[Reader-list] Bengalis and their Adda

[Amit Basu]

Dear Roger,
Thanks for your interest. As a Bengali, 'adda' has a special connotation with its usage in our culture. The word 'chatting' has been used by many (Bengali)translators perhaps to represent an informal dia/multilogue in a small group. A simple click on the google 'pages from India' churned out 1,430 sites for adda! Why don't you take a try? 
Cheers!
amit

roger das <rgdj12 at yahoo.com> wrote:
Dear mr. Amit,
 I failed to undertsand why bengalis called a chatting session 'adda'....if u can pls elaborate on this.
 
thanks 
roger

Amit Basu <amitrbasu50 at yahoo.co.in> wrote:

apologies for cross posting, if any.

amit

May 15, 2005

The New York Times

The Chattering Masses

By PETER TRACHTENBERG 

       

ome facts you had better get used to: you will never get to eavesdrop on Sartre 

and Genet at the Cafe de Flore, or watch Irving Howe and Philip Rahv getting 

worked up about Roth and Mailer at the Tip Toe Inn on the Upper West Side. And 

if you wander into Le Figaro Cafe you won't find Kerouac and Ginsberg hollering 

at each other in holy ecstasy -- just some N.Y.U. kids talking about 

relationships. 

But the tradition of freestyle intellectual conversation lives on in Calcutta. 

The city (officially renamed Kolkata in 2001) has an oral culture as lively and 

cerebral as that of 1950's New York or Paris. Bengalis love to talk, especially 

about exalted topics (the notion that some topics are exalted still holds 

currency there, even among postmodernists). 

And they have enshrined that love in adda, a kind of eclectic and often fiercely 

erudite conversation that originated among the upper classes but became 

democratized, thanks to universities, bookstores and coffeehouses. ''If you ask 

a Bengali what he is fond of,'' Suman Chattopadhyay, a producer at Star Anand TV 

News, told me, ''he will say rasgulla, which is a sweetmeat, Tagore's songs and 

adda.'' 

The word adda (pronounced AHD-da) is ''a place'' for ''careless talk with boon 

companions,'' as the scholar Sunitikumar Chattopadhyay 

puts it, and sometimes as ''the chat of intimate friends.'' Another scholar, 

Vipesh Chakrabarty, writes, ''Roughly speaking, it is the practice of friends 

getting together for long, informal and unrigorous conversations.'' 

Of course, all these terms are subject to debate. Take ''long.'' The journalist 

Subir Bhaumik reports that some older members of his swimming club start their 

adda at 6 in the morning and are still at it when the place closes for lunch. An 

adda at the last Calcutta Book Fair is said to have gone on for five days. 

As far as informality goes, the addas at the tony Center of International Modern 

Art (CIMA) are invitation-only and dedicated to specific topics. And can a 

conversation whose participants score points by reciting poetry really be called 

unrigorous? Bengalis assure me that addas may also include talk about job and 

family, but I suspect this is like a serious eater taking a little sherbet to 

clear his palate between the braised sea bass and the truffled sweetbreads. 

(An adda, incidentally, nearly always involves the eating of fried savories like 

samosas and bhaji, or the rococo sweets that Bengalis call mishti.) 

Tell a Calcuttan you went to his or her city looking for good talk, and there is 

a moment of incomprehension, followed by relief. The fear is that you will bring 

up Mother Teresa, who did a lot for the poor, according to the consensus, but 

dealt a body blow to the city's reputation, engendering an entire industry of 

squalor -- and uplift-tourism. Of course, there is squalor here, and poverty to 

gnash your teeth over. But the city also has legions of purposeful, well-dressed 

office workers; street chefs frying bhaji on propane stoves; vendors of saris, 

tube socks, counterfeit Nike bags and fresh papayas; and august old men in 

shalwar kameez that give them the sleek silhouette of an automobile hood 

ornament. Calcuttans might not want to talk about their presumptive saint, but 

when I asked them about adda, they wouldn't shut up. 

''Adda is something typically Bengali,'' said the tiny, patrician Dr. Krishna 

Bose, a retired English literature professor at the University of Calcutta and a 

former member of Parliament. She is related by marriage to the Bengali 

independence leader Subhas Chandra Bose, which gives her pronouncements on the 

national character a definitive quality. ''It is something very spontaneous. The 

club life that the British have, that is not adda. It cannot be 50 people 

together. That becomes a meeting. So it should be three persons minimum, because 

if you have two that also is not an adda.'' 

Amithabha Bhattasali, a BBC reporter, believes that two people can have a 

perfectly decent adda, while the sisters Rakhi Sarkar and Pratiti Basu Sarkar, 

who run the events at CIMA, say that their addas typically draw 20 or 30 people. 

Most cognoscenti would say that the CIMA events don't qualify as true adda, 

since there is a program of topics. ''The thing about an adda is that it moves 

fluidly,'' Bhaumik insisted. ''You could be discussing Charles and Camilla's 

marriage this moment, and the next moment you're swinging over to the latest 

cricket series between India and Pakistan, and then swing back to the recent 

controversy over Tagore.'' 

During my stay in Calcutta, I began to feel that I was taking part in a 

never-ending adda about adda. The participants were scattered throughout the 

city, and I scurried back and forth among them, relaying an opinion and having 

it accepted or elaborated upon or shot down. Of course, everyone had an idea of 

what constituted a real adda. Was it peasants chatting at sundown by the Kali 

temple; the pensioners gabbing at Bhaumik's club; the tailors and goldsmiths 

opining by the tea stalls on Ganguly Road; the literary heavyweights who meet 

every Wednesday to discuss the arts? 

The one thing everyone agreed on was that the best addas were the ones held at 

coffeehouses, near Presidency College, at the University of Calcutta, the city's 

(and maybe India's) most revered academic institution. Bose had partaken of them 

as a student in the 50's (she recalled a professor whose seminars on Milton had 

lasted so long as to necessitate two addas). The other thing people agreed on 

was that those addas were a thing of the past. College students today were too 

obsessed with their grades. 

So when I went to the student coffeehouse, it was with low expectations. Nearby 

College Street is an uninterrupted corridor of used-book stalls; on this Friday 

evening all of them were thronged. The crowds and the lurid glow of the 

bookshops' lamps gave the street the feel of a carnival midway. The coffeehouse 

was on a side street. As I climbed a dank stone staircase, I heard a hum that 

might have been a generator, but when I rounded the corner it became apparent it 

was the sound of people talking. There seemed to be hundreds of them. I couldn't 

be sure because the room was so dark. In the tobacco-colored gloom, people sat 

at tiny tables built for one or two, but some had six people squeezed around 

them, gesticulating through a haze of cigarette smoke. (Seeing so many smokers 

at large was itself exhilarating.) 

I zeroed in on a rangy, bespectacled man in his 30's who seemed to be discussing 

something heavy with two older companions and introduced myself. ''So let me ask 

you, are you having an adda?'' 

''Adda? Yes, this is an adda.'' 

''And what are you talking about?'' 

''We are writers,'' the ringleader announced grandly. His name was Sarosij Basu. 

''I am a very simple and very marginal writer. I publish a magazine, a little 

magazine. We only publish local writers, in Bengali.'' 

He showed me a copy that was bound with staples. Another writer, Dilip Ghosh, 

translated Dostoyevsky from English into Bengali. Basu had published an issue of 

his translations and critical articles. All 400 copies had sold out. Everybody 

at the table loved Dostoyevsky. Also Joyce Carol Oates and the Italian scholar 

Roberto Calasso, whom they saluted as their guru. 

Our conversation went on for two hours and moved from Dostoyevsky to the 

blockade of Leningrad to Cioran to Calasso to Indian mythology to the 

demographics of Calcutta to the vagaries of the United States publishing 

industry. I suppose that made it a true adda. When I finally tugged myself away, 

I was tired and hoarse, but my brain seemed to be crisscrossed by new neural 

pathways, all of them roaring with conceptual traffic. On the basis of this 

experience, I would say that the coffeehouse adda is still thriving and that 

this is a good thing. But I should add the caveat of another man who joined our 

group and bemoaned the undisciplined spirits who spend their entire lives 

engrossed in adda: they ruin their kidneys with endless cups of coffee and their 

lungs with cigarettes, and their lives recede from them like mirages while they 

go on ceaselessly adda-fying. 

''So you think adda is an addiction?'' I asked him. 

''Adda,'' he answered, ''is a profession.'' 

 

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