narratives of three generations of urban middle-class - eTheses ...

men continually seek for communal and cultural belongingness through adda. These
subjectivities simultaneously embody a death of adda and a desire for it.
Adda and Narratives of Masculine Nostalgia:
First generation Nirmal’s narration summarizes the cultural contradiction of adda,
“Not only others but the bhadralok themselves claim that the Bengali ‘culture’ has
been doomed because of the notorious practice of lazy people wasting time
giving adda rather than working. As much as this is true that we Bengalis live on
fish and rice and are also quite lazy and work-shy, it cannot be denied that our
integral ‘culture’ of adda has seen a Rabindranath Tagore 4 who is compared to
Shakespeare but definitely greater than him! It has also seen the best of literary
and cinematic creations and the masterpieces of ‘great minds’ and ‘great men’
who were known to indulge into unending addas!”
Despite adda’s historically gender, class and caste bias, adda’s perceived gradual
disappearance from urban life of Calcutta over the past three or four decades, owing to
its weakening hold against the pressures of industrialization and the individualization of
modernity, has created cross-generational nostalgia. “It is as if with the slow death of
adda will die the identity of being a Bengali” (Chakrabarty, 2000: 181). Subjects crossgenerationally
narrated that male adda these days are constrained by pressures of work
and conjugality. Third generation Arjun, an IT engineer, echoes his other five friends,
who are all married now, and have ‘re-united’ after a long gap of their now rare gettogethers,
4 Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) is the first non-European Nobel Prize winner for Literature. He was the poet,
philosopher and writer who was globally renowned particularly for reshaping his region’s literature and music. He
is still highly regarded amongst Bengalis, particularly among the urban Bengali bhadrasamaj. He is also the
epitome of symbolic capital of the bhadrasamaj.
112