Creolisation, India, and The Indian Ocean World: The Case of Goa
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11 Dec
2024
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Aesthetics, Criticism and Theory (ACT)
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Ananya Jahanara Kabir
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Image: Cover sheet for ‘Ballets du Concan’, by Goan composer Carlos Eugenio Ferreira
Creolisation as a theory of cultural encounter and cultural co-creation under historical circumstances of inequality, unintelligibility, competition and coercion has been usually applied to island locations in the Atlantic and — to a lesser extent — the Indian Ocean world — which have been part of the Plantation system created and sustained through European expansionism, colonialism, and enslavement. For the past decade I have been developing this theory to understand cultural histories of India’s coastlines through hubs and enclaves formed on those coastlines by the interaction of different European powers with local, regional, and non-European transoceanic actors as well as with each other; I have also been interested in using creolisation to understand how those coastal histories reverberate in postcolonial India. In my lecture, I will draw on this work to explain how and why theories of creolisation are useful within the Indian context, focusing on Goa as a creolised and creolizing node of the wider Indian Ocean world.
Haun Saiba Poltodi Vetam: Understanding Creolisation through a Goan Dekhni Song
In the second part of the lecture, we will track the trajectories of creolisation connecting the (trans)colonial past to the postcolonial present by focusing on an iconic and popular Goan song, ‘haun saiba poltodi vetam’, a version of which entered Bombay cinema through the song ‘na mangun sona chandi’ from the film Bobby (1973).
Free In-Person Public Lecture with Live Streaming on ZOOM
Duration -
December 11, 2024
Timing: Tea: 6:00 PM | Lecture: 6:30 - 8:00 PM IST
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Ananya Jahanara Kabir
Ananya Jahanara Kabir FBA is Professor of English Literature at King’s College London. Her research spans creolisation across the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds, critical philology, and the relationship between literary texts, embodied cultural expression, and memory work. Professor Kabir is the author of Paradise, Death and Doomsday in Anglo-Saxon Literature (2002), Territory of Desire: Representing the Valley of Kashmir (2009) and Partition’s Post-Amnesias: 1947, 1971, and Modern South Asia (2013). During 2013-18, she directed the ERC Advanced Grant-funded project ‘Modern Moves’. She is Fellow of the British Academy, has been awarded India’s Infosys Prize in the Humanities and Germany’s Humboldt Research Prize, and is on the editorial team of the new Cambridge University Press journal, Public Humanities.