Chakravarty (2000). Provincializing Europe. Ch7.

Chakravarty (2000). Provincializing Europe. Ch7.
Chakravarty focuses in this chapter in a very rich and complex term in the Bengali society, Adda, something that can be translated as “chat of intimate friends”. For Ch. it is more the story of desire for –or against- the Adda in the process of modernization in Bengal. It is associated with maleness, public life, and middle-class, but yet it is also a central part of Bengali’s identity that now is disappearing. But Adda was seen by the elites as a lazy activity. But Adda’s places were also connected with spaces for the production of modern Bengali reading public. (It seems there is certain similarity with Habermas’ ideas of the coffee-houses deliberations in the Enlightenment effervescence with one difference: here is not only reason what counts, for many authors of that time and even now Addas was considered a more democratic reunion of equals –different from the Majtish- with strong sentiments of friendship and intimacy.) This grouping of mainly middle-class male was in the 20th century a center of a literary, artistic and then political sociability that was held in the rooftops and parks of Calcutta. For Chakravarty there is a tension between the Addas and the modern civil society in the Addas one could say the mean of having an intimate chat with friends was an end in itself, “the pure art of conversation” (205), whereas in the modern civil society time and space are rationalized in the search for certain goals. There are still many debates in the relation between Addas and modernity and capitalism: discipline vs. laziness, women’s confinement in domestic sphere vs participation in public sphere, separation of male and female spaces vs. shared public life for both, leisure classes vs. working classes, an openness to the world vs. responsibilities of domestic life, etc (284). Another central tension is this idea of modernity that is dissociated with a linear temporality of progress, here the conversation and the sense of grouping is first and the outcome is not important.