Bangalis as a people are characterized by their limitless dreams and dreaming big. Be it politics, revolution, literature, art, philosophy, religion, or international affairs -- the subjects are without horizons, and each individual is stubbornly devoted to his or her thoughts or ideas.
A Bangali who doesn’t harbour any of these traits is not a Bangali. Irrespective of his social standing -- from a rickshaw puller to a barber to someone sitting on the highest pedestal of society -- a Bengali strongly believes he has the right solution to every woe of society.
It’s not for no reason that the revered Congress leader GK Gokhlay had famously pronounced that “what Bengal thinks today, the rest of India thinks tomorrow.” Indeed Bengal, and for that matter, Calcutta now called Kolkata, has been historically the incubator of Bangali renaissance and anti-British revolution as well as the cultural Mecca.
While the intellectuals and die-hard revolutionaries shared ideas in their designated meeting places and hideouts, the ordinary people, the unemployed, the bohemians were not lagging and had carved out their own spaces or rendezvous, such as roadside tea stalls or under a huge banyan tree to propagate their theories and argue over them, sometimes raging in fury to defend their ground.
Such gatherings of a neatly woven cluster of people, called addas, are ubiquitous not only in the confines of city cafes, libraries, and restaurants but also in the nook and corners of Bengal's villages for the ordinary people, or the school fields for the pupils, after the school hours. When I say “Bengal,” I mean the entire Bengal transcending the geographical and political border of Bangladesh and West Bengal.
Though I must hasten to add that there does exist a subtle difference in the cultural nuances between the two, below the veneer. But adda is a common social phenomenon. Bengali's penchant for adda runs in their veins. There is a saying, “adda na diley Bangalir peter bhaat hojom hoina.”
These addas are part of our cultural mooring, perhaps a way to ventilate frustration accumulated over a plethora of real or perceived economic, social, and political disappointments, and a platform to woo others to one’s points of view.
Adda, though, is not uniquely a Bengali monopolistic social characteristic. In Paris, the historical cafe Les Deux Magots (1800) and its rival Cafe de Flore (1880) used to be frequented by luminaries such as Simon Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Pablo Picasso, Bertol Brecht, Zhou Enlai, Ho Chi Minh, etc who used to spent countless hours there, perhaps for replenishment of their wisdom and ideas, or to engineer strategies for introducing new social and political reforms.
While Cafe Friend (1850), in the same old city, welcomed the working-class, allowing them a space of their own to spawn ideas to shape their destiny. The Philosopher Marc Sautet founded a cafe in Paris in 1992, called Cafe philosophique to create a grassroots forum for philosophical discussion. Cafe philosophique has since opened many branches in Europe including in London for similar purposes.
In England too, in the middle of the 17th century and early 18th and 19th century, several coffeehouses -- which were different from the tone and nature of taverns and alehouses -- popped up in several towns and cities.
Famous amongst them were the Oxford coffeehouses and especially London's historical Temple Bar, established in 1656. These coffee houses, according to a writer of the time, ”served as something more than a centre for social intercourse and gossip; and there was serious scholastic and sober discussion on all matters.” The British are also avid club goers and there goes a saying `` you want to kill the British? shut all their clubs down.”
The iconic Modhur canteen, in Dhaka University, has also firmly ingrained itself in our history as the womb of all struggles relating to our language movement, for equal status of East Pakistan as that of West Pakistan, the movement of the 60s, the liberation war, and the movement for the establishment of democracy at various times in the post-independent Bangladesh.
Recently, I came across an interesting article in the New York Times, entitled “Coffee or Chai? At 2 Kolkata Cafes, ‘Adda’ Is what’s really on the Menu,” by Mujib Mashal.
About a two-storied cafe in college street, Kolkata, Indian Coffee House has been running without a hiatus for 103 long years. It’s a fascinating story that takes you back to the simmering days of the early 20th century of Kolkata, and how this coffee shop, which used to be frequented by the standard-bearers of Bangali literature, art culture and philosophy, including the swadeshi Andolan (self-rule), such as poet Nazrul, writer Sibram Chakraborty, filmmaker Satyajit Ray, Nobel laureate Amartya Sen (in his days) et al, played a vital role in advancing the Bengali renaissance as well as the independence movement of India.
Reading through the article, I learned with considerable amazement that a Bangali professor of sociology at the Presidency University of Kolkata, Dr Nabamita Das, wrote her doctoral thesis on Adda. She commented that “Adda is something that goes unnoticed -- because it’s so integral to the identity of being a Bangali.”
Then, of course, we have the famous Manna Dey song Coffee houser shei addata, the song all of us had lipped once in a while. If I am not wrong, the venue was the same.
The story reminds me of an interesting discourse I had with an intellectual Greek lady during my visit to Athens in 2008. Our Honorary Consul (we didn't have a resident mission in Greece then) in Athens invited us to dine at an exclusive seaside restaurant. Among the local guests, there was this distinguished lady, who was seated beside me. She was the Director of the Athens Historical Museum.
As we talked about a myriad of things including the historic Greek Philosophers, at one stage I told her that akin to the Greeks, Bengalis were also fond of spending time with friends discussing a plethora of issues and ideas for hours on end, but without reaching any conclusion. Unwittingly I added, these were just a waste of time.
The lady gave me a queer look and lectured: “Ambassador, they are not a waste of time. They are constant exercises for a devout search for truth.” In a moment, she elevated the discussion to such a height of intellectuality that I was out of my depth.
I mumbled “yes, you may be right.” This four word golden observation has reverberated in my consciousness time and again, and I parroted it every time whenever there was an opportunity.
Luckily, my wife never stopped me from joining my adda.
Ashraf ud Doula is a former Secretary and served as Bangladesh Ambassador to several countries.