Between Kin and Friends: Historicising the Bengali Dādā

The paper focuses on everyday male friendships by studying the figure of the elder brother in twentieth century Bengali society. It argues that Dādā or the elder brother is indexical of a conglomeration of social relations that has transcended exclusive kinship associations over the course of the last century. The sheer ubiquitousness of the figure in Bengali public domain provides it with such vital energy that it mediates a host of interactions across class, caste, and gender identities - containing within them distinctive aesthetics of male bonding. What are the implications of such an invocation on male-male friendships and what are the types male identities that it helps create? Why does Dādā become the go-to figure to negotiate between Bengali men, often irrespective of age and familiality? And most importantly, what are the sense perceptions that are activated by referring to someone as Dādā or by attaching the suffix dā after a proper noun?

The paper reads a plethora of biographies and memoirs that were written on the young anticolonial revolutionaries to understand three aspects of popular aesthetics around Dādā. First, it explores the aesthetics of relatedness around a host of teacher-cum-leaders of the emerging ‘terrorist’ organisations, where Dādā is liminally perceived both as kin and a friend. Second, the paper unpacks the popular perceptions on masculinity that Dādā constitutes. Finally, the metanarrative of the very sources of the paper becomes instructive to understand the sensuous incitements that were consciously constructed by aestheticizing the elder brother in the memoirs as the nation’s icon. Such an approach aids us in reconsidering the anxieties around projections of effeminacy on Bengali male bodies and consequent claims of ‘political manhood’ during this time. The elder brother, therefore, lets us destabilise notions of private and public spheres of colonial Bengali society.