Cultivating ‘Beverage-hood’: The Shaping of Tastes and Identities in Textured Spaces of a South Kolkata Locality

Introduction

The locality of Golpark in South Kolkata is popular among the youth for its many beverage-destinations including roadside tea-stalls, franchise outlets of branded coffee chains and boutique cafés. Golpark as is apparent from the name is a park, a gol (round) one. In it stands a tall, jaded black statue of Swami Vivekananda with the Ramakrishna Mission Institute of Culture, which is set as a backdrop. Incidentally, the institute houses one of the Asia’s largest language schools enrolling close to a hundred thousand students in an academic year. While hardly a single soul ever sets foot on the carved and rounded edges of Golpark, life comes bustling in the adjacent roads pliant to all kinds of connectivities. The youth quotient to these link-ups is bolstered by its proximity to Rabindra Sarobar, one of the few love-haunts that the city offers.

Among the many sites of Golpark, the evidently marked ones are the somewhat shabby tea-stalls lined up in a row shaded by the blue tarpaulins that flutter the message of an informal meet. The bloated biscuits in almost opaque glass jars, the steaming smoke from giant saucepans and the din only add grime to the scene. On the road across stands ‘Just Baked’ a confectionary cum café, its translucent shop-window boasting of its thousand neon customers sipping beverages in an artificial coolness which wafts in the warmth of a café. A slight rounded left turn lands us to a place which welcomes with a caption ‘a lot can happen over coffee’, ostensibly a Café Coffee Day (CCD) outlet. On the parallel alley, next to South City College runs Bhola’s tea-stall on the footpath frequented mostly by college-goers while a Barista store stands pretty in adjoining Hindusthan Road. The quieter, leafy bylanes in and around Golpark are home to more classy boutique cafés bearing distinctive names—‘Wise Owl’, ‘Mrs Magpie’, ‘The Byeloom Store and Café’, ‘First Flush’, ‘The Whistling Kettle’ leading it to be touted as ‘the newest and coolest café para’ ¹

The evening provides beverage consumers the ideal stretch to relax, converse and socialise. Amidst the mirth that surrounds Golpark, I settle in mashi’s chai-er dokan (a roadside tea-stall run by a matronly shop-owner) on a creaky wooden bench. On the same territory, a junta of three young women, puff their way sharing a candid confession. One of them quips:

It is the end of the month … pocket’s empty … no money to splurge. In any case, mashi’s tea is good enough … what say? Come salary day next month and we will hit CCD or else bait on my fiancé to burn his pocket … wish I manage to coax him to get to CCD.

As the two women break into a hushed giggle, a bespectacled third somberly opines:

What’s the need to waste money on a stupid cup of tea? It doesn’t in any case make sense. Instead a Red Bull can energize and refresh you. That’s value for money.

Trivial as these remarks appear, they reveal and juxtapose alternatives in having a ‘good drink’. The intervention of the urban flâneur in different public spaces, her desires for myriad’s consumption practices speak of a democratisation of tastes as she shuttles between beverages, sip-destinations and nurtures the idea of an ever-contingent beverage-hood. By beverage-hood, I refer to the group of consumers in public spaces anchored to the beverage-sites (tea-stalls and/or cafés), who are thereby assigned rungs that these occupy in the social distribution of tastes. The choice of beverages determined largely by financial entitlements often re-signifies the anxiety to annex a certain class position even as it remains suspect to volatility. This article seeks to explore the cultural flux that reinstates the in-betweenness in inhabiting beverage-hoods as these get reshaped by the textured ²

The textures of place, I seek to argue, play important roles in shaping identities as beverage consumers strive to exhibit desirable cultural capital (Bourdieu 1986: 17–18) in differentiated spaces of cafés and tea-stalls. In this article, I ethnographically explore the montage of performances that characterise these spaces as they punctuate ‘within’ and ‘between’ class reproducibility. The interpretation for this study is drawn primarily from data generated from semi-structured in-depth interviews of 15 café consumers and 16 tea-stall customers stretched over a period of one and half years (2014–15). Ten of the former group of consumers were café frequenters and the other five were first-timers while eight of the 16 tea-stall customers were regulars. Among the café-goers, nine admitted that they had frequented tea-stalls at some point while seven customers at tea-stalls claimed to have visited cafés on ‘other’ occasions. All the interviews were conducted face-to-face excepting one café respondent who was interviewed over the telephone. Twelve of the interviews at cafés were carried out in the evening hours, the remaining three at around mid-noon while a set of eight respondents at tea-stalls were interviewed at morning hours and after dusk. All informants were told of the purpose of the study and of the confidentiality of their responses.

The Experiential Dynamics of Cafés and Tea-stalls

The non-alcoholic beverage-map of Kolkata displays an interesting mosaic in its wide display of available choices and preferred tastes. For instance, the first coffee house in Kolkata ‘The Indian Coffee House’ or popularly the Coffee House of College Street at boipara (the book neighbourhood) has enduringly encouraged an active public sphere attracting consumers for the pedantic precision and didactic insistence of the many conversations and the counter-cultures nurtured across its tables. Here, the kind of social intercourse engaged upon by frequenters is one that purges the criterion of status altogether. ³

The beverages served at Flurys or the Indian Coffee House do not define these places; rather the varied cultures and the pleasures of relentless addas ⁴

The paradigmatic shift in interpreting a café experience today involves a notion of urbanity which presupposes that all the consumers ‘are convinced they are playing a positive-sum game by the very act of experiencing the urban space’ (Levy 2011: 45). In a modern café ‘when two people “go out for coffee,” … they arrange their schedules and pay money to conduct an ostensibly “private,” casual interaction in a “public,” institutional venue that is “privately” owned’ (Gaudio 2003: 674). There is a conscious ploy on the part of the café-goer to individuate his presence in the spaced company of others. So, cafés are ‘ideal places for people who want to be alone but need company for it’ (Pendergrast quoted in Tucker 2000: 7). Cafés operating as ‘intervals’ amidst the general chaos of the urban order are spaces where frequenters typically choose to untie themselves from the networks of familiar places to newer spaces of sociability and conviviality that is to the ‘beyond’ of the known spaces of home and neighbourhood. In fact, commodified practices at cafés subscribe to spatialisations, where the rhythm of the modern metropolis is sought to be orchestrated in a confined Third Place—‘a comfortable, sociable gathering spot away from home and work, like an extension of the front porch’ (Schultz and Yang 1997: 5). Young café frequenters at CCD and Barista describing their café experiences said, ‘I am myself at a café’, ‘I feel free and at home at a café’ and ‘Parents can’t pry on us, so the café’s a godsend’ et cetera. So, the commercial appeal of the ‘Third Place’ concept applies to these modern cafés, where just being in a store, customers felt they were out in the world, ‘in a safe place, in a home away from home’ (Oldenburg 1989: 42), a home shorn of parental control. ⁶

In contrast, roadside tea-stalls bolster a kind of sociability where the collective consumption of the beverage matters most. This is attested by the fact that the habitat of the Kolkatan tea-stall is the street, a ‘weakly classified space’ (Sibley 1988: 412) where different people and activities mingle (Edensor 1998: 214). Sippers while consuming a plebeian drink often end up engaging in lay talk on issues like politics, governance, cricket or scandals. They are a people marked by a high degree of cultural and demographic heterogeneity. Here, familialness is open to interpretation and choreographed by differences within. One can contend that it shares characteristics of a drawing room in the streets, a quasi-primary group curiously held over by secondary relations. Even though the symbolic value of the commodity sold in these beverage-sites, namely tea is adjudged inferior, its immense popularity remains undeterred.

Interviews with regular customers in road-side tea-stalls revealed that the sentiments, feelings and emotions associated with these little territories exercise a moral influence in shaping the identity of the neighbourhood. Some elderly residents were even keen to perpetuate an idea of the local in ‘keeping up’ the Bengali-ness of their para. A regular at a Golpark tea-stall, Jagadish Sen, an elderly male remarked the following of a Tamilian dosa-shop owner, whose enterprise clumsily jutted out among the many adjacent tea-stalls:

He does business, a shrewd one, increased prices three times in four months … just imagine huh … but he doesn’t understand the pulse of the people here. Let him run the ruse for a while … I bet that if prices keep skyrocketing this manner his business will soon run dry.

It is not difficult to presume that Jagadish’s contempt stems from the dosa-shop owner’s ethnic background and following it, his unscrupulous business ethics. This derision manifests a lingering desire to preserve a distinctive ‘communal quality’ (de Neve and Donner 2006: 11) for the neighbourhood. The street, in turn, becomes a contested terrain, which contains within, potential disputes over who its rightful heir is. Spawned by an ethnocentric sensibility that entitlements should naturally proceed to locals and not just any other occupant, it mirrors how ethnic and class identities are constructed through users and uses of public spaces. It is a reminder of ‘how the vibrancy of streets is animated by a continual contest’ (Anjaria 2012: 25) outlining ways in which the street should function. This texturing of space is multiplied when cafés cohabitating in adjoining streets invite consumers to cultivate cultural attributes steeped in globality. Café-goers displayed clear preferences in choosing a café over a tea-stall for reasons like ‘I do not want to be seen in streets’, ‘street-food is unhygienic’, ‘the roadsides remain perennially littered with garbage’ et cetera. The café-goers’ spontaneous reflections convey dystopic visions of the immediate adjoining streets replete with squalors. These reflections are also coproduced by fantasies of ‘transnational urban imaginaries’ (Anjaria and McFarlane 2011: 3), which seek to abandon all that is distasteful of the lived city. So, the city is in a state of flux, as it tries to cope with entangled knots of its many lived paucities and imagined pipedreams.

The layered dynamics of the street culture posits different beverage-sites in a relational hierarchy. It institutes a palpable tension between the culture of coveted necessity in cafes versus the unadorned tradition of plenty in tea-stalls. The choice between a café and a tea-stall is never absolute but a dialectical refuge where the absolute standard of urban experience in subscribing to liquid pleasures is strung between restrained choices. The decision to be in a particular beverage-site is provisional, tenuous and contextual. In fact different situational contexts strongly influence agentic orientations in nurturing beverage-hoods. These contexts in conjunction with the varying ‘navigational capacities’ (Appadurai 2004: 69) of consumers, lead them to ‘judge which particular actions are most suitable for resolving the practical dilemmas’ (Emirbayer and Mische 1998: 1006) of the present situation.

I use the phrase ‘restrained choices’ to refer to limitations in availing alternatives that are not simply decided by economic principles but are guided by perceptual factors concerning economic principles. Some like Nita and her friends, college-goers choose to give CCD a miss. Nita ⁷

The preference for certain communal ways of being shows the capacity of people to ‘improvise on common cultural templates’ (Warde and Martens 2003: 221) to suit different occasions. In fact, Nita’s weighing relative costs showcase her desire for respectable outings at cafés, which implicitly marginalise plebeian pursuits in the process. It also signifies the restricted ability to attain consumption-defined lifestyle objectives. Of the seven tea-stall customers who claimed to have visited cafés, instances of repeat consumerism were weak, suggesting a fragile link between actual consumption and aspirational predilection. This in turn characterises coping lifestyles, as beverage consumers struggle to shape much-desired-for identities. Differences in customer perception of coffee chains outlined in a comparative study of Barista and CCD outlets by Paromita Goswami (2007) revealed that for CCD customers ambience, store merchandise, value for money, attentive employees and hangout, music, self-service, indifference to distance and friend’s perception counted while the cluster for Barista outlets were value and ambience, décor and nearness, store merchandising and status. Yet, another study conducted by the Indian Institute of Planning and Management concluded that though prices of food and beverage items at Barista and CCD are identical, the former is perceived as a more expensive brand. ⁸

Of Beverage Destinations and Middle Classes

The category of madhyabitta bhadralok or the middle class respectable folks as they are referred to in Bengal blends notions of class and status group. They are madhyabitta or ‘in the middle’ situated below the aristocracy and above the lesser folk (Sarkar 1997: 169) in terms of market situation and bhadralok ‘distinguished by their refined behaviour and cultivated tastes’ (Ganguly-Scrase and Scrase 2009: 11) conferring them status honour. Broadly, the madhyabitta bhadralok is interpreted in culturalistic terms sculpted by ‘practices and values that attach meaning to membership of a specific group and lifeworld’ (Donner 2011: 2). Even in colonial Bengal, when the middle class was laying down new criteria of social respectability, setting new aesthetic and moral standards of judgment, and suffusing it with the spirit of nationalism (Chatterjee 1993: 35–36) it did so in the ideological domain. In the postcolonial nation-state, the middle classes became more heterogeneous in terms of educational and occupational trajectories. This led to a multiplication of relational hierarchies and resulted in increasing tensions between different sections of the middle classes. For instance, according to the rules of the older middle classes or elites, there exists an organic coupling between economic and cultural capital, the possession of the latter claimed as their natural attribute. This is a rehearsed strategy to distinguish from the aspiring new middle class, who having acquired economic capital innovate novel tactics of gaining status privilege, for instance self-labelling themselves as yuppies. A café experience, the study findings show is scoffed off as a wasteful luxury by the older elites keeping in with the code of self-restraint. In contrast, the aspiring classes use the same to stage a cosmopolitan oeuvre such that they may prove their cultural competences and tastes. Again, a tea moment is used by class inheritors as a reconversion strategy to prevent downclassing or by achievers to celebrate memory and authenticity-fostering new equa-tions of identity formations. Beverage-hoods, I argue, serve as sticky palimpsests for shuffling attributions of middle-classness and attendant respectability as these get reconfigured by many agentic manipulations adopted by savourers of different drinks.

In many tea-stalls in Golpark, people belonging to different age cohorts assemble and little homology whatsoever can be associated with social origin, occupational position, educational and economic capital of customers. The morning hours spanning from seven to nine a.m. are the busiest business hours attracting ‘the breakfast crowd’. It is comprised of a collage of middle brow workers—policemen, market agents, salesmen, college-goers taking a quick ‘sip and bite’ and getting all geared up for a hard day’s work. The clamour dies down towards mid-noon only to be renewed in the evenings when tea-stalls are inundated with a mix of elderly neighbourhood folk from the locality, people from other geographies including office-goers returning home and visitors to the city.

Of the eight respondents interviewed at the tea-stalls in the morning rush-hours, there were two middle-aged policemen, three door-to-door salesmen, a market agent and two college girls. None of them were locals. Except the college-goers, the rest admitted that they had never been to cafés. They identified themselves as madhyabitta and maintained a stance of ‘indifference’ appearing rather unaffected by the new forms of urban leisure that economic liberalisation had fuelled. ‘Cafés are too expensive’, ‘I am too busy to find time to go to a café’, ‘I don’t like coffee’ and ‘I am hardly young enough to be seen in such a place’ were some of the explanations offered as to why they had never been to cafés. While the first explanation seems convincing, the other remarks are not particularly compelling. Biting on a bread toast smeared with ghugni, ⁹

Café respondents in the study who were all below 35 years of age described themselves as upper class, ‘yuppies’, possessing attitudes—‘cool’, ‘hip’ and ‘happening’. The claim to a distinctive lifestyle was evident when Seema, a hospitality manager in her late 20s said that she could not ever imagine herself in a tea-stall because ‘they were places peopled by adha-bhadras’ (half-refined). Sharing space with the latter, despicable class inferiors lacking in economic and cultural capital is vehemently rejected by the uppity in Seema. Seema labels herself rightfully as a yuppie obsessed with social exclusiveness and style. But this borrowed Western term dramatically loses much of its meaning when those who are young, urban, moneyed yet not professional use it with an élan to signify their money, status, prestige and recognition. While seven young professionals called themselves yuppies, there were two college-goers and three unpaid apprentices in their family businesses who misconstrued themselves as yuppies associating the term with ‘coolness’, ‘funkiness’ and the ‘in-thing’. The substitution of an acronym by a social attitude is symptomatic of a conflated version of yuppie-hood. The unique combination of socio-demographic characteristics ‘young, urban and professional’ no longer remains definitional for the term yuppie. If both income and property are used as key attributes in the profiling of a yuppie, the latter is rendered a loose and indistinct term. At best, it is suggestive of any financially well-endowed individual, professional or non-professional spending freely on socially symbolic high-end products and consuming them in a style, expressly effortless.

To interpret yuppie-hood as being equipped with the ‘right’ disposi-tions in cafés plausibly gave self-acclaimed yuppies a leeway to prove their higher social standing compared to their class fraternals. In the study, proximity of table selection in a quiet café lent them to suspect eavesdropping; in another instance, keeping a chair occupied with belongings in a crowded café signalled ‘a lack of etiquette’. These practices, yuppies concluded, betrayed the habitus of origin of their fellow sippers and were tell-tale signs that they were but first-timers in a café. Yuppies also contended that some fellow sippers who ‘clearly appear overdressed for a café visit’, or ‘gesticulated too very animatedly’ were ‘wannabes’ trying very hard to make their presence registered. Yuppism is then reduced to curating a museum of proper manners apparent in the symbolic struggles between class fraternals. It tends to invite a position that cultural competencies can be acquired through repetitive practice. That this is a social misrecognition is proved when cultural capital is discerned as property with restricted access wherein ‘initial endowments play a decisive role’ (Deshpande 2003: 141). In fact, this forms the basis of class envy when economically less privileged sections of the middle classes decried the flashy young who by being privileged at birth enjoy undue advantages in affording conspicuous consumption. Aseem, a 34-year-old government clerk drinking his evening tea commented that café-goers are ‘basically jobless people squandering their baper poisha (father’s wealth) … they are apparently famous and popular in social networking sites and are seen hanging out and smoking up in cafés, parks and terraces’. This opinionated remark echoes the seething tensions on the part of the less-privileged to justify their social worthiness compared to the worthless preoccupations of their class superiors. It also reflects the on-going struggles among different fractions of middle classes to rationalise the validity of cultural tastes in a hierarchised field of beverage-hoods.

Interestingly a 23-year-old Manas, sipping his evening tea at Golpark’s mashi’s chaier dokan said:

… My father used to take me to Flurys on my birthdays when I was a child to buy me a cake. I loved it. A few days back, I took my friends from Delhi University to taste the legendary rum balls and the patties. They loved it as well.

The reference to a traditional anglophile tea-room like Flurys by a sipper in a roadside tea-stall shows that the incompatibility between his class position and status disposition can be tempered by the category of class inheritance. Ostensibly, the visit to Flurys follows a cultural calendar of celebrating personal holidays, be it a birthday or a day out with friends. These visits attribute class a non-negotiable ascriptive quality such that we envision class as an inherited position. So Manas may sip tea at a tea-stall since he perceives himself as a true cosmopolitan conversant in differing cultures of beverage-hood be it ‘five generations of fine confection’ ¹⁰

Availing savvy café experiences was deemed by many a consumer in the study as a way of ensuring the successful reproduction of upward social mobility.

Sipping cappuccino in a CCD outlet Prasanta, a young IT professional in his early 20s said:

My father … umm … a head clerk had limited expectations—to basically survive, to provide for the family, bring up the children… I need more. I want to live ‘in’ style. We need more vacations, flamboyant shopping sprees, indulge in eating outs. Rewinding at a café is a nice retreat at the day’s end. It adds to our standards of living.

Prasanta belongs to the tribe of achievers who in consciously shaping new tastes represent the ‘new’ middle class, the fluid boundaries of which hold ‘the promise of entry for other social segments’ (Fernandes 2011: 71). With the democratisation of tastes, he stands on an equal platform with the likes of Manas. Apparently, Prasanta seems assertive in bidding to upclass. But his seeming hesitation in naming his father’s occupation evident in the filler words, uneasy pauses punctuating his conversation is telling of a breach. It is a marker of distancing himself from the ‘unacceptable idea that such an unchosen determination could determine the choices of someone entirely occupied in choosing what he is to be’ (Bourdieu and Passerson 1979: 38). Prasanta’s discourse on his needs is, therefore, an affirmation of choosing for himself particular consumption behaviours, which in turn, assigns him a class of his choice. He is convinced that associating with the symbolic landscape of a café is a way among many others to procure a ‘chosen lifestyle’. Yet, the nostalgia of a distant moral living often tempers a skewed preference for café experiences on the part of new middle-class aspirants. This is apparent when Soumya, a 26-year-old call centre professional based in Mumbai sipping tea in his neighbourhood teashop said that he frequents many cafés in Mumbai ‘but no tea tastes better than this shop’. The emotional excess derived from his inherited class position makes him reminiscent of memories of olden days, which peeks in-between his professed class allegiance to an upper echelon that he presently associates himself with.

The differing navigational capacities of beverage consumers in cafés and tea-stalls in an urban locality show that their nature, composition and dispositions cannot be directly ‘deduced’ from any objectivist map of class structure. A halt in a teashop by inheritors is a substitutive strategy to upkeep a ‘different’ distinction and deter downclassing, while for achievers the very visit to a café carries the double function of flaunting their pecuniary strengths and concurrent cultural competencies. The chase to reduce class distances or tactics to retain class positions indicates that they are indissoluble dimensions of a twinned reality, namely the exigencies to de-escalate downward social mobility and intensify fascinations to possess and display ‘distinction’.

Performing Class in Sip-destinations

Modern cafés are sites where class is enacted by customers displaying appropriate cultural dispositions in matters of taste. Given that ‘taste classifies and classifies the classifier’ (Bourdieu 1984: 6), it becomes important to interrogate how the cultivation of distinctive cultural tastes in the social space of a café qualifies a performer for a desired class position.

The modern café caters to the ‘me’ generation. ‘I can be myself’, ‘I spend quality time with my friends’ and ‘The beverages suit me’ are the usual responses of young people when asked why they visit a café. The ‘me’-oriented consumer, the narcissist, typically wishes the beverage he chooses to reflect his lifestyle and his taste. For instance, the promotion of flavoured coffees and teas, the equivalent of soft drinks can safely be linked to the college student who would particularly prefer them. Of course, in the West, coffee experts rue that people who drink flavoured coffees are people who never drank coffee before (World Coffee and Tea cited in Roseberry 1996: 769). In Kolkata where tea and not coffee is the preferred drink, ¹¹

A look at the menu cards of popular branded cafés also shows that the shaping of tastes asks for a ‘guaranteed level of competence and a specific level of performance’ (Lefebvre 1994: 33). What becomes apparent is that the CCD or Barista menus do presume its clientele to be equipped with specialised knowledge for instance, of exotic ingredients, foreign language and the ability to identify fusion cuisines. However, the accompanying photos of many a drink in CCD and Barista menu cards attest to the fact that these provide a preview and allow the customer to ‘visually imagine’ the drink before he orders. In this, we might make a safe guess that the photos ‘tutor’ rather than ‘recommend’ available beverage options. Illustrations have the covert intention of preparing nouveau drinkers in their new endeavours of ‘what to consume’. They are a people who need to be educated to nurture distinctive tastes evoking a middle-class membership. In a study on stratification on the menu, Wright and Ransom had argued how menus categorised in the upper class were less likely to use any illustrations, while menus categorised as upper-middle-class tended to rely on pen and ink drawings, sketches or other graphic illustrations for artistic expression (Wright and Ransom 2005: 313). Menu cards of boutique cafés located in Golpark like ‘Mrs Magpie’ ‘Byeloom Store and Café’ are designed with sketches of a peeping magpie and steaming cups, respectively, tokens of their upper-classness. In contrast, the menu card of an upmarket café like ‘Wise Owl’ describes each food item in a one-liner and displays two illustrated options in each of its pages titled ‘wise choice’. The wise choices offer a cosmopolitan spread including chicken caciatora, tetrazzini, bacon and leek soup, pizza gardenia, Panko chicken, Greek salad—food items which are marketed as exotic but are in wont of being suitably tutored to its clientele. This is ironical since customers who endeavour to distance themselves from other social groups by flaunting distinctive tastes are the very ones who need to be educated to articulate taste in the first place.

Given the knowledge base of consumers, retailers at cafés are allowed near perfect flexibility specially on international gourmet blends as exotic as the Aztec or Ethiopian coffees. While cafés manifestly produce global consumers the inclusion of fusion food shows that they are also attentive to local cultures. For instance, the entry ‘Paneer Tikka Sandwich’ in the Big Eats section of the CCD menu reads ‘delectable Indian cottage and tandoori spices whipped in zero trans-fat mayo served in brown bread. East meets West amicably’. ¹²

The identarian politics displayed in performing class often lends the consumer a precarious status—one which is suspended between a dubious connoisseur and the nouveau sipper. Yet in subscribing to ‘certain’ beverage and food preferences, the consumer believes to have achieved a status he aspires. In cafés, people are often chasing an image of what they would like to be like and therefore are less likely to be satisfied with what they are at any moment. In investing in the fun ethic, the new age café-goer seeks a ‘good life’ undertaking an apprenticeship in the games to be played with social determinisms. Therefore, he adopts a learning mode to life and consciously educates himself in the field of taste, style and lifestyle. It has been argued that ‘the regimes of commercial establishments are planned in a way that encourages simulated, rather than genuine, engagement between companions’ (Finkelstein 1989: 52). Says Abhiroop a young consumer in his mid-20s:

The café is a stylish place. I carry my laptop along so that I can use the Wi-Fi facility at CCD. It’s cool you know. You need to make a mark after all … being in the café is fun too. You can catch up with friends, there are girls to watch as well … and if you are smart enough you can hit upon someone really nice. It’s a good and safe place to bring your girlfriend along … after all it’s great feeling to show off some attitude.

The ‘attitude’ which Abhiroop enjoys to display at a café is linked to the performativity of middle classness. The café is an identarian place, suitably stylish and closely ‘identified … with modern forms of individualism’ (Schnapp 2001: 248). It is where consumers like Abhiroop engage in edifying forms of identity play, exhibiting themselves and, in turn, seek to earn social approval by an appropriate use of the associative perks. The maintenance of respectful social proxemics, the social acceptability of the drink, ¹³

The aforementioned statement corroborates the assumption that the wish to belong to a particular beverage-hood is context-sensitive. In a café, Abhiroop drinks the beverage not because he is thirsty ‘but because he needs to indicate the state of his social relations with others’ (Corrigan 1997: 129). The café-goer in Abhiroop, thus, has the obligation to remain status-conscious while he can choose to be complacent at a tea-stall. His is a reproductive struggle because the chase to ease the class gap with his reference ‘others’ in the café implicitly attributes ‘legitimacy to goals pursued by those whom they pursue’ (Bourdieu and Passerson 1979: 97). Abhiroop’s middle classness becomes a domain of internally competing cultural strategies which ‘is simultaneously at odds with itself and with its class others’ (Liechty 2002: 15). He temporarily associates in sipping tea with neighbourhood chums discounting the need to flaunt rhetorics of cultural profligacy. But this often is a short-lived destination. Soon the consumer can flit to the café where by subscribing to a certain lifestyle pattern, status is bargained for a price. This in turn signals the dilution of status ordering where the possession of disposable income confers honour and money becomes the most easily recognised evidence of a reputable degree of success. While it is true that in purchasing a coveted experience, the young consumer is being spontaneous, what he finds appealing is the rhetoric of speculative esteem that the acquisition of cultural markers guarantees. The ‘new’ middle class man can be both an ‘everyman and elite vanguard’ (Baviskar and Ray 2011: 23) performing class-as-lifestyle enroute to a wished-for beverage-hood.

At this point, it can be argued that there are broadly two groups within the middle classes who visit cafés (a) strivers cum achievers for whom a café offers the social space to fulfil the need to exhibit cultural competency and distinction from other social groupings and (b) successors who are financially well-endowed for whom going to a café is a way of life. There remains an open possibility that these two groups might as well intersect or overlap each other in the biography of an individual’s life. To internally distinguish between strivers and successors leads us to differentiate within social groups that are predominated increasingly by continual processes of individualisation. The latter deprive class distinctions of their social identity (Beck 1992: 100). However, inequalities do not disappear. They merely become redefined by individualisation of social choices. The alleged social hierarchy of consumers remains. The choice of venue for a beverage on the aggregate remains strongly dependent on the economic factor but it is not always the determining one. It is here that the social distributions of cultural tastes become equally important. It is true that the financially ill-equipped would hardly have a chance to make use of a commercial facility like a café or the snobs relying on rigid rules of exclusion may never locate themselves at a tea-stall; but the drink template is far more complex, diverse and diffuse to be rationalised by an exclusionary rationale.

Members of the middle class including those entitled to material resources or those achieving a strived-for position redefine their taste of necessity according to circumstantial requirements. Often these tastes translate into tastes of liberty. But then again, there is no occasion to see a completely atomised situation where no one shares any tastes at all. However, the massification of tastes has also hardly been achieved. Rather, there is a tension between the possibility of groups who share common consumption patterns ‘that are not necessarily (at least on the surface) driven by class oriented associations’ (Tomlinson 1998: 6) as when anyone irrespective of his class situation takes a quick sip at a weakly classified space like a tea-stall; and the Bourdieusian position that a person’s social-class position determines a major part of consumption habits as when young professionals feel obliged to relax only and only in a lifestyle niche of a modern café. The sipper vacillates in choosing between need and desire. Traditional forms of life and living are pushed more to the peripheries; strangely however they are hardly overcome by lifestyle patterns. Lifestyles have grown predominant and preponderant but they simultaneously moderate traditions allowing them to co-exist as remnants of an order that can easily be revisited.

Conclusion

No social characteristic prohibits attendance to cafés or tea-stalls. But this image of neutrality is hardly neutral. Significant social selection does operate to make the customer base of tea-stalls, coffee chains and boutique cafés substantially different. This is more a matter of the relative preponderance of people in different social spaces rather than of systematic exclusion. But while homogeneity or sameness underlines the ‘commonality’ required of dispositions in a café, it is the embedded heterogeneity which breeds the notion of ‘communality’ in a tea-stall. Different beverage-hoods are steeped in differing symbolic landscapes that provoke associative moods and dispositions. So while customers in tea-stalls dispense off performativity, café-goers are obliged to put up competent performances. Often however, tea-stall customers and café-goers do swap sip-destinations, seeking provisional identities by flattening or heightening performative incongruities. These hybrid choices demonstrate the relationality of hierarchised beverage-hoods as these remain interconnected in contextual and preferential spatial praxis adopted by consumers. Sippers wilfully moderate conspicuous consumption often underscoring inconspicuous ones, yet are also reluctant to forfeit the allure of distinctive and distinguishing lifestyles. Tracing the ambivalences of inhabiting classified beverage-hoods, this article thus articulates agentic manipulations in deterring downclassing and cultivating upclassing, which in turn shapes and gives meaning to the heterology of textured spaces of an urban locality at Golpark.

Acknowledgements

I thank both the anonymous reviewers whose comments on earlier drafts of this article helped me strengthen its analysis.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.