The figure who comes to mind when I read this is Benjamin's flâneur; and, though Chakrabarty doesn't explore the correspondence between flânerie and adda, the resemblances are striking. Both adda and flânerie are activities whose worth is ambivalent in a capitalist society: they rupture the 'march of progress'. Flânerie is 'dawdling', and adda a waste of time which, at least according to one writer, Nirad C. Chaudhuri, 'virtually killed family life'. Neither flânerie nor adda is a purely physical or mental activity; both are reconfigurings of urban space. The flâneur, as Benjamin saw him, walked about the Parisian arcades of the 19th century, but as Hannah Arendt pointed out, he did so as if they were an extension of his living-room: he deliberately blurred the line dividing inside from outside. Something similar happened with adda in Calcutta in the 20th century; it either took place in drawing-rooms, in such a way as to disrupt domesticity and turn the interior into a sort of public space; or on the rawak or porches of houses in cramped lanes, neither inside the home nor in the street. For historical and social reasons, both activities are largely the preserve of the male; there are few female flâneurs and, as Chakrabarty points out, female participation in an adda is exceptional.

Benjamin's relationship to the flâneur and his subterranean affirmation of daydreaming in his meditations on flânerie lend his work an odd poignancy and ambivalence; given that Benjamin was a Marxist, the flâneur could never be wholly legitimate either outside or inside his work. Some of Chakrabarty's concerns in this book - modernity, adda and the shadow of Benjamin's flâneur - occupy a similarly ambivalent position in relationship to his provenance as a subalternist historian. The subaltern is certainly an interloper in this book (especially in a terrific essay, 'Subaltern Pasts, Minority Histories'), but the modern is an equally problematic one: they both challenge the historian, in this case the subalternist historian, with the limits and responsibilities of his discipline. It is the ambiguity of Chakrabarty's own position as both a critic and archivist of modernity that gives his study its poetic undertow and its intelligent irresponsibility.

Originally published in The London Review of Books