Tracing the Relational Ethic in the Postcolonial Life Writing of the Indo-Fijian Diaspora

ABSTRACT

Despite the celebratory stance adopted by proponents of globalisation towards migration and transnationalism, many diasporic subjects experience geographical and cultural displacement as dispossession and loss. It is most evident in the life writing of post-indenture descendants of the nineteenth-century Indian diaspora in Fiji who are, de facto, living in a state of perpetual exile. In this article, I examine the life-writing texts of two Indo-Fijian writers, Satendra Nandan and Brij Lal, for the centrality they accord to the relational ethic through which they foreground the experiences of their community. While Nandan deploys a melodramatic aesthetic in his life writing to elicit sympathy for his post-indenture community's predicament, Lal interweaves disciplinary history with creative autobiography to make an interventionist gesture through which he recuperates an agential role for his Indo-Fijian community. I argue for broadening the archive of postcolonial diasporic literature by including such texts that resist the triumphalist rhetoric of de-territorialisation and transnationalism.

KEYWORDS:

• Indo-Fijian diaspora
• relational ethic
• melodramatic aesthetic
• interventionist autobiography

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Ashma Sharma is an assistant professor at the Department of English, Hindu College, University of Delhi, India. She is a PhD candidate at the Australian National University. Her research interests include postcolonial studies, life writing, South Asian literature, culture and history.

Notes

1 In his book Absolutely Postcolonial (2001), Hallward makes a further distinction between the ‘specific’ and ‘singular’ itineraries through which postcolonial subjectivities can be understood. The ‘specific’ mode of individuation is relational and differs from the ‘singular’, which is marked by a radical disjuncture and is ‘self-constituent’ (xi, xxi, 19). Hallward proposes that the prevailing theoretical paradigm within postcolonial literary studies which favours the ‘singular’, especially in the work of Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak, in a sense undermines postcolonialism's foundational aspiration for recuperating collective agency against racial, class and gender oppression (20, 61).

2 In the context of the predominantly Hindu Indo-Fijian diaspora, Mishra interprets many of their cultural practices such as the performance and public recitation of Tulsidasa's Ramayana as a manifestation of the classic features of a ‘fragment’ society. Drawing on the work of historians like Lois Hartz, who argued that in the initial phase of their history white settler nations displayed a ‘fossilized, regressive’ ideology based on cultural inwardness and nostalgia, Mishra makes a similar case for the Fiji Indian fragment even as he recognises the power differentials between these two migrant communities (2007, 22–70). He uses the term ‘girmit ideology’ for the ‘old’ Indian diaspora of classical capitalism for whom ‘memory, promise and trauma are constitutive characteristics’ (23). However, other scholars, like Mariam Pirbhai and Sudesh Mishra, have taken a tangential view of Mishra's descriptive term. For example, Pirbhai points to the differences within the colonial indenture diasporas in terms of their specific geopolitical location, gender identity, and religious affiliation which tend to get homogenised by the term ‘girmit ideology’ (2009, 18). For Sudesh Mishra, the term ‘girmit’ not only evokes the memory of the contract signed by those who came to Fiji for plantation work, but also carries a subversive potential if we understand it as the betrayal of their millenarian hopes for a better future. On this point Sudesh Mishra's analysis diverges from Vijay Mishra's insofar as he interprets the term's symbolic valency as gesturing towards a form of subaltern agency with regard to the ‘affective intentionality’ of these colonial subjects (Mishra, 2005, 20).

3 Lal mentions various factors that led to internal migration of the rural peasantry in nineteenth-century colonial India. These included the introduction of new notions of private ownership of property, increasing fragmentation of land holdings, deepening indebtedness among the peasantry and natural calamities (Lal 2009, 94).

4 As Kirin Narayan notes, the term ‘faction’ has gained wide currency since it was used by Geertz in Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author (1988). She explains that Geertz had used it to encourage ethnographers to ‘acknowledge a wider literary movement [in New Journalism] … which uses some of the storytelling techniques of fiction to write about actual events’ (Narayan 2007, 130).

5 Athique discusses Nandan's autobiographical novel The Wounded Sea and Lal's ‘factional’ autobiography, Mr Tulsi's Store as examples of South Asian-Australian fiction in chapter four of her thesis.

6 Though Aurell cites Brij Lal in this article, his analysis is almost exclusively focused on Western historians (2015, 265).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Government Research Training Scholarship.