ABSTRACT
The Tea and Coffee House, as noted above, were not the only places facilitating literary discussions, or adda for that matter. Just like the private gatherings at a writer’s place, offices of publishing agencies too were meeting places that brought writers and publishers under the same roof. Even now, in public imagination, the Indian Coffee House is most often associated with the presence of stalwarts from the academia, film, literature and theatre, making them ‘sites of cultural pilgrimage’. Chapter Two examined both the nature of the adda and the space of the ICH that facilitated it. This chapter will explore the integrative nature of the adda at the Coffee and Tea House and its connection especially with literary practices influencing production in that field. I argue here that although adda without a telos as such is a prime medium for multiple free communications, telos can be injected into it and the ensuing adda can lead to diverse consequences beyond it, leaking into the professional and the social. When a few students in the Coffee House discussed a recently published novella like Bibar (Hell, 1965) that created a despondency and uproar for its content and the use of the obscene language, the adda covered inter alia social taboos and literary styles which might influence their viewpoint and their own style of writing, if they were to take up that profession later.1 In a recent work Ulrike Stark
has underlined the dual nature of the Indian publishing houses as a modern capitalist enterprise and an important site of scholarly pursuits ‘turning them into vibrant meeting places for intellectuals and writers’.2 Through a combination of entrepreneurial and intellectual engagement publishers like Fardunji Sorabji Marzban in Bombay, Munshi Harsukh Rai in Lahore, Maulvi Abdul Rahman Khan in Kanpur and Mustafa Khan and Munshi Naval Kishore in Lucknow contributed to ‘Indian modernity through the diffusion of education and knowledge’ in the nineteenth century.3 Publishing houses, as we shall see here, played a crucial role in bringing those connected with the literary and scholarly world. The regular adda at a publishing house would still be limited to a number of intellectuals especially in view of the physical space available for the practice of leisure.
