“Dādācaritmānas: A Cultural History of the Modern Bengali Youth” ['Dādācaritmānas' literally translated as ‘in the lake of the deeds of the Dādā’] offers the first full-length academic study of the location of the Bengali ‘elder brother’ in modern India. Dādā – the term used in Bengali for an elder brother - opens a world of experiences and meanings that address multifarious issues such as generational conflicts, gender disparities, and moments of crises in nationhood. Through my research, I trace the genealogy and the immense vitality of the increasingly polysemic and metaphorical figure of the ‘elder brother’ in the political and public domains and study the moments that has made this proliferation possible. The study also aims to take the conversation forward on conceptions of the ‘public’ and the ‘political’ from the global South. The emergence of the modern public space in Bengal is invested on structures of feelings that perpetually inform institutions of education, workplace, and leisure. The elder brother, with diverse civic emotions attached to his image, is a central figure in such a narrative. The dissertation, thus, traces a history of modernism which is distinctively anchored in kinship associations in South Asia. My archive consists of texts ranging from life-writings, novels, short stories, to songs, cinema, and new media. This situates the study at the intersection of several sub-disciplines such as cultural history, critical youth culture studies, histories of popular culture, postcolonial studies, masculinity studies, and media studies and contributes to the same. Establishing the import of the Dādā across these varied texts lets us investigate the mutually sustaining role of a form of address and forms of artistic expression. Situating the Dādā in specific contexts from the nineteenth century to the present and studying what gets projected, reified, and fetishized through this figure clarifies the location of the elder brother in organizing the society and how he becomes constitutive of crucial historical events.