( An article from New York Times - courtesy TCS Kool-Katha Team)
Some 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.''
Some 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.''
No comments:
Post a Comment