Cha (tea), Gan (Song), aar (and) Adda ('idle'/'care-less' talk): Making and Consuming Normal Food 'Identities'

The plaintive notes of this ode to ‘Bengali familiarity’ draws our attention to a trait hitherto unexamined. Any ethnography of food in Bengal is incomplete without a description of the clusters ³ of relations that tea, ⁴ as an element of the normal foodscape, and its frequent companion, adda (‘idle’ or ‘care-less’ talk) create and encapsulate. The manner in which predominantly middle-class Bengalis in urban Bengal assemble their everyday and hospitality relations through the polyphonic ⁵ practice of adda needs to be examined. Through a series of vignettes, I describe here their sensuous anxious engagement with their relational worlds, making, unmaking, and remaking them through sound, smell, touch, taste, and vision, and thereby evoking their perceptions of relatedness as Bengaliness (Bangalitto) in variegated ways. The vignettes that ensue focus on a rather technical discussion of very specific linguistic forms and practices, and hence contain many Bengali phrases and sentences. The use of Bengali not only evinces a sense of the normal soundscape of these addas, but also makes visible the particular identities indexed by specific shifts in food linguistic terms. It is to be noted that all direct speech has been bracketed in bold, and the description that unfolds as the chapter proceeds has been italicised and bracketed in bold.