There is a kind of gathering that happens in Bengali households and Calcutta coffee houses that English has no word for. The closest approximations are all wrong. "Conversation" is too purposeful. "Chatting" is too trivial. "Hanging out" is too aimless. "Salon" suggests a host and a program, neither of which is required. The word Bengali uses is adda, and I want to spend a few minutes defending the decision to not translate it.
An adda begins without ceremony. Someone drops in. Someone else was already there. Tea is produced, or not. An opinion is expressed. A joke is made. The opinion is disputed, the joke is improved upon, a third person arrives and re-sets the topic entirely. No one is trying to accomplish anything. No one is trying to be clever, though cleverness happens constantly. The addressable outcome of an adda is that, several hours later, everyone leaves having thought slightly differently about something they did not know they were going to think about when they came in.
This is not a trivial output. I would argue, gently, that it is one of the most under-rated modes of intellectual production in the world, and that a fair amount of Bengali cultural achievement over the last hundred and fifty years is directly downstream of it.
Why English cannot hold the word
English is a language of explicit purposes. Its verbs for social interaction almost all imply an outcome. Meeting implies an agenda. Catching up implies information to be exchanged. Networking, god help us, implies a transaction. Even conversation implies a topic.
Adda implies none of these. It is, in its pure form, a commitment to the company of particular minds for an indefinite period, without a defined subject and without a time limit. The only thing being optimized for is the quality of the minds present and the freedom of the time. That is the whole form.
English cannot name this because English, over the last three hundred years, stopped valuing it. The Protestant work ethic, the industrial revolution, the scheduling logic of modern capitalism — all of these worked against the long, aimless gathering as a socially respectable use of time. The word disappeared because the thing disappeared.
What gets done in an adda
An enormous amount, and almost none of it is announced. I have watched friendships form in addas. I have watched poems get their first draft. I have watched people change their minds about marriages, careers, political parties, and gods, all inside the same room over the same evening, without anyone raising their voice. The absence of a formal agenda does not mean absence of movement. It means the movement is not being announced.
This is why it is hard to describe an adda to someone who has not been in one. The surface activity looks trivial. Tea, banter, a cigarette or two, an argument about a film, a long digression about someone's uncle. Beneath the surface, the intellectual plates are shifting. Whoever leaves the room at the end has been changed by it, in ways that would be hard to describe at the door.
Why I write it untranslated
If I write salon, I have lied to you. If I write gathering, I have told you almost nothing. If I write adda and decline to translate, I have done two things. I have been accurate about what I mean. And I have asked you to do the small work of accepting that another language contains a category yours does not.
The second thing is, I think, the more important thing. There are concepts English refuses to carry. Naming them in the language that carries them, in the middle of an English sentence, is a small act of linguistic honesty. It admits that the thought I am describing lives somewhere else. It invites you to visit.
I am not precious about this. If you meet me and we talk for three hours about nothing and everything, I will not lecture you about what we are doing. But in my head, quietly, I will call it what it is. And every so often, when someone asks me what I think is the best thing about being Bengali, this is what I will try to say. Not adda itself, which would be easy. The fact that we never translated the word, which is harder to explain and, I think, more accurate.