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

What problematizes these spaces and negotiations is never being able to surely locate
the ‘real’ or the ‘authentic’ in the claimed Bengali authenticity of adda. It indicates
continuous grappling with the new but logically not being able to strictly locate the
newness about it; for, if the authentic ‘self’ is unstable, so is its ‘other’. For instance,
when I asked my subjects if they could tell me about what they meant by ‘our adda is
different’ or if they would locate their ‘actual or real adda’, most subjects paused to think
about an oft-claimed authenticity of Bengali adda. Subjects could hardly confirm what
‘real adda’ was and only variously located it in multiple aspects of the Bengali culture
such as food, music, politics, literature and its lazy spirit.
Anthropologically it is significant to note that even amidst shifting embodiments and
imaginations, there is a high value placed on the ‘real’ self, the collective desire and
effort to locate it by whatever means available (Morgan, 2011: 17). This involves
conditions of collective reading, criticisms and pleasures which Appadurai terms, a
“community of sentiment”, a group that imagines and feels things together although in
its heterogeneity (1996: 8). However elusive the ‘authentic’ might be, or however
unstable its hegemonic nature might be; the collective imagination of the Bengalis in
seeking to locate the ‘authentic’, as evident in the cultural discourse of adda, cannot be
under-emphasized. This is because with every attempt to define the ‘authentic’; the
‘real’, ‘original’ and ‘true’ nature of Bengali adda, Bengali society and Bengali identity is
continually discursively constructed and re-imagined.
These spaces of adda in a globalized Bengal are best understood as habitus of global
subjects struggling to grapple with a sense of Bengaliness in motion, which is, however,
predominantly still male and middleclass. A sense of intimate belongingness is, to an
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