Creole Indias

21/05/2023

'A creole tongue alive with mishearing and mistranslation of Tamil and French percolates quotidian Pondicherry in poetic surprises of unplanned encounters of languages…’ Dear friends of Creole Indias, please enjoy an experimental essay on Pondicherry Creole that emerged out of the now defunct ‘thinnai kreyol’ collaboration that all of you supported.
The essay contains precious photos from my fieldwork in Pondicherry last year and a move towards linking Pondicherry Creole with Anglo-Indian English. Enjoy!

From May 2020 until May 2022, I, an English- and Bangla-speaking academic and literary critic, collaborated with a French and Tamil-speaking writer of historical fiction (Ari Gautier) as co-founders of the cultural platform, Le Thinnai Kreyol. Shared interests in memory, multilingual mess and creoli...

02/05/2023

dear friends, here is the recording of a recent talk I gave on Creolisation and Fort Kochi as remembered through fiction. Hope you enjoy it!

In this talk, Prof. Kabir examines how fiction offers a route to recall, valorise, and reactivate the creolisation processes that were set into motion by the...

25/04/2023

we pay homage to the genius of Harry Belafonte today, aRtivist extraordinaire! and for many of us in India, the most important and memorable voice carrying the pain and joy of Creole worlds into our hearts, minds, and ears.
The Banana Boat Song is one of my favourite songs by him. Which one’s yours?
Rest in foot-tapping peace, maestro!

Harry Belafonte - Day-O, excerpt from "Harry Belafonte in Concert (Japan, 1960)". Recorded live at Sankei Hall, Tokyo, 18 July 1960. From the album "Calypso"...

07/04/2023

easter greetings to everyone! I wanted to post a really lovely little piece by Rafaël Confiant, the co-founder of the Créolité movement, about a creolised easter dish from the French West Indies. As he notes, this dish is not just about European and African influences but also the Amerindian element. And so it all goes into the creolising swirl to become something new, delicious and unpredictable.
Enjoy the long weekend, folks!
https://fondaskreyol.org/article/matoutou-ou-matete-un-exemple-de-creolisation-culinaire?fbclid=IwAR1qzbQwDqmIQQsA_ofFH3xxgztfqtUqWzqfloc9fVC-cL1E3lwgFpwgt0Y

Cette période de Pâques au cours de laquelle aux Antilles, nous consommons cette sorte de fricassée de crabes de terre appelée "matoutou" en Martinique et "matété" en Guadeloupe, est une excellente occasion de réfléchir au processus de créolisation dans le domaine culinaire.

23/03/2023

How amazing! A conversation between a speaker of Kreyol from Haiti and Seychellois Kreol. Completely mutually intelligible! How much can you understand? 🙂 dive in to experience the full archipelagicity of creole worlds!

Ti koze ant Jacques Pierre ak Aneesa Vel Ozordi nou pibliy en konversasyon dan Kreol Seselwa e Kreol Aisyen. Sa konversasyon i ant Seselwaz Aneesa Vel ek Jacques Pierre, ...

21/03/2023

hello friends-- Nowroz greetings! what a lovely coincidence that today The Conversation Africa published my piece on how five Iranian girls chose to challenge the Islamic Republic through a creolised dance routine to an African song. Read more about the famous Calm Down Dance Challenge here, who created the steps, and how it went viral to reach Iran! creolisation is power :)

The five Iranian teenagers were arrested and forced to apologise – but the dance challenge continues to go viral.

13/03/2023

Six years ago, the European Research Council honoured me with a portrait of my research, which they were then funding. This was the project that led me to thinking about Asia and Africa together, about creolisation and joy as resistance to trauma, and so much more: it was an essential step to creole Indias! I am happy to share this video with all of you! I hope you enjoy it… :-)

12/03/2023

Mauritius, a country I feel particularly at home in, is celebrating its 55th Anniversary of Independence today. Felisitasyon, Moris! As it is also a country with a special relationship to global postal history, Creole Indias marks this anniversary with a stamp issued on 12th March 1968, the day Mauritius gained independence from the British.
Fascinating to note that the key image chosen is the extinct bird. the Dodo-- endemic to the island, it was hunted to extinction by the Dutch who were the first Europeans to settle there in numbers since the late 16th century (and indeed, from whose then ’stathouder' Prince Maurice van Nassau, the island and nation receives its name).
But since living creatures are at least every bit as important as extinct ones, here’s another Mauritius post office cover of the bats of Mauritius and Rodrigues; an engraving of my favourite Mauritian bird, the Mauritius bulbul, and a photo of the Chagossian Common Myna (taken from the John Ellerman Foundation); and a stamp depicting the glossy Ibis bird from Agalega.
Nations are complicated and independence is but the first step towards decoloniality :)

21/02/2023

Happy Mother Language Day, everybody! let’s celebrate Kre(y)ol languages worldwide that converted survival into resistance, oppression into joy! many endangered and marginalised, others struggling with internalised trauma of generations, these languages and their embodied cultures are actually to be loved, venerated, and held up as examples of the irrepressible processes of collaboration, negotiation, compromise, and innovation that I analyse and theorise as ‘creolisation’. Here’s a new cover of old Indian Ocean creole songs from the Sri Lankan Burgher community to mark the occasion. Thank you Hugo Cardoso for bringing it to our notice. Sometimes a pact with the market needs to be struck! this is Creole as living resource for love and life. Enjoy ‘Minha Amor’ by Derrick Keil of Sri Lanka!

MINHA AMOR (මින්‍ය අමෝර්) / Mee wadayaki - Remake | DERRICK KEIL | Official Music Video | Ceylon Portuguese | Kaffringha ♪ Artiste - Derrick Keil♪ Lyrics - S...

07/01/2023

I came into Mattancherry at night, the full moon was shining and on the corner of the silent streets what should be waiting for me but a shrine to Kappiri Muttappan, ‘Black grandfather’, the spirits of the African enslaved who, as legend goes, had been sealed up by the fleeing Portuguese along with treasure into the walls of Fort Kochi when the Fort fell to the Dutch. Rammed into the interstices not just of competing colonial powers but the juggernaut of racial capitalism and Postcolonial India’s relentless quest for purity, here is something that nevertheless slipped through to survive: the living trace of Africanity.
Who lights the camphor scented candles and leaves the ci**rs and the marigold flowers?
Do they do so to expiate the erasures and blockages of history, or in solidarity with the enslaved?
We don’t know.
But as I leant into the shrine and took in the camphor and the heat, under the light of the moon, I thought of many cigar puffing spirits across oceans far and near, from Haiti to Mauritius.
creole Indias!
(Ananya Kabir)

28/12/2022

'Mémoire, musique et créolisation aux Seychelles’: for those who read French, a lovely open-access article on creolisation and music in Seychelles by my colleague and former research team member Dr Elina Djebbari, based on research we did together in the Indian Ocean in 2017! Enjoy :)

En octobre 2017 se tenait aux Seychelles le 32e festival Kreol. Cette année-là, le thème « Fyer nou Lidantyte » (« fier de notre identité » en créole seselwa) se déclinait à travers de nombreux con...

20/12/2022

I am thrilled to present to the followers of le thinnai kreyol this new essay from me, ‘Creole Indias and the Artistic Activation of Memory’, for TAKE on Art Magazine's latest issue on ‘Memory’. This piece draws on several people we hosted on this platform’s live events, the ‘thinnai katcheri’ series, including Subodh Kerkar, Fernand Ratier, Paula Sengupta, and Tanya Abraham. Ayesha Hameed, whose work the essay closes on, also used to follow the lives. So here’s a big thank you to everyone who, in the course of two years, fed my intellect and imagination with your participation, support, and feedback.
Creole Indias is a thing :D and it’s a thing we love to be part of.