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

comfortable, secure and familiar habitus in the collective imagination of the people; an
unyielding bargain of locating one’s ‘home’ amidst newer uncertainties and anxieties
(Chakrabarty, 2000: 182).
This holding back of one’s self from an uncritical absorption into the global market and
its crass materialism associated with the ‘newly rich middle-class’ which is the ‘other’ of
the educated tasteful ‘cultured’ ‘self’ of the bhardrolok, is sometimes real and often
imagined. A culturally defined ‘intellectual’ critique of the bourgeois culture by the
‘abhijat’ or sophisticated middle-class can be read as a form of patriarchal
romanticization through radical left politics that has historically been pre-dominantly
male-dominated. A paradox which belies this critique is that, in a continual negotiation
with modernity, the bhadralok in their overwhelming critique of blatant bourgeois
lifestyle, most often inhabits and appropriates the very same bourgeois spaces and
desire. What is therefore continually discursively co-constructed is both the local and
the global, the self and the other, the ‘real’/ ‘authentic’ and the unreal/inauthentic, past
and present, then and now, and tradition and modernity.
The co-constitution of ‘now’ and ‘then’ forms a significant aspect of contemporary addas
where adda of the past is continually invoked to make sense of adda in the present.
Putative dichotomies of ‘past’ and ‘present’ or ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ generations are
mutually constituted just as addas of these times are, even within the same generation
across one’s lifespan, as illustrated in Ashok’s narrative. In this co-constitution,
hegemonic performances of gender and class-community culture keep being continually
constructed and reproduced.
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