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

and a form of gendered, class relationality through which the bhadralok and
bhadrasamaj are valorized.
By narrativizing the thek as the ‘second home’, the idea of home is linked with the
intimate - adda, male friendship, secured belongingness and a sense of unchanging
fixed place. The invocation of thek or addakhana in the cross-generational narratives of
adda, brings out the cultural significance of family and home. It also blurs the strict
demarcation between the private and the public, through which adda, even in its public
form is domesticized or made homely. Narratives of adda therefore confirm ‘the idea of
home’ which provides a sense of security and control over one’s life in contrast to the
market and state controlled lives in modern societies (Morgan, 2011: 13) or in the words
of Ronjon, in contrast to ‘neo-liberal politics and consumerist culture’. Ashok’s
description of his para club as “home-like” or “as part of growing up”, Shantanu’s
familiar comfort with coffee house, Ronjon’s romaticization of parar adda and Ronojoy’s
thek as his “second home”; narrativizes the sociological significance of family, the idea
of home and its gendered and classed underpinnings, in constructing the idea of the
intimate through the practice of homosocial adda.
The specific semiotic registers of the thek, bhanre cha, local brand cigarettes can be
read as texts that narrate unique local and cultural deviations from an uncritical
absorption and assimilation into a hegemonic homogenous modern knowledge systems
and global consumerist consumption (Hall, 1991) and can be understood as instances
that indicate varying responses to globalization (Chakrabarty, 2002). Underlying multiple
responses to globalization, are the problematized negotiations between an everchanging
capitalist modernization characteristic of an unsettling habitus and a
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