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

The topics discussed may have also reflected the separation of social domains (cited in
Chakrabarty, 2000: 207).
A striking gendered pattern is noticeable in subjects’ narrations across all three
generations of women’s spaces of adda. ‘Amader nijeder adda’ or our own adda,
narrativized by a fifty-two year-old woman, Mita, within the context of a core group of
three women, Mita, Mala and Dola, is pertinent in this context of separate space and
separate domain of female adda. When asked about how they see their space of adda
and what it means to them, Dola on behalf of her other two friends unambiguously
narrativizes – “Mitar barir nicher tolaye amader teen bandhobir moner kichhu shukh
dukhher golpo” translated as stories from the hearts of us three female friends of some
happiness and sorrows on the ground floor of Mita’s house.
This narrative of adda as ‘our own’, as stories of ‘us three female friends’ is
sociologically significant in terms of its implication of a relatively separate identity and
space that is of a gendered nature. This separateness invokes a sense of a gendered
privacy and exclusivity against its middle-class feminine other, ‘they’. The gendered
character is heightened by a cultural construction and narrative association of the
feminine with emotion, the feminine with the private and the private with emotion. The
intimate tales of ‘some happiness and sorrows’ is therefore narrated as ‘moner golpo’ or
stories from the heart in which ‘our’ intimacy is constructed as emotional, internal and of
the private.
This narration of private space has two inter-related but contradictory connotations. In
the first sense, it can be understood as Mita’s house; private as the domestic, the
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