Subaltern Narratives in Fiji Hindi Literature

By Vijay Mishra

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Feb 13, 2024
• ISBN: 9781839990717

Vijay Mishra

Dr. Vijay Mishra, PhD is an Associate Professor at Department of Pharmaceutics, School of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Lovely Professional University, India. Dr. Mishra earned his doctoral degree in Pharmaceutical Sciences from Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Dr. H.S. Gour Central University, Sagar (MP), India. He has been a recipient of several internationally acclaimed fellowships and awards including Graduate Research Fellowship (AICTE, New Delhi), UGC- BSR Senior Research Fellowship (UGC, New Delhi) and International Travel Award/Grant (DBT, New Delhi). He has authored more than 50 international publications in well reputed peer-reviewed journals, book chapters, books and patents (filed). He serves as a reviewer and Editorial board member of various journals of high repute. He is a life member of Indian Science Congress Association, Kolkata, India. His current research interests encompass nanomedicine, cancer, toxicology, surface-engineered dendrimers, carbon nanotubes, quantum dots, gold nanoparticles, siRNA delivery as well as controlled and novel drug delivery systems.

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Subaltern Narratives in Fiji Hindi Literature

Subaltern Narratives in Fiji Hindi Literature

Vijay Mishra

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2024

by ANTHEM PRESS

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or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK

and

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© 2024 Vijay Mishra

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: 2023946481

A catalog record for this book has been requested.

ISBN-13: 978-1-83999-070-0 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-83999-070-8 (Hbk)

Cover Credit: Mark Pereira for Michel Jean Cazabon Painting ‘East Indian Woman’ (1886)

This title is also available as an e-book.

For my late parents

Hari K and Lilawati Mishra

Who gave me the gift of a mother tongue

sunahu bharat bhāvī prabala bilakhi kaheu munināth

hāni lābhu jīvanu maranu jasu apajasu bidhi hāth

In sorrow says the lord of sages, ‘Listen Bharata, Fate is all powerful. Loss and gain, life and death, fame and calumny are all in its hands’.

—Tulsīdās, Rāmcaritmānas II. 171

Contents

Acknowledgements

A Note on Transliteration

Map of Fiji

Foreword: On the Genesis of Ḍaukā Purān

Introduction: Reading the Fiji Hindi Demotic

1 The Shock of the New

2 The Moment of Ḍaukā Purān

3 Fījī Māṁ: The Female Subaltern Epic

Conclusion: Can the Subaltern Speak? Language Itself Speaks

Appendix: Glossary of Fiji Hindi and Fijian Words

Select Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Praveen Chandra, Hirday Mishra, Sudesh Mishra, John O’Caroll, Som Prakash, Harish Trivedi, and my wife Nalini for sharing their thoughts on these novels with me. With tremendous patience and care Praveen Chandra went through the Glossary of Fiji Hindi words, provided a map of Fiji with localities mentioned in the books discussed, corrected a number of oversights and misreadings and formatted the entire manuscript. Subramani himself found time from his busy schedule to write the foreword and comment on a first draft of the book. I acknowledge with gratitude his permission to quote extensively from his novels. I wish to place on record a special vote of thanks to Dr Jasmine Dean who copy-edited the entire manuscript with great care and suggested changes in more instances than I can recall. I wish to thank my close friend Nandi Bhatia of the University of Western Ontario for sending me a copy of Lakshmi Singh’s play Kulī Prathā (‘The Coolie System’, 1916) and for her interest in the project. Professor Francesca Orsini, an authority on early modern Hindi literature, alerted me to oversights in my translation of medieval Hindi texts. Oversights on both substantives and ‘accidentals’ that remain are, of course, my own responsibility. Memory takes me back to my paternal grandmother, Mrs Ram Samujh Misir, my Dādī from the village of Veisama in Nakelo, who for so many years always set aside an extra shilling every Saturday morning so that I could see a Bollywood film and hear commentaries on it, in Fiji Hindi, from other cinema goers. The commentary on Mother India by Bed Mati’s in-laws in Fiji Maa brought back memories of my Dādī’s generosity. The late Mark N. Pereira, sometime Curator of 101Art Gallery, Trinidad, very kindly gave his permission to use a print of Michel Jean Cazabon’s painting ‘East Indian Woman’ (1886) on the cover of this book. The two anonymous external readers wrote very generous commentaries on the manuscript, and I am grateful to them for their enthusiastic support for the book. I wish to thank Professor Shaista Shameem, vice chancellor of the University of Fiji, for her belief in the value of a book that uses the Fiji Hindi demotic as its principal archive. Finally I want to fully acknowledge the support I have received from Mario Rosair, Jebaslin Hephzibah, Gomathy Ilammathe, Pradhiba, and Phiriya Durairaj at Anthem Press. They have guided me all along and answered even those trivial questions that would have stretched the patience of any editor. After all these years in many lands, a loss, an absence, a regret remains. This book, dedicated to my late mother for very obvious reasons, carries the subtext that I failed to accomplish, in my first language, what Subramani achieved for our homeland.

Vijay Mishra

Murdoch University

8 September 2023

A Note on Transliteration

Figure 1 Map of Fiji. Supplied by Praveen Chandra.

FOREWORD

On the Genesis of Ḍaukā Purān

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. It was a pity Vivekanand couldn’t see the flourish of my Devanāgarī script; he was semi-blind by then. However, as the story I was telling had its basis in the oral tradition, it was important that he should simply hear what I read.

It was a slow and painstaking task working with Devanāgarī script, like preparing a manuscript before the age of printing press. I didn’t realize when I began writing that the narrative would grow into a 521-page long manuscript, and that I would have to copy each page, like the medieval scribe, many times over before the manuscript would be ready to be taken to a printer. Monks had to brave such repetitive action and just persevere. I couldn’t allow my mind to wander after anything else. The monks had their scriptorium; I wrote my novel mostly in the open world (when I was away from my office travelling in India) on aeroplanes and trains, in hotel rooms and leaning against colonnades of temples. The novel had taken off half out of control, in uncharted territories. I had to nudge it along towards some sort of resolution, while keeping it alive and animated – my body, mind, effort and pleasure all driven by the sole challenge of the task. My Devanāgarī frequently attracted the attention of inquisitive Indians who peeked and nodded their heads in approval. It took me nearly five years to complete Fijilal’s pilgrimage through Fiji.

There was no one to read my Devanāgarī, give me support, or offer helpful advice. Competent readers of Devanāgarī were diminishing in number in Fiji. Besides, the pages were so full, so cluttered, without breathing spaces, that in itself was prohibiting for anyone who was sympathetic to my labour of love. When the title came to me, Ḍaukā Purān, I dug out old copies of the purāṇas. I was happy to see the pages in them too were unbroken blocks of texts on discoloured paper, a product of protracted burst of sacred energy meant to haul the reader into their incantatory spell without pause or distraction. It was exactly what Fijilal in my novel was trying to attain: he compelled the visiting scholar to sit before him for three days and to listen to the unbroken chronicle of his life. The purāṇas had almost no voice, the narratives driven by divine inspiration. Fijilal, on the other hand, was transported by the love of his own voice.

So Vivekanand couldn’t read the manuscript because he was nearly blind. Someone mentioned the name of Ambika Nand, an ex-Agricultural officer, who was a radio announcer and sympathetic to Fiji Hindi. I looked for him in Suva, learnt that he had migrated to Sydney, Australia. At Christmas vacation, I flew off to Sydney with the manuscript on my lap, located Ambika Nand living in retirement in a suburb of the big city. His sole responsibility was taking care of his grandchildren during the day. He had plenty of time and was prepared to read the manuscript for a small fee.

He went over the manuscript conscientiously, making careful notes for me in pencil. He pointed out the hardcore Bhojpuri and Avadhi in places that needed to be modified. (I drew instruction from Dilip Kumar who stayed for weeks in the interior of UP to learn the nuances and intonations of the Purbi, Avadhi, and Bhojpuri dialects for his film Gunga Jumna (1961), and then in creating his picture he had to fine-tune the colourful and expressive language to make it accessible to the Hindi-speaking audiences.) Ambika Nand’s another helpful comment was the South Indian lilt in some of my words and phraseology. That required my going through the entire manuscript one more time to correct that slant in the writing.

I hadn’t expected all these hurdles when I began writing. Similarly, Fijilal, my protagonist, didn’t realize there would be so many detours and digressions in his journey. The gain for my manuscript was that frequent re-visiting was making the writing more intact than it was ever meant to be. I also sensed it was taking too long, that the years were rolling by me. Since I was on the road to perfection anyway, I asked my friend John Pule, an artist from the small island of Niue, who was making a name for himself in New Zealand, to design the cover for my novel.

I was right in having a slightly mystical view of writing, publishing, and readership. I believed that at a proper time, things will come together in my favour somehow because my intention was fair. Towards the end of the year 2000, the University of the South Pacific, my employer, allowed me a generous sabbatical, and the university bookshop manager, Mr Armin Kullack, said he would take care of the sale and distribution of the novel and gave me a small grant to have the novel published in India. I travelled with my wife to New Delhi and found cheap lodgings in Karol Bagh for three months.

In the commotion at a nearby golchakkar, I found my perfect khewat, the yachtsman, an erudite auto driver, knowledgeable about books and authors and publishers in New Delhi. One wintery morning he drove me to 4/5-B Asif Ali Road. I was greatly amused to see rows of typists in white sitting under the awning of shops diligently typing away letters and manuscripts, and they were in Devanāgarī! I realized modernization had indeed arrived, leaving me behind in the Middle Ages.

Mr Amar Nath Varma, the manager of Star Publishers, took a couple of hours to look over the manuscript while I surveyed the endless shelves of books in Hindi and English. Mr Varma called me for a cup of coffee, and told me he had visited Fiji once, and heard Fiji Hindi being spoken; he would be happy to publish my manuscript as the first novel in Fiji Hindi. He promised to write a publisher’s blurb and suggested a strong Introduction by an Indian scholar that would open up the book to Indian readers.

I took an auto from Asif Ali Road and headed for Delhi University to see my friend Professor Harish Trivedi. I had met Harish Trivedi in Birmingham, UK, in 1985 where we shared an office as visiting scholars. He was happy to write an Introduction and offered a perceptive observation that if V. S. Naipaul and Salman Rushdie had written their novels in Hindi using Devanāgarī, the map of world literature would have become transformed. About Ḍaukā Purān he wrote, ‘Altogether, this novel is a rare event in the history not only of Fiji literature but also of Indian literature, and it should win for itself a place of special importance in postcolonial world literature’. My mystical hunch served me well: that no effort goes to waste or ends in failure if it is driven by the unwavering mind that does not yearn for worldly gain. I was assured by colleagues that very few readers would ever touch the novel, so there was no chance of my becoming rich. In any case, the proceeds from the sale would be collected by Mr Armin Kullack, the university bookshop manager. The novel was unlikely to win me acclaim though some form of notoriety was guaranteed for the impudent Professor of English who dared to write a novel in ‘Hindi that had no grammar’. I wanted to believe that the writing of the novel was a gift, but there was no certainty who will be the recipient of the gift.

There were more impediments on the way for the humble scribe. The editors at Star Publishers took pity on my inept Hindi and tried to improve the text in whatever way they could. I spent undoing their ‘corrections’ through several nights, blaming the glitches and quirks that I overlooked on frequent power failures in Karol Bagh. I was learning many times over the truth in the cliché, ‘writing is re-writing’. Mr Amar Varma worked patiently with me, shared his lunch tiffin for the whole two months, and regaled me with fascinating accounts of writers and artists who visited the premise. He told me about Bharat Bhushan who came to read, and Shabana Azmi and Javed Akhtar, both of whom came looking for new books of poems. (When Shabana and Javed published a poetry collection, during a subsequent visit, Mr Varma invited me to the book launch.) My wife and I were guests at Mr Varma’s house for dinner, with his wife Mrs Suman Varma, and sons Anil, Sunil and Sanjay and their spouses. We were treated like members of the family. Fijilal says in Ḍaukā Purān wherever he went during his travels people were good to him, and he was regarded as one of them. Many people were good to this scribe. I knew how to tell a story and learnt to write in Devanāgarī; other people came in to produce the book for me.

When Mr Varma called me one morning to collect the first copy of the book, I immediately took an auto to Asif Ali Road feeling nervous and thrilled at the same time, as if I was about to see my lifetime’s work in print. And there it was sitting exquisitely on Mr Varma’s table, with a life of its own, written in the Hindi of my childhood in Devanāgarī, like the only real book I had ever written.

Subramani

Adjunct Professor

The University of Fiji

Introduction: Reading the Fiji Hindi Demotic

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. Dominant languages have a clientele, a patronage; they carry the burden of a heavy intertextual tradition; they speak with the voice of a continuous, unbroken culture. The ‘real’ subaltern text has none of these advantages; it speaks to itself; it has no tradition as such and yet in the hands of an accomplished writer (which Subramani is) it draws on world literature as an ‘everyman’ text; it uses the generic registers, the historical echoes, the intertextual resonances of world literature towards subaltern ends. Sometimes the recreation of these echoes may sound parodic; at other times, they are steeped in irony; but at all times, they challenge the reader with a defiant statement, ‘The subaltern can also think, her language also has value, all it needs is legitimation’. But with the language comes another challenge as it is untranslatable. There is no equivalent target language in which the source language can be given adequate expression. The dissociation, the absence of an objective correlative, is complete. It means that the novels will forever remain in their own subaltern language and will not enter, unproblematically, the ‘canon’ of world literature, a key theoretical presumption of which is that great books of world literature, and certainly prose works, improve in translation.

When one thinks about the standing of a text in the challenging context of translation, in our profession ‘you are nobody’, wrote Paul de Man, ‘unless you have said something about this text’.¹ The text that de Man referred to was Walter Benjamin’s distinguished essay, ‘The Task of the Translator’.² Benjamin considered ‘translatability’ ‘an essential quality of certain works’, which was not the same thing as saying ‘that it is essential that they be translated’.³ For Benjamin there was a further complication because the construction of the meaning of a work (the hermeneutic exercise) was not a question of reader response; it was intrinsic to the text itself. In an unusual opening move (now impossible to defend), he had written ‘No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the listener’.⁴ The work of art is both autotelic and self-contained, its meaning residing within, and a reader is expected to grasp or understand it in terms of the text’s own existence. The translator is faced with a text that has the aura of the ‘sacred’ about it. Because of this, even as translatability is intrinsically interwoven into the formal definition of a literary work of art, of necessity a translation must fail. But even if it were successful, translatable ‘works of world literature’, adds Benjamin, ‘never find their chosen translators at the time of their origin, their translation marks their stage of continued life’.⁵ In its afterlife as a translated text – not as a ‘likeness to the original’ text but as its ‘renewal’ or even reincarnation – the work ‘undergoes a change’.⁶ The original, in a further twist, Benjamin notes, is intrinsically canonical inasmuch as it demands translation, and it is therefore the translation which endows it with an established, institutionalized canonicity. In this respect, the translation is more like literary criticism or even philosophy or history, as it is never an imitation of the original. Paul de Man’s observation on this point is salutary. He notes, ‘The translation canonizes, freezes, an original and shows in the original a mobility, an instability, which at first one did not notice’.⁷ In other words, it is the translated text that ‘canonizes’ the intrinsic canonicity of the original. And this is because beneath both the original and the translation is the ‘greater language’ itself (as both grammar and word) of which the original and the translation are ‘fragments’.⁸ In exposing the original text’s instability, its ‘disarticulation’, the translated text confirms (even as it establishes its universal affinity with it) the ‘errancy of language’, the différance that inheres between the signifier and the signified. The translation syncopates and affirms language; it is the latter’s ghostly voice, even as it confirms the untranslatability of texts.

Benjamin understood the kinship of European languages and its corollary that originals and translations are fragments of a larger whole. In that understanding of a deep structural connection between languages and world literature (which in Benjamin’s case is a literature hallowed by the great European languages and its classical tradition), source (original) and target (translated) texts entered into the ‘errancy’ of [European] languages of which both were ‘fragments’. Neither Benjamin nor his commentator, Paul de Man, engaged with translations across mutually exclusive languages or language groups. Walter Benjamin‘s essay, brilliant in every way, had raised a powerful theoretical problematic that, from a multilingual and localized understanding of world literature, requires another entry point. And here I was faced with a subaltern text written in my mother tongue that, in a very real sense, belonged to no established family of languages, indeed to no metropolitan language of which, one could claim with Benjamin, it was a ‘fragment’. As I searched for alternative theoretical pathways, Derrida alone among the small group of commentators I examined gave me an entry point when he spoke of a speaker ‘deprived of all language’. The work in which this point is made is a kind of linguistic meditation on Derrida’s own acquisition of a mother tongue in his native Algeria, where he is part of a minority Jewish community. I want to turn to this short work and especially to the sentence ‘The monolingual of whom I speak speaks a language of which he is deprived’. ⁹ This is because, Derrida confesses, the French language is not his. To inhabit a language means belonging to it in every way: culturally, historically, linguistically as well as familially. The ‘monolingual’ here is an ‘aphasic’ who is thrown into language as ‘absolute translation, a translation without a pole of reference, without an originary language, and without a source language’, without indeed the cultural capital that goes into a language.¹⁰ I have entered these novels written in the Fiji Hindi demotic with a similar sense of deprivation, a similar sense of ‘unbelonging’ even as, like Derrida, I declare that the demotic in which Subramani’s novels is written is my mother tongue. What I am faced with – and the reader too – is the impossibility of translating a language which, although my mother tongue, is not mine and nor is it, within Derrida’s observation on his own mother tongue, the author’s whose two magnificent novels form the central archive of the book. Emily Apter tells us that ‘World Literature [relies] on a translatability assumption [and as a result] incommensurability and what has been called the Untranslatable are insufficiently built into the literary heuristic’.¹¹ In this study, the untranslatability of the subaltern demotic texts haunts their translatability; their very incommensurability energizes the works and opens up their intrinsic canonicity.

Subramani’s novels stand out as a unique example of subaltern writing which, even as they are untranslatable, represent an extraordinary instantiation of the legitimation of the subaltern voice. That kind of legitimation, exceptional because it has not happened before in world literature, emphatically draws attention to its own location and eschews what Francesca Orsini has called ‘the easy binary of local vs. global in which the world is always elsewhere’.¹² This is a bold claim to make, possibly an unwise and overenthusiastic one, but it is made nevertheless to draw a reader’s attention to the special nature of narrative achievement in these novels and my own engagement with them under a cloud of deprivation. Translating the untranslatable from the [absolute] global periphery thus becomes a heuristic necessity, even a messianic act. And so translations of the untranslatable will be built into this study, making untranslatability itself the challenge posed by the subaltern demotic. The original, as Benjamin had observed, is intrinsically canonical, and it is the translation (often done not at the most propitious time, the time of the text’s origin) as an extended philosophical commentary on the text that drags the work into the literary canon. To reprise what I have said, Subramani’s subaltern novels, ‘heroic’ compositions as they are in the vernacular, constitute the silent, untranslatable underside of world literature.

A rare moment of a subaltern text’s mode of production and ‘arrival’ was noted by Rashmi Sadana in her seminal study, English Heart, Hindi Heartland.¹³ Part of this book relates the author’s interviews with book publishers in India. On Asif Ali Road, Delhi, she meets the publisher Amar Varma, a man who is both a bookseller and a publisher of books in Hindi. His bookshop, the Hindi Book Centre, is one of the largest bookshops in India. Her meeting with Varma leads to an unusual encounter with an author from a distant land. It is an account in the annals of Fiji Hindi that requires quoting in full (with ellipses where needed).

[I found Varma] sitting behind his desk in a large, glass-windowed office […] I noticed he was speaking to another man who was seated across from him. A thick manuscript was sitting on the desk between them […] I was ushered straight into his office and found myself sitting next to the man he had been in conversation with […] The man to my left […] Subramani, it turned out, was a Hindi writer from Fiji.

[…] Subramani […] based in Fiji and writing in ‘Fiji Hindi’, was not linked to the Hindi literary sphere in India