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Authors: Nabamita Das
Keywords: friendship, fraternity, nostalgia, nation
Abstract: Through the cultural discourse of adda, where adda is a distinct Bengali speech genre and refers to friends getting together for long, informal conversations; this paper will illustrate how the urban Bengali middle-class, the bhadrasamaj, in India, struggles to be at home in modernity through performances of intimate friendships. These friendships often map onto spaces and narratives of the familial, the familiar and the fraternal. Despite adda’s historically gender, class and caste bias, much of the narratives of adda are also narratives of the mourning of adda that perceives adda as always already dying. This perceived loss of adda that is at the heart of such narratives is both a resistance to modernity as well as its product. Adda is narrated as a presence only in its non-presence. A cross-generational nostalgia about adda constructed against the ever-increasing pressures of urbanisation and industrialisation creates a collective community of mourning that can be read from Derrida’s lens, as the only mode of its survival. Is adda present only in its absence, then? How can we, in this light, philosophise friendship that is integral to this everyday adda? The paper will elaborate on this with reference to the statement attributed to Aristotle, ‘O my friends there is no friend’. Through the Bengali bhadrasamaj’s discourse of naturalising adda, the paper will focus on two dimensions of friendship in adda. It will focus on how adda particularly in its public form, is highly male in character, strengthens male homosociality and its claim to an intellectual cultural capital of an eternally lost Bengal. Taking from Derrida’s politics of friendship, it will then show how the modern republican democracy which is based on the principles of equality, liberty and fraternity, also informs much of the discourses of the Bengali home and nation, both real and imagined.