The Bengalis Keeping Adda Alive

After walking through the weathered door of College Street’s infamous Coffee House in Calcutta, you’re likely to see groups of people huddled around square tables, drinking chai and chatting. But they would be the first to tell you: they’re not just hanging out, but partaking of a cherished Bengali tradition they call adda.

The term “adda” (pronounced “uhd-DAH”) has no exact English translation. It is to Bengal what the Socratic dialogues were to ancient Greece, what the salons were to Enlightenment Paris, or what tertulias were to the Spanish-speaking world. Yet, unlike these more formal intellectual exchanges, adda today has a distinctly egalitarian, spontaneous character with a flavor all its own. “Adda is a sort of self-declared or self-claimed discourse of Bengali social life,” Debarati Sen, a cultural anthropologist, told The Juggernaut. “It’s indexing your Bengaliness.”

Today, from Calcutta to New York, the Bengali tradition of discussion is on the verge of disappearing. Still, many are refusing to let it slip away.