, he found faults with “nearly every suggestion." He found ‘learning aids’ condescending, since they made it seem as though the only thing the poor needed was to learn and reform. 

About that most common gift—‘pyjamas,’ he says the poor don’t wear pyjamas; they go off to sleep in their jeans or whatever it was they were wearing when they felt sleepy.

As modern people, there is something amateurish about us; we are amateur humans, compared to more feral people. Charity, like compassion, is modern and we are still finding our way through this new behaviour. 

When gifting is not confused with charity, when we fully see gifting as a social conduct between equals, we are more sure of ourselves, because it is an ancient act. Every ancient thing we do is a herd activity.

Also read: Diwali 2024: The joy of giving laughter and memories

The academic anthropologist Marcel Mauss argued in his famous essay, ‘The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies,’ that gifting was an ancient practice and not an individual’s action. It was an obligation imposed by the whole clan on individuals.

Mauss has a very affectionate view of gifting partly because in its original state, it had a quality that humanities scholars love—it was not an economic activity. 

In olden times, gifts were not “… solely property and wealth, movable and immovable goods, and things economically useful. In particular, such exchanges are acts of politeness: banquets, rituals…"

Now gifting has become an economic activity. But a fundamental quality of gifting still derives from its ancient origin. It is an obligation imposed by the clan.