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

extended and elevated bench-like contour that Ronojoy and his friends have imagined
to represent the lost rawk. Since two of their friends already live there, as a group they
first meet at this common venue for a collective chat, cigarettes and tea (Ronojoy has
also heard how tea and cheap cigarettes have been indispensable elements of addas
then). Their fixed thek has today attracted and accomodated many of their other friends
from college and Ronojoy’s music band. The space today is a second home for many
and a hub of ceaseless addas on films, sports, music and women. A ritualistic
performance of their hegemonic masculinity can be noted in their claimed ‘playfull’
jharimara (casual ‘checking out’ of girls) or what Radha Prasad (2010) referred to as
jhakidorshon (implying men collectively looking at women) in the context of 1940s
Bengal.
Such performances of middle-class maleness confirm a generational cultural
transmission of the highly gendered Bulterian (1990) concept of ‘perfomativity’ of
masculinity through the ‘performance’ of adda. Semiotic registers of adda, both public
and private are often made more pleasurable with the consumption of imported vodka,
rum, whiskey, and coke. The increasing inclinations for globally branded cigarettes and
the finest of whiskeys by the elite middle-class have shown relaxations of their
communistic bourgeois critique in the name of ‘classy taste’. However, the everyday
enactment of adda at the slightest possible break from ‘office work’ still upholds the
inexpensive bhnare cha (tea served in mud pots), ‘good food’ and middle-class
affordable cigarettes. Enactment of adda through the dependence on familiar semiotic
registers therefore makes adda as a semiotic value, a generationally binding sociality
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