I wake up every morning in a world that seems like a seething inferno — wars (military and economic), terrorism (religious, political, and verbal), genocides being normalised, rampant depredations of all kinds. I check WhatsApp on my phone, and it’s bursting with app-generated ‘Good Morning’ or ‘Happy something’ messages, embellished with emojis or gifs of red roses and adorable cats. While deleting, I catch a quick glimpse of several that articulate a stylised ‘anger’ at the devastations going around, accompanied by creative re-jigs of famous literary quotes or aphorisms. As the day progresses, more curated inanities pour in, and social media begins to burst at the seams with back-and-forth exchanges on everything on earth. And, yet, I feel a disconnect, palpable and disembodied, putting me at many removes from what I had taken for granted for much of my life — an extended, ordinary, human conversation.
Maybe it’s the trailing afterglow of a habit formed by growing up in Bengal where it blends into the freewheeling chat called adda, arguably its greatest intangible cultural heritage. The practice may well incorporate arguments and focused discussion but is essentially different from them in its lack of specificity and an ability to segue seamlessly from one subject to many different others. Amartya Sen, for instance, writes about our strong tradition of logical discourse and argumentation in The Argumentative Indian but also waxes eloquent — in Home in the World: A Memoir — on the informal conversations or adda in the Indian Coffee House in the 1950s that shaped his intellect.
Historically, spaces marked for extended conversations have been central to Bengal’s rural and urban life. The chandimandap, for instance — an open-air platform adjacent to the village temple — traditionally serves as a focal point of congregation for the community, a space for discussions, arbitrations, social functions, samkirtans and so on. These are similar to the tea shops near small-town bazaars, often frequented by elderly men done with their daily shopping and pining for some adda with fellow shoppers or neighbours over a steaming ‘cuppa’. In the older parts of Calcutta, the elevated platforms called rowak (pronounced ‘rock’) — reinvented from the daoa or wraparound verandahs of village huts — historically represented a communal space linked to the neighbourhood (para) culture and its time-worn conversational pleasures in the form of adda.
Do expressions of serious differences in opinion count as conversations, especially when the conflicting opinions are consequential? The answer probably lies in the manner in which they are carried out. In Bengali addas, participants seldom agree with each other, but the consequentiality is trivial. Mahatma Gandhi spent a considerable amount of his lifetime in solitary prayers, but perhaps a far greater amount in conducting conversations, often in an epistolary form. It’s a tribute to the prototype of the ‘argumentative Indian’ that this foremost leader had fundamental differences (and debates in the style of conversations) with so many other figures — B.R. Ambedkar, Rabindranath Tagore, Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, Jawaharlal Nehru, M.A. Jinnah, and so on — on imaginations of the nation. But these were conducted with respect and reasoning, nowhere indicated more tellingly than in the exchange of letters — representing two very different visions — between Gandhi and Tagore, compiled and annotated beautifully by the late historian, Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, in a volume titled The Mahatma and the Poet: Letters and Debates Between Gandhi and Tagore, 1915-1941 (1997).
Stepping this question up, can a meaningful conversation take place between staunch adversaries? In a fractious, combustible world, we so wish it did. In reality, this rarely happens, but imaginations of such conversations do exist. In the aftermath of 9/11, a striking fictional conversation between Gandhi and Osama bin Laden — both strong critiques of the hegemony of Western civilisation — was imagined by the political theorist and Gandhi scholar, Bhikhu Parekh. It contrasted their ideologies on violence, justice, and resistance, exploring the clash between extremist violence and ethical resistance, inviting readers to reflect on the moral limits of political struggle in a world marked by terror and conflict. Their differences turned out to be irresolvable in this counterfactual case but — as surreal as it may sound — the civility with which this improbable ‘conversation’ was crafted shows us some possibilities of reclaiming a mindset laid to waste in these times.
One of my favourite books is Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500-1800 (1983) by the redoubtable British historian, Keith Thomas, growing out of a memorial lecture for another formidable social historian, G.M. Trevelyan, who taught at Cambridge from the late 1920s through the early 1950s. The book’s opening sentences intrigued me ever since I first read them: “Unlike most historians, who are a sedentary lot, George Macaulay Trevelyan was passionately devoted to the open air and the countryside. In later life he was notorious for taking unsuspecting guests on short strolls after lunch which would turn out to be thirty-mile walks.” I always wondered: while walking, what did Trevelyan and his guests talk about? Did they talk at all about India — a country that was going through the pangs of war, famine, and Partition — as they sidestepped around the primroses and bluebells of the English wilderness? To take another example, Albert Einstein and Kurt Gödel were known to engage in daily walks and conversations on their way to and from the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, now famously recreated in the film, Oppenheimer. Did they talk about anything other than relativity and the incompleteness theorems? Music? God? The Bomb? Love?
These are questions that crowd my mind even as my familiar world of extended conversations keeps shrinking to an ever-diminishing shadow of itself. Amid the swirl of tweets, status updates, GIF wars, and instant replies with nothing but emojis, I keep sinking into an amnesia of sorts where conversations are just a memory-fragment. I realise that though I am tethered to many others through screens and signals, this is a slowly forming envelope of disembodied loneliness that’s difficult to get out of — the premonition of a silence whose spectre overshadows all the digital noise.
Online and offline fora offering advice on the need to maintain social interaction are legion. But where to find reasonably acceptable, knowledgeable conversation that can be carried out on broadly the same wavelength? Can Artificial Intelligence be this solution? We have brief conversations with our Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant all the time, asking them to dig up random information from the internet. Can chatbots go one step further and alleviate our creeping feelings of loneliness by offering us consistent companionship? With the ‘enrichment’ of AI with more anthropomorphic features — attribution of human-like traits, emotions and intentions —conversational styles reminiscent of human personality traits are already possible. So, as it turns out, the answer is yes.
So, do we need to brace ourselves for our world of the chandimandap, roak, cha er dokan, coffee house, college canteen, majlis, pub, hookah bar and so on to be taken over completely by today’s fantastic beasts like WhatsApp, Zoom Cocktail, Slack, WeChat, Snapchat, Messenger, Telegram et al? Well, there is no use living in denial. It is up to us to dig our heels in to the real-world, physical-world terrain of human conversations. The historian, Theodore Zeldin, in his delightful little book, Conversation: How Talk Can Change Our Lives (1998), said that the kind of conversation he was interested in was “one which you start with a willingness to emerge a slightly different person. It is always an experiment, whose results are never guaranteed. It’s an adventure in which agree to cook the world together and make it taste less bitter.” On this day, the 236th anniversary of perhaps the greatest revolution of the modern times, let’s pledge ourselves to that adventure.
Jayanta Sengupta is Director, Alipore Museum; jsengupt@gmail.com