Manpreet Kaur
The University of Fiji
Prashneel Ravisan Goundar
Fiji National University
Abstract
The aim of this
research paper is to study the odyssey of the Fiji Indian writer in the
Pacific: Satendra Nandan, who transforms his memoirs into artistic
reconstructions through a strategy of writings heightened by exilic experience. Nandan’s writings dig deep into the
experiences of the Fiji Indian. For the authors of this paper, Nandan’s works
of art are expressions of a remarkable genius with a quest for writing the
unwritten, untold tales of the people who suffered for many years. As a Fiji
Indian, his mind and soul sensitively captures the remnants of indenture, and
nurtured further by the Fijian coup culture, the education in Fiji, tertiary
education in England, India and Australia, including the English language. His
background represents the girmit experience, for he shows a willingness to
confront the unimagined, the unrecognized and the unseen.
However, Nandan’s
works shows an insightful grasp and deep understanding of the problems and
ignorance of Fiji, a place which itself is a text to be deciphered, his
mounting confidence in the capacity of human reasoning to interpret man and
nature. His works bring to the fore the opposing myths that are related to any
kind of diasporic condition, and in particular with the entire ethos, plight
and history of the Girmit people.
Yet, many Indians
in Fiji feel that they are a fragment that had been harshly expelled from their
place of birth. Nandan, then, attempts to explore through his works of art ,
which appears both personal and political, comic and tragic, fictive and
autobiographical, a portion of the anguish the Indians faced in Fiji ever since
the beginning of the saga of the indenture.
The researchers believe the historical experiences have taken root in
the mind of this Fiji Indian writer. Thus, the centre in his fiction is also
the self; the beginning of all his narratives is the writer himself. The multiplicity of voices in his writings is
marked by the very people in his personal and professional life that shaped the
man Nandan is at present.
The greatness of
Nandan’s work is possible largely because of the works of great writers like
Patrick White, V.S. Naipaul, M.K. Gandhi and Salman Rushdie. Hence, Nandan’s work
provides an adequate base for a study of the colonial policy of separate ethnic
development and the threat of eviction by some ethnic leaders. He brings the
discourse of the colonized to the fore by abrogating the language and using the
bilingual writing itself. This research paper is an attempt to analyse Nandan’s
works, and explore the multiple themes of politics in literature, exile and
identity and what it is to be a Fiji Indian.
The political world
of Nandan grows out of the special predicament of the Fiji Indians in Fiji. It
is built around an intuitive grasp of the Girmit ideology, which Nandan
occasionally blasts open, often parodies, but invariably enters into through a
process of self-dialogue. Nandan extensively writes and laments the Fijian
rebellion of May 14, 1987. Exactly 108 years after the arrival of the Leonidas
in Fijian waters, the Fijian coup confounded the Fiji Indians at the very
moment when, through political power, one kind of millenarian fulfilment was
within their grasp. The repressed returned to haunt them and the Fiji Indians
were left in a state of shock. Out of this conjunction emerged Nandan's
fictional autobiographical pieces which represent the essentially tragic world
of the Fiji Indians.
Keywords: Fiji Indian writer, girmit, Satendra Nandan, Pacific, Fiji
Indians.
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