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

consumerist culture and the newly rich middle-class”. It is significant in this context to
note how Ronjon reinterprets the capitalist hegemonic ideas of ‘rich and productive’. He
disassociates the concepts necessarily with economic capital and understands these
through the lens of cultural and symbolic capital (Bourdieu, 1984). By characterizing the
‘distinction’ of Bengali bhadrasmaj through symbolic and cultural capital, he assigns
superiority to these forms of capital and to the society which embodies these. His
narrative can be read as a desire for an ‘alternative modernity’ (Chakrabarty, 2002) that
critiques or at least attempts to critique, a globalized capitalistic modernity. Such critique
is evident in his romantic invocation of ‘roadside tea, cheap cigarettes, and the
communist left inclined Bengali intellectual.’ ‘Intellectual productivity’ is held as the basis
for leisurely adda that is not a ‘waste of time’.
Ronjon’s narrative reconceptualizes a modern ‘politics of time’ that associates progress
with capitalism, capitalism with work and work with economic productivity. It upholds a
version of localized modernity that destabilizes a monolithic hegemonic modernity (Hall,
1991). However, although Ronjon subverts and interrogates hegemonic notions of
modernity, progress and power through a critique of consumeristic capitalism; he
nevertheless, confirms and reinforces another hegemonic notion of culture and
progress. This hegemony lies in upholding a male, intellectual middle-class nature of
adda through which the Bengali cultural community is seen to be constructed. Such
character of adda is upheld by many others across generations as the “real” form of
adda that acquires meaning precisely through its intertwined gendered, classed and
communal character. This Bengali male cultural chauvinism, within everyday mundane
practice of adda, illustrates the everyday inter-subjective interactionist processes of
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