This article seeks to explore the cultural dynamics of differentially textured spaces of modern cafés and roadside tea-stalls in a microcosm of Kolkata’s teeming urban landscape. Beverage consumers shuttling between sites as different as cafés steeped in consumerist appeal and roadside tea-stalls imbued with plebeian charm aggravate class tensions around the shaping of tastes. Ethnographically accounting for the montage of performances in beverage destinations, supplemented by in-depth interviews of café and tea-stall customers, findings indicate that class reproductions entailed in acquiring ‘class-as-achieved’ involve obsessions with hierarchy and distinction while those entailed in retaining ‘class-as-inherited’ reveal concerns of combating the crisis of downclassing. The struggles among different fractions of the middle classes to rationalise the validity of tastes in a hierarchised field of beverage-hoods are many. However, the agentic manipulations of consumers in subscribing and unsubscribing to different beverage practices determined largely by the rhetoric of speculative esteem suggest that the drink template is complex and varied. The article concludes by noting that since neither atomisation nor massification of tastes has been achieved, it is the relationality of hierarchised beverage-hoods, which shapes the textured spaces of this urban locality.

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Early 20th-century Bengal witnessed the budding of a constituency of spiritually inclined psychic healers who provided miraculous treatment to ailing patients through practices widely referred to as sammohan. Practicing healers seemed to recklessly borrow from Western healing therapies of mesmerism and hypnotism, on the one hand, and simultaneously appear, on the other, to vigorously harp, albeit covertly on the mystical kernel of indigenous occult tantric knowledge. This, I argue, had the marks of an unsure modernity, which produced its own enchantment ironically in the public discourse by retaining the mystical essence of occultism under the shell of popular healing. This article explores whether practices of sammohan placed between the medically sober and the erotically intoxicated provide a way to unravel the complexities of the “Bengali modern.” It also investigates whether the occult turn of psychic healing constituted an enormous, complex, and internally complicated phenomenon yet posited simultaneously a coherent response to the dilemmas of modernity.

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