One day in 2001, John O’ Carroll, then a lecturer at the University of the South Pacific, sent me a book with a note, ‘Someone sent me this book to review but I can't read a word of it. Could you please have a look at it?’ The book was Subramani's Ḍaukā Purān. I had read all the great works of literature, was moved by them, couldn't put down Don Quixote, The Brothers Karamazov, or James Joyce's Ulysses or the seven-volume Princeton translation of the Vālmīki Rāmāyaṇa. But occasionally one came across a text that moved you in a different way, a text that made you feel that you were not just reading it but ‘speaking’ and ‘writing’ it as if it were reading you. One such text was V. S. Naipaul's extraordinary A House for Mr Biswas. John O’Carroll's request posed a different kind of challenge as the book was written in a language that triggered a kind of return of the repressed: after all, it was in my mother tongue, a language that was my own secret and which I had never used in an academic discourse. But what an experience its reading was! I read the book over two or three days. I was in a daze for this was a great book, the kind of book that I would quite unabashedly place alongside the very best in the world. I had read much and had been moved by books. But this book hit me in a way so different from anything else. I don't know when I felt that Subramani was writing this book or when I was acting as the amanuensis to his voice. The book was followed by the equally magnificent Fījī Māṁ (Fiji Maa) some 18 years later. These two books have placed Subramani in the pantheon of great writers of world literature. The achievement is extraordinary, magnificent, formidable, even inimitable. They are the absolute, the defining, the definitive texts of the subaltern. Writers and critics had commented on sundry subaltern writing: how these works signified the silent underside of a national literary project, the latter invariably written in a borrowed European language (principally English and French, occasionally in Spanish and Portuguese) or in a dominant vernacular such as Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Tamil or Arabic.

When the subaltern finally speaks, she stumps theory or at least challenges theory to find ways of accommodating her voice. Her texts explore heterogeneous life practices, those forms of knowledge that refuse dissolution into a grand post-Enlightenment narrative of reason. The life worlds of gods and spirits require cultural investment of a very different kind. Subramani's novels in the Fiji Hindi demotic finally say to postcolonial theorists, ‘the subaltern has spoken, or this is how she will speak if only you would depart from your own source texts in metropolitan languages and read her in her own language’. What this book has claimed is that these extraordinary novels are defining texts of the subaltern, in fact great performative texts through which we can rethink the incomplete project of postcolonialism, enter into alternative, nontotalizing historicities and explore traces that have eluded received modes of historical expression. To understand the theoretical ramifications of the subaltern voice that comes across loud and clear in the comic-realist mode in which these novels are written, I want to return to the challenging essay from which I have borrowed the question, ‘Can the subaltern speak?’ that heads this Conclusion. The author of the question, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, published the original version of the essay in 1985. The essay, expanded, was re-issued in 1988. Eleven years later, again modified and extended, it formed the core of the ‘History’ section of Spivak's most important work on postcolonial reason.

I began this book with an autobiographical note about an encounter with Subramani's first novel that provided me with a different kind of literary experience. It was an experience that was linked to my body, to a language that had remained hidden within me, a language of which I was ‘deprived’ but which had not found a proper aesthetic outlet until the arrival of Ḍaukā Purān. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's essay had appeared some years before its publication, and the novel, together with Subramani's second, Fiji Maa, is in many ways a response to the challenge posed in Spivak's essay. As it appears in the ‘History’ component of A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, the essay is prefaced by two interconnected prefaces: the first on the location of the subaltern within the Law of Reason and the second on the elisions in colonial archives.

Imagine a Spanish reader faced with the first part of Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote on its publication in 1605 (the second part is published in 1615). This reader (whom I assume is male) would have read the first part of Cervantes’ novel (running into some 500 pages) with some familiarity with the genres of narrative fiction. He would have read the anonymously written picaresque tale Lazarillo de Tormes (1554), a text noted a number of times in Don Quixote itself, and Francisco de Quevedo's The Swindler, which, although written in 1608, possibly earlier, remained unpublished until 1626 but may have circulated in holograph versions. This reader's frame of reference, indeed his horizon of expectations for a novel that parted company from the earlier celebrated chivalric romances noted in Cervantes’ own Prologue, would have been limited to these works. Cervantes, whose primary target in his picaresque novel is the enormously popular fourteenth-century Spanish chivalric romance Amadís de Gaula (Amadís of Gaul) and whose work ‘definitively initiates [the] break between the romance and the novel’, had made his point of departure from the established conventions of the genre of romance clear in his Prologue. Like Socrates appropriating someone else's voice, Cervantes wrote,

The imaginary Spanish historical reader I speak of had two relatively minor works as his point of reference (if he had seen Quevedo's tale in holograph), and he would have asked the usual questions: ‘Is Cervantes better?’ ‘Can he improve on the earlier works?’ ‘Is the content serious?’ ‘Can a modern, colloquial language such as Spanish carry the weight of high literature?’ ‘Can a work of literary art be written in a low mimetic mode, and moreover in the vernacular?’

Part of the aesthetics, one might even say the romance, of writing a novel in Hindi was, for me, using the Devanāgarī script. At the time I started writing my novel, the Roman script was coming into vogue. A fellow writer, Raymond Pillai, had written a play in Hindi using the Roman script. To me, Hindi in Roman script looked unadorned, robbed of its grace and poetry. If this is how Hindi was to survive, then it seemed an insidious, degraded survival; just a temporary reprieve. The trend had to be resisted.

I had learnt Hindi only up to the secondary school level. My first attempt at writing fiction was in Devanāgarī. I wrote a highly sentimental novel in the style of the popular writers of romance. My teachers rightly dismissed it as trash.

I returned to creating in Hindi after I had established myself as a writer in English, three decades later. What I remembered of the Devanāgarī script had receded to the far corner of my memory. I had to bring it to the fore, and work like a medieval monk, arduously forming each letter and word, re-capturing their curve and swirl, putting them together like a jeweller inserting tiny gems to form an ornament. I sensed the old rhythms returning. Devanāgarī was my link with life that I had left behind. The words fell on the page, looking so unfamiliar, unlike the characters I saw in Hindi textbooks. That did not deter me. At no time did I doubt about the worthiness of the writing project. In fact, I was struck by the originality of what was appearing in front of me. I was confident enough to read the pages, as they emerged in slow increments, to a real scholar of the language – Pandit Vivekanand Sharma. He taught Hindi at the university. He came to my office at the University of the South Pacific every morning, an embroidered shawl thrown over his shoulder, and heard me, Scheherazade, telling a thousand and one tales to a tyrannical Sultan who would behead me if I failed. I was hugely relieved seeing the Sultan chortle, guffaw, and at times breaking into uncontrollable laughter. I was assured that the story would live.

After Ḍaukā Purān, Subramani spent some 17 years writing an even larger subaltern novel, 1,000 pages long with a word count of over 300,000. If the first, narrated by a man, was a picaresque tale written in a comic mode (as indeed the conventions of the genre demanded), this novel, Fījī Māṁ (‘Mother of a Thousand’, hereafter without diacritical marks and given as Fiji Maa), narrated by a woman, is the ‘subaltern historical novel’, a national allegory, with an epic sweep of a thousand [and one] tales. The novel, clearly structured as a filmic narrative, deploys cinematic techniques of representation with the point of view of the eye of a camera. Indeed, cinema is what the novel becomes in the end as we are informed that fiction – here narrative as biography – will exist in the cultural domain as film and not as book. There is, however, a more difficult reading which is embedded in the novel itself, and this reading turns the reader's attention to language. As a literary work of art, this subaltern work too exists as language, a demotic language that captures the cri en cale, the scream from the hold. This cry or scream that produced the Fiji Hindi demotic is the voice of the coolie, part of the girmitiya historical consciousness through which experience is given form. In other words, discourse itself speaks, as language carries the experience of the race: language, in short, functions as ideology. Language makes the novel a private subaltern affair as it registers a mode of literary articulation that, like an anti-language, is an exclusive social semiotic of the people, a people who can only speak to themselves. It follows that any reading of the text is an exercise at once of interpretation (hermeneutics) and annotation (poetics).

Fiji Maa is divided into six parts of variable length: Kū Kū Esṭeiṭ (167 pages), Matuvālā Gāoṁ (443 pages), Beivākābulāī (97 pages), Beimānā (217 pages), Kū Kū Esṭeiṭ (51 pages) and Matuvālā Gāoṁ (50 pages). If importance is to be gauged by the length of the parts, then the second part, as the longest (around 40 per cent of the novel), is the centre of the novel.

There are few works of world literature that may be unproblematically categorized as subaltern writing. As the voice of peoples marginalized by the grand narratives of world history, including that of colonization, they exist as ephemeral entries (often via translations) in critical discourses on subaltern theory and practice. As autonomous, self-defining texts representative of that voice the examples are few. This is true as well of plantation Indian history (the general backdrop of this study) where once again the texts, often orally transmitted, exist only as fragmentary narratives. A proper intertextual framing of subaltern works is therefore impossible. However, there are a few challenging and defiantly exclusive subaltern texts in the critical bibliography of the field, and these may be mentioned: poems and prose works by Trinidadian and Guyanese Indians such as David Dabydeen, Kumar Mahabir and Rooplall Monar, plays by the Mauritian Patois French writer Dev Virahsawmy and the poems of the Suriname Bhojpuri writer Jit Narain.1 This is an incomplete and partial list that needs correction. In these limited citations, the one work that stands out is Dev Virahsawmy’s dramatic re-rendering of Shakespeare’s The Tempest as Toufann (‘Tempest’). But even as one concedes the power and originality of Virahsawmy’s challenging work, there is nothing in the Indian plantation subaltern literary archive remotely comparable to Subramani’s monumental novels Ḍaukā Purān and Fījī Māṁ (hereafter the latter without diacritical marks and given as Fiji Maa). As already noted, they are works of such exceptional power and originality that they require not only critical analysis but also critical exposure. This chapter is aimed at filling that need with reference to the first of the two novels by Subramani written in the Fiji Hindi demotic.

Subramani’s Ḍaukā Purān (‘The Subaltern Tale’ as I have translated the title) is a rich, indeed seminal, text through which we can talk about subaltern voice and speech. Many books and essays have been written about plantation and post-plantation Fiji history, but there is no work that explores life worlds through which an alternative, subaltern, narrative could be theorized.

Appendix: Glossary of Fiji Hindi and Fijian Words

Chapter 1 argues that V. S. Naipaul’s works are critically co-extensive with world literary formations and demonstrably foundational to the conception of the modern idea of world literature. Naipaul’s entry into world literature is via a writing that reads the literary world as an aesthetic totality. Kant’s critique of judgement is critical here even if Naipaul departs from Kant who read human cognition as discursive and not intuitive. Naipaul’s aesthetics is grounded in an intuitive mode of human cognition. His idea of “seeing” (and here he means “critical seeing”) via a “sensible intuition” is the basis of all his writings. Naipaul’s declaration of the primacy of the intuitive intellect – Proust is cited as exemplary – in the artistic process has no need for concepts or guiding principles, a prior idea or even a politics. However, Naipaul heeds Kant’s warning that if we were to rely purely on intuition – which would generate a non-contingent world with no distinction between objects that are real and those merely possible because all objects for the intuitive intellect are real – there would be no universal concepts generated by understanding and only individual representations grasped directly and immediately.

Using a short work by Jane Gallop on what the “theoretical” death of an author means when one is faced with an actual death of a writer one is writing on, the Epilogue argues that we have now entered an age in which an ethics of responsibility dictates that the death of the author is not just a theoretical problematic but one where both theory, personal loss, and mourning are brought together. The Epilogue thinks through the literary death of the writer. It is argued through close readings of three of his final works that Naipaul’s literary death coincides with the death of his first wife Patricia Naipaul in 1996. His final three major works are read as works symptomatic of a writer no longer in control of his great literary gifts. When the aesthetic impulse dies, the “author” dies too, but in the case of a great writer, which Naipaul is, before his “death” he had created worlds that no other writer had created. That achievement, singular and original, has to be acknowledged insofar as it now enables us to rethink and reconceptualize what it means to be a writer of “world literature.”