Description
Book SynopsisSubaltern Narratives in Fiji Hindi Literature is the first comprehensive study of fiction written in Fiji Hindi that moves beyond the hegemonic and colonially-implicated perspectives that have necessarily informed top-down historical accounts. Mishra makes this case using two extraordinary novels Ḍaukā Purān [‘A Subaltern Tale’] (2001]) and Fiji Maa [‘Mother of a Thousand’] (2018) by the Fiji Indian writer Subramani. They are massive novels (respectively 500 and 1,000 pages long) written in the devanāgarī (Sanskrit) script. They are examples of subaltern writing that do not exist, as a legitimation of the subaltern voice, anywhere else in the world. The novels constitute the silent underside of world literature, whose canon they silently challenge. For postcolonial, diaspora and subaltern scholars, they are defining (indeed definitive) texts without which their theories remain incomplete. Theories require mastery of primary texts and these subaltern novels, ‘heroic’ compositions as they are in the vernacular, offer a challenge to the theorist.
Trade Review“We owe a great debt to Vijay Mishra for making Subramani’s two wonderful books available to us in translation, and for giving us a critical frame to understand their history and achievement. In transliteration, Subramani’s language is a revelation and dazzles with intimate details and striking ambition. As attention to oceanic literatures and the Indian labour diaspora continues to grow, Subramani’s Fiji Hindi novels and Vijay Mishra’s reading will surely and deservedly gather readers and acclaim.” — Francesca Orsini, FBA, Professor emerita, SOAS, University of London
“In his groundbreaking book, Vijay Mishra offers a scholarly but accessible study of the novels of the Fiji Indian writer Subramani. Mishra approaches these novels on their own terms, while also linking them with the traditions of folk humour, the carnivalesque and the picaresque in European literature.” — Elizabeth Jackson, Senior Lecturer in Literatures in English at the University of the West Indies (Trinidad)
“Subaltern Narratives offers English-speaking readers a profound understanding of Fiji-Hindi as a literary language, by means of extended translational analyses of two vernacular Hindi masterpieces by Subramani. In this book, Mishra dignifies both his own experience of Fiji-Hindi and the experience of other subaltern language communities around the world.” — John O’Carroll, Charles Sturt University, Australia
“The magic carpet of the Indian diaspora on which V. S. Naipaul and Salman Rushdie flew to worldwide renown is flipped in this book to reveal its granular underside. This is a sophisticated analysis of two epic novels written not in elite English but in a doubly subaltern language – a Hindi dialect vernacularized by Indian bonded labourers in Fiji. This is a dot on the world map writing back to global discourse.” — Harish Trivedi, University of Delhi
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements; A Note on Transliteration; Map of Fiji; Foreword On the Genesis of Ḍaukā Purān; Introduction Reading the Fiji Hindi Demotic; Chapter One The Shock of the New; Chapter Two The Moment of Ḍaukā Purān; Chapter Three Fījī Māṁ: the Female Subaltern Epic; Conclusion Can the Subaltern Speak? Language itself speaks; Appendix; Select Bibliography; Index
