Subaltern Narratives in Fiji Hindi Literature

Book excerpt: Subaltern 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.