Vocalizing a Eurasian Otherness: Antony Firingi and a Creole Bengali Subalternity

Abstract

Abstract This paper examines the alternative articulations of the nineteenth-century Eurasian ‘other’ along the vocal axis of a ‘creole Bengali subalternity’. It predicates its contextual premise upon the transcultural encounters of Bengal’s mofussil enclaves by the Hooghly River. These enclaves developed rapidly into Portuguese, Dutch, French and Danish settlements between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, before being overtaken by the metropolitan colonial modernity of British Calcutta. My analysis of the creole Bengali space-times constituting such entangled histories and their interstitial legacies, revolves around the Eurasian life-world of Antony Firingi (c. 1786–1836), a Portuguese-Bengali kobi singer, viz. kobiyal, from the French comptoir, Chandernagore. Mobilizing the sonic scope of the rasa modality in Indic aesthetics, I close-read a key passage from Firingi’s kobigaan, or ‘musical verse’, duel with his rival, Bhola Moira, to decode the subaltern agency of the ‘creole Bengali rasa’ inflecting the vocal poetics of his liminal identity-narrative as a Eurasian kobiyal.