Vijay Mishra

In Salman Rushdie’s Quichotte (2019), Sam Duchamp, the latter day Cide Hamete Benengeli of Miguel de Cervantes’s (Citation2005) Don Quixote, tells his sister that in the new book he is writing (which forms the basis of the narrator/Rushdie’s reconstruction of the novel) he would write about the “mind-numbing junk culture of his time [… about] unforgivable things [… and about] Indian immigrants, racism toward them” (289). And then, it seems as an afterthought, he adds a more theoretical premise: he would also write about the “intertwining of fictional and ‘real’ realities, the death of the author” (289)...

Subaltern Narratives in Fiji Hindi Literature is the first study of fiction written in Fiji Hindi. Its target texts are 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 foundational form – the picaresque – it adapts and interrogates. 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.

The argument of the book takes off from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s well-known declaration (later modified) that ‘The subaltern cannot speak’. Through a close examination of the two novels – and with extensive translations of passages transliterated in the roman script – it is argued that the subaltern does speak but in her own language. The subaltern speech acts in the Fiji Hindi demotic (itself an amalgam of Hindi dialects with borrowings from English and Fijian) are both private and public: private in the sense that the language (which is not to be confused with Creole English or Patois French) is an outcome of a specific historically conditioned Fiji Indian plantation experience, and public in the sense that it can be read and understood by speakers and readers of standard Hindi.

Combining deep sensitivity to language and art, the book makes a very bold claim: these books are world literary texts to which the same kind of exhaustive criticism may be applied that one would with any other great work of literature. This book brings to the reader something that has never been done before. It challenges the subaltern theorist by stipulating (axiomatically) that to understand the subaltern, one must understand her own language and not depend on redacted accounts of their experiences in metropolitan or privileged languages be they French and English or Hindi and Arabic.

Fashions changed, but Raja Rao remained a transcendentalist throughout his long life. It may be noted that at the high point of French surrealism, Raja Rao saw in it not so much a reaction to classical forms but a philosophical extension of debates about the real and the unreal, the world of phenomena and the world of dreams, the idea of a self other than that understood by the senses. Raja Rao wrote not to claim a special space for himself but to show how culturally sensitive he in fact was when it came to aesthetic matters. Indeed Raja Rao, like no other writer and thinker, would have said what more could one write when faced with Drona’s words to Yudhisthira when the latter, at the end of the Krishna–Arjuna dialogue in the Gita, goes to his teacher, Drona, to seek not only his permission to fight but also to ask how he could be killed.

In 1993, the University of Tulsa purchased the V S Naipaul papers and installed the V S Naipaul Archive, principally a paper archive, a year later. In this essay, which is also a homage to the late Professor Tom O’Regan, I examine the value of archives, a scholar’s use of them and the ‘Freudian impressions’ or latent texts embedded in in them. Although once established an archive can acquire mystical power, in reading it, one has to be conscious of processes of selection and redaction built into the archive. One ‘Freudian impression’ that requires attending to is the role of Naipaul’s first wife Patricia Naipaul in the growth of the writer’s craft. The archival evidence suggests that his best works were written while she was alive.