Christopher Pinney in his book, Photos of the Gods : The Printed Image and Political Struggle in India (2004) calls visual culture “an experimental zone” where new possibilities and new identities are forged, and Pinney here focuses primarily on the chromolithographs produced from the late 1870s onwards in India (8). For Pinney these chromolithographs were an integral element of history in the making rather than produce a narrative that conforms to what is already known about India. Pinney tries to study the relevant question of what images can ‘do’ or ‘want’ rather than how they ‘look’. By stressing on the extraordinary power of images or the notion of darshan of ‘seeing and being seen’, Pinney discusses the possibility of physical transformation that forms the backdrop against which a new kind of history has to be written. Cinema which is an important part of visual culture helps to reconstruct identities and represent figures that remain elusive to history, and are often missing in archives and records. In this paper attempt shall be made to focus on the figure of early nineteenth-century Eurasian kabiyal or singer-songwriter on whom two Bengali films are made – Sunil Banerjee’s Antony Firingee (1967) and Srijit Mukherji’s Jaatishwar: A Musical of Memories (2014). As this figure occupies a contradictory position because of his racial identity so the concept of ‘the body’ shall be discussed in this paper. The ‘body’ that is constantly being redefined through social and cultural practices forge new identities but at the same time ‘the body’ also carries with it the imprint of past identity. Hence this idea of constructing and retaining identities shall be critically analyzed and studied in this paper through the figure of early nineteenth-century Eurasian singer-songwriter of colonial Bengal who is depicted in Bengali films, and see how these twentieth and twenty-first century filmmakers have depicted him within the framework of the ‘alternative Bengali imaginary’ that constructs a sense of Bengali self or a ‘Bengalination’ as discussed by Sharmistha Gooptu in her book, Bengali Cinema: An Other Nation (2010). Therefore, in this paper attempt shall be made to rethink the concept of ‘the body’ by focusing on the term firingi that is attached to the singer-songwriter’s name, and secondly, attempt shall be made to focus on the time period in which the two Bengali films on Antony Firingi were made to critically analyze the deeply contested idea of ‘Bengali identity’ as constructed through the figure.
Ph.D. Student, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta
