Neshar Adda: An Interrogation of Spaces of Intemperance in 19th-Century Calcutta

Indulgence in drinking or any other form of intoxicants, particularly for leisure and in the public space was strictly expected to be a male activity in Bengal. Since the time of Jagai and Madhai, of medieval Vaishnava tradition, intoxicants have been the common medium for male bonding and camaraderie. In this paper though we will be restricting our focus to nineteenth century Bengal. To the ‘Young Bengals’ of nineteenth-century Calcutta, the act of drinking had a symbolic significance. The bottle of European brandy, for them, became a tool for assault against the Hindu orthodoxy. This paper, however, will draw upon contemporary memoirs to suggest how the temptation for the bottle also engendered mistrust and hardened the disparities that had existed within the male social space. Peary Churn Sircar, a contemporary and later a temperance activist alleged, that the young students were often bullied into taking up drinking. Bijoy Krishna Goswami, another contemporary wrote, “aversion to drink or refusal of an offer of drink at a social party was then held to be a sign of barbarity.” The paper will argue that such misgivings concerning drinking can be instructive in understanding how the exclusivity among the educated elites cut across class as well as the urban-rural divide. The class hierarchy also encouraged a simultaneous ordering of different categories of intoxicants. Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar during his time as a student, discovered his compatriots from rural background with less financial privilege had little access to the drinking circles and mostly found refuge in the gulir adda i.e. the opium dens. The paper will round off by interrogating the impact such exclusively male domains had on the domestic space through representations from the contemporary media.