THE GIRMIT IDEOLOGY RECONSIDERED

V1jay C. Mishra Murdoch University

ka barasa saba krsi sukanem, samaya cukem puni ka pachitanem Tulsidasa, Ramcaritamanasa, I, caupai 261

Honor Klein, the femme fatale and incestuous anthropologist of Iris Murdoch's A Severed Head tells Martin, who has the epic misfortune of falling violently in love with her,

Because of what I am and because of what you saw I am a terrible object of fascination for you. I am a severed head such as primitive tribes and old alchemists used to use, anointing it with oil and putting a morsel of gold upon its tongue to make it utter prophecies. And who knows but that long acquaintance with a severed head might not lead to strange knowledge. for such knowledge one would have paid enough. 1

By a curious paradox, the literary theorist is also expected, like the pre­condition of his critical act, the literary artist, the producer, that is, of what is the institution of literature, to utter prophecies, to build systems, to unravel riddles and even, if he is creative enough. to posit an alternative text, a text which may rival the primary act of creation upon which he exercises whatever powers the primitive tribes or the old alchemists give him. He stands alone, conscious of his inferior status, conscious that he cannot participate in those acts of transcen­dence which the texts themselves perform. He is a reader - and if he is a good reader he is in great company. Recall Walter Benjamin reading Goethe's Elective Affinities, F.R. Leavis reading Conrad's Nostromo or William Empson reading Marvell's "The Garden" - with them our enterprise acquires a certain dignity, a certain sense of pur­pose. But even they are essentially parasitic, and the act of literary criticism is fundamentally parasitic. To quote George Steiner, "This existential p0steriority, this dependence of the perceptual and nor­mative act on the prior and autonomous nature of the object, signified that all criticism is, ontologically, parasitic." 2 Steiner, of course, argues from a somewhat phenomenological standpoint. On the other - and structuralist extreme - l would argue that the "object" in question, the

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literary product itself, if not parasitic, at least outwardly enters into a symbiotic relationship with prior modes of ordering reality, prior prin­ciples of structuration by which reality (and by "reality" I mean the in­ner dynamism of form) has been made into recognisable constructs. Literature, therefore, has a built-in linearity. in other words it relates to earlier ways of perceiving the world, and far from "reflecting" con­sciousness, it mediates it in different ways. Frederick Sinnett in his "Fiction Fields of Australia," a theoretical piece written about Australian literature in 1856, in fact said that most books written 'remodel models rather than life. '3 "remodel models" - one does not wish to suggest that he was in fact anticipating a formalist literary critique of Australian literature, but while writing centrally within the tradition of English Romantic criticism, he thought fit to mention a way of approaching the literary text which comes closer to my own. This in itself is not surprising. Robert Scholes in Structuralism and Literature4 argues that much of Romantic literary criticism and, especially that of Shelley. did in fact anticipate the linguistic explosion that was to occur at the turn of the next century and which forms the basis of 20th century literature and criticism.

Frederick Sinnett is a useful departure point for the model of literature I wish to offer here, and this is primarily because he wrote about a "new" literature which I know better than most other new literatures. Clearly, he did not believe that "remodelling the model" was in itself an act of creativity; it was, in his words, hack work "ad in­finitum." "Like most painters," he wrote, "they fancy that they are imitating nature when they are only imitating pictures of nature previously painted." For Sinnett, the genius (and the idea of genius is important in this kind of criticism, and underlies much of criticism which is hieratic, that is based on the establishment of literary canons) alone overcomes the limitations of the mediocre; by some act of per­ception or "intellectual auscultation" (the term is Henri Bergson's) he is able to see "nature" as it is. Clearly, Australian literature had to wait until Patrick White made that kind of awareness possible, though, with the wisdom of hindsight, I wonder if Henry Lawson had not made that breakthrough before him. Again we return to literary history, an area which remains reasonably untrodden in Australian literature. If we shift the axis of the nature-nurture model, if the "nature" that Sinnett speaks of could indeed include an Australian conciousness, shall we say a dominant convict "world-view," a system which reflects not the universals of life which Sinnett offers but those formations of existence specifically modified by the conditions of life in Australia, then Sinnet­t's arguments could be made to read something like this. Those who remodel models do not realise that what they are modelling is a "false consciousness," the imposition upon Australians of a system of values alien to their experience. The genius cuts across that false con­sciousness and is able to participate in the workings of the Real behind this which has been offered in inverted forms in the first instance. Mark Twain was to call Australian history "the most beautiful lies," 5

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aware perhaps of the mythologies underlying history. The model which I then offer here is structurally not dissimilar to

those already offered for other literatures. What is different is that I work from a different ideological standpoint. "Literary works," writes Terry Eagleton, "are not mysteriously inspired, or explicable simply in terms of their author's psychology. They are forms of perception, par­ticular ways of seeing the world; and as such they have a relation to that dominant way of seeing the world which is the 'social mentality' or ideology of an age." 6 I have modified Sinnett to suit my own arguments and critics of English literary criticism would presumably feel uncomfortable with a model which replaces oppositions with dialectics, nature with consciousness and reflection with mediation. These theoretical presuppositions will have to be filled out by historians - Manning Clark in Australia has done precisely that - and Mr. Brij La! of the Australian National University has taken over the task of actually finding out if, what I termed four years ago, the "gir­mit" consciousness, is in fact historically possible. I depart from the more enthusiastic position which I held in 1976 when the first paper was written, to a position which begins by seeing the girmit con­sciousness as an act of ideological formation and ultimately as an act which is ideologically false. The girmit ideology then is a conscious falsification of reality, a falsification which was necessary to keep the psychic totality of these displaced Indians intact. This act of conscious falsification - as I said a necessary act for survival, a mythology -conforms to the classic Marxist notion of ideologies (such as the bourgeois ideology) which are by definition false. 7 But I do not wish to push the classic Marxist political line any further because here we have a false ideology created not by the ruling cla~ses (for whom the closure is necessary) but in effect by the proletariat, for the girmitiyas did not hold any position of power. Again, whether a caste-ridden society, an immobile society untouched by the great "reform movements of India," still part of "an old and perhaps ancient India," 8 in spite of its displacement, could have seen itself as the proletariat is another question. It is my belief that by the time the girmit ended forty years later (1879-1919), the insularity of the Indians, in fact had led to the buttressing and upholding of class positions which made the proletariat as a unity under colonial masters all but impossible. Professor Jayawar­dena in an article in Ram as Banishment indeed argues that the illusory beliefs (he doesn't use that term) became dominant the moment a sem­blance of some village unity in Fiji could be recreated. In the Rewa Valley, where the girmitiyas first settled, he finds the quick adoption of a "self-contained ethnicity" which tended to exclude drastic attacks on its attempts to reintegrate fragments "that were shored against the ruins of emigration." 9

It is ideology as a "system of illusory beliefs - false ideas or false consciousness" and ideology as a theory (which necessitates the con­trary statement that "practical consciousness" of the proletariat will not produce this) that govern the critical methodology of this paper. 10

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The act of conscious falsification, inherent in the belief-system of the girmitiyas also answers the anxieties of those critics who may wish to identify "falsification" with the unsaid claim of racial immaturity. The girmit ideology was then a sophisticated construct, false, necessary. Yet this falsification has gone unnoticed - in the same way as, and un­der slightly different socio-economic and class situation (again I refer to C. Jayawardena), it went on unnoticed in Trinidadian Indian life un­til Seepersad Naipaul began to write his short stories and until his son, V.S. Naipaul, completed the act of literary mediation. Historically, it is easy enough to demonstrate how Fiji Indian literary works kept on re­issuing versions of that falsification without the transcendence, the resolution of the conflicts and contradictions within the ideology (the ideology-proletariat problem for instance) essential for the creative ar­tist (my initial proposition). Pandit Pratap Chandra Sharma in Pravas Bhajanamjali ("A Foreign offering of Verse"), written to commemorate Indian independence, writes from within this false consciousness and offers again an ideological standpoint which, in literary terms, fails to mediate the contradictions inherent within the system. 11 On a more basic level the question posed is this: what are the essential con­figurations of what I have termed the girmit ideology? I think that the ideology arose primarily out of a conscious misreading of India - the idea of Ramraj, for instance, became important: it was articulated and encoded simultaneously. It blinded the Fiji Indians to the facts of life in Fiji and the relationship that they ought to enter into with regard to the adivasis, the native Fijians. But, above all, it gave the Indians a false sense of security, a false reading of politics and an insularity which could then be exploited by others. It gave them, quite possibly, an in­feriority complex, because the practical enactment of that con­sciousness was not possible.

I offer a reading of Indo-Fijian Literature in terms of this ideological matrix. I argue that literature becomes literary not when genius offers an artistic wholeness, a self-contained poem or novel to which one can give the title "great" or which can be hierarchically placed within some prior canon of literary enterprise but when literature begins to see an ideological falsification, when history reads myth, when, as Sartre was to say, the written sentence begins to reverberate at every level of man and society, when, again in more centrally Marxist terms "man becomes conscious of this conflict and fights it out." 12 Pandit Pratap Chandra Sharma's Pravas Bhajanamjali reflects, in other words it distorts, falsifies, maintains not art but an ideology. His kind of literature does not mediate (Vermittlung). We get a more precise pic­ture of the ideology in someone like Vijendra Kumar who offers a reading of it in his contribution to The Indo-Fijian Experience. u Kumar's version parallels the conscious falsification I have outlined and is clearly not meant to be ironic, that mode which, as Luckacs has maintained, is the only possible reading of a world which is no longer authentic, and a mode, I add in parenthesis, used by another quester, V.S. Naipaul. Kumar's account of his journey to India is not in the

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literary sense an articulation of consciousness which vies with "real, positive knowledge," 14 but it is, nevertheless, a useful starting point with which to begin testing the model l have outlined.

Vijendra Kumar recalls "ancient" girmitiya yarns within phrases such as "the hell-hole of Waqadra" where some indentured labourers worked, or as "those savage times" to denote the period of bondage. He then goes on to speak about the girmitiya's perception of India in the following terms:

I grew up in my grandparents' lap. It was a lap lavish in love and affection. I ab­sorbed the endless tales of India: of exotic fruits, of wizards and witches, of frightening animals and serpents, of great poets and singers, of the great rajahs and their lovely queens, of mountains towering into the sky, of rivers deeper and bigger than our seas, of dacoits who robbed the rich and fed the poor, and of the peace and tranquillity of village life. I heard all this and more. Nothing in Fiji could compare with India. "The milk here is like the water in muluk (home country)," I heard from them.

This was part of the mythology that the Indo-Fijian was brought up on. What gives it an ideological dimension - as a structure, a theory meant to sustain a certain way of life, a production of the subject and by the subject - is the belief that this mythology is consciously real. Vijendra Kumar's "Through the Time Tunnel" (the return to one's past superimposed upon Mrs. Indira Gandhi's own "time capsule," one wonders?) reinforces the attitudes implied ip the above quotation. Without any degree of understatement (litotes) or irony the preconcep­tions find, discover their own distortions. He writes:

It was the beginning of an interesting journey. I had two weeks to learn and see something of this vast and ancient land. This was the land of Lord Krishna, Lord Rama, Lord Buddha. Emperor Ashoka, Emperor Akbar and Swami Vivekananda. This was the land that spawned civilizations, was ravaged by conquerors who came from all the four directions. Yet somehow "Mother India" survived and triumphed over all. The conquerors became the conquered or converts .... This, too, was the land of Gandhi and Nehru. Gandhi gave the world a new vision and Nehru a new idealism.

The question whether Kumar actually believes this need not worry us. What is important is that he writes from within, as a producer and par­ticipant of the act of falsification, and he goes to India with the ideological formations of that mythology intact. Upon first reading I was convinced that the author was being ironic, but upon subsequent readings I find that an ironic reading is quite untenable. I believe that Kumar's style - and the aim of his journalism - is not to explore the falsification (the literary text ought to do that) but simply to add to the falsification, and I have used passages from it to establish my point about the nature of the girmit ideology. Towards the end he con­cedes, "India is another country in another age," giving heed to the dif­ference between the construct and the Real but it is not enough to dampen the earlier outburst:

The centuries old temples and archaelogical finds show that India had superb sculptors and masons when much of the world was still living in jungles.

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The temples of Mamallapuram (if that indeed is Kumar's Mahabalipuram) were in fact carved under the patronage of 7th cen­tury Pallava Kings. 15 The act of writing about India does not deny inherent ideological stance as indeed the denial works out in Naipaul's An Area of Darkness and India: A Wounded Civilization - 16 - there travelogue does become fiction - rather the act of writing affirms the bias and, I should imagine, Kumar does not wish to do otherwise. He does not offer a literary text, but he does crystallise for the literary critic (the dreadful kangaroo ticks that we are}, at least for the pur­poses of this model, the context within which the paper proposes to examine the writing of fiction in Fiji by Indians. Fiction, unlike Kumar's travelogue, cannot include unmediated ideas, it cannot, in other words simply reflect ideology, undecoded belief-systems. Moreover, unlike journalistic writing, a much more profound under­standing of the basis of the social and historical crisis is necessary before that act of transcendence that we are all so envious of can take place; the ideology, in other words, cannot replace the literary text. Or as Mao Tse Tung placed it, "Marxism includes realism in artistic and literary creation, but cannot replace it."

The literary text I have said mediates. This act of mediation explains Raymond Williams,

[describes] the process of relationship between 'society' and 'art,' or between the 'base' and the 'superstructure.' We should not expect to find (or always to find) directly 'reflected' social realities in art, since these (often or always) pass through a process of 'mediation' in which their original content is changed.t7

Clearly social realities can be projected or disguised which demands a corresponding act of "recovery" on the part of the creative writer and sometimes of the critic. In certain Australian works written on aboriginal subjects such as Thomas Keneally's The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith18 or Xavier Herbert's Capricornia, 19 for instance, the act of mediation gets complic"ated by, first of all, the use of an alien form (the novel) to locate black aboriginal consciousness and, secondly, by the use of irony which at least in the case of Keneally implies a certain collusion between the implied author and the implied reader. In the German Ideology Marx said that in "all ideology men and their circum­stances appear upside down as in a Camera obscura"20 an awareness of which J>laces us on our guard as to any easy identification between the authors voice and that of the implied narrator in the text. In Capricor­nia the positions of Peter Differ, Tim O'Cannon and Andy McRandy, all of whom espouse white liberal, humanist views, should not be equated with that of Herbert nor indeed seen as solutions to the black paradox in Australia. Aboriginal consciousness will be expressed only when blacks themselves (as Baldwin, Cleaver, Jackson, Brown, and others were to do in America) offer literary typifications of that con­sciousness. What I wish to impress upon you is that the relationship between the text and ideology is complex: solutions such as those of critics like Vincent Buckley who see in Capricornia the "cosmic in­justice done to all men" 21 inevitably refuse to grapple with the

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multiplicity of the text itself which ipso facto does not lead to simple metaphysical closures, the universal in the particular or the grand polemical gesture of our university English professors who always used to threaten us in their English tutorials with the implacable: "But who

knows?" The act of literary production in Fiji ever since Totaram Sanadhya's

Fiji Dvip mem meri ikkis varsa could be seen in terms of its ideological context. Pandit Pratap Chandra Sharma's work was in this tradition and in the seventies the,works of Satendra Nandan, Raymond Pillai and Subramani have been grappling,' by the fact of being Fiji Indian writing, with this background. The literary analysis of their works is, of course, complicated by the fact that we are not simply speaking about social backgrounds or "authentic history" (Nandan's phrase) but of ideology and, moreover, of ideology defined as a conscious attempt at l'falsification." Sanadhya, Sharma and latterly Vijendra Kumar, who has been cited already, offer reflective accounts of the ideology. The falsification is not transcended, the literary act does not attempt to mediate; but then these texts are not "literary" in the sense in which

Naipaul's works are. In 1976 Satendra Nandan, whilst still a student at the Australian National University, completed Faces in a Village.

22 The volume was

published in India and, characteristically, the printer omitted the year of publication. A year later the volume was re-issued in Fiji. By mid-1976 Pillai had established himself as a comparatively major short story writer and Subramani's "Sautu" had appeared in one of the Mana yearlies. This was the year in which an article on literature and the gir·

mit ideology was written. "A people without history is not redeemed from time." The words

are Eliot's but they are just as applicable to Nandan. I think he seeks for redemption from time, states emphatically that the indentured labourers wrote their history and hence possess the potential for redemption, though perhaps, not quite in the sense in which Eliot, echoing a Christian conception of history, writes about redemption. Yet Nandan's Faces in a Village does not perform the act of transcen­dence, of mediation, which, within the limitations of the model I have outlined, is necessary for the literary text which, unlike Vijendra Kumar's or even Sharma's, must defamiliarise (ostrananie), roughen out the edges, bring the Rea/into rehef and offer a reading of "history" which sees the falsification and, finally, which explains in ideology which has failed us. It is an ideology which made the act of banishment itself "an objective and conventional system of signification."

23 In "the

ghost" the old man under the tamarind tree utters.

youth i lost here. and grace i gave to this island place. what more than a man's age can one give to history's outrage? with the faith i lived, i fashioned a new world with bits from the old.

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Yes, "history's outrage" is an appropriate term for the system of slavery under which we came. But Nandan's man, as most of the people in his volume, offers unmediated restatements of the structure of belief which he had created to sustain his existence. The poem gains its momentum through mythic interpolations, through Sita's 'vanvas,' the 'ganges, ' 'shiv a's jata, 'Ram a's 'exile,' configurations to the very end of the construct made by the girmitiyas, consciously, to falsify because therein lay an act of enclosure. Again to refer to an extract from Sar­tre's "The Purpose of Writing" from which I have already quoted, literature "wilts if it is reduced to innocence, to song. "24 And here the "wilting" is also done in a verse which remains metonymic in it~ verbal relationships. The poetry, in other words, stays and operates on its diachronic horizontal level and does not cut across this contiguity syn­chronically. I think that Nandan's intuitive, and exceptionally humorous, gifts lead him to locate the crisis of the girmitiyas. Yet the form that he adopts, a form which is without ironic possibilities, does not sustain the abstractions which he no doubt knows are there. His forms do not capture the typifications, the dynamic tension, the bent of history, so that the act of creation simply reflects social realities, but does not capture the overall bent of the social and historical crisis. Within Nandan's English idiolect - and like other new literatures, the author must be the final arbiter - it is difficult to abstract a theory of poetics from a basic knowledge of poetic usage in English generally. He is obviously quite aware of the tradition of English poetics -sometimes the echoes of Eliot, especially, become annoyingly obvious - but he is also working from within Hindi poetics and the dehati songs on which he was brought up. That clearly imposes another level of meaning on his writing, and leads to questions about English in multilingual societies which must be left to people more competent than I to answer. Still, in the "old man and the scholar" there is ironic parenthesis (the parenthesis is an ironic code in this respect) where the act of mediation (as freedom) is clearly foregrounded:

'babu are you from the police?' (to caged animals that have grown used to prison bars or the safety of the barbed wire freedom can be so frightening).

The irony here, in Lukacsian terms, is "the self-correction of the world's fragility," 2:i but it is not the mode which Nandan employs. The structures of illusion embedded in the girmit ideology are hence not shown to be transformations, they are simply given "reflective" presence in art.

In his short stories similarly, Nandan proposes to unravel the coolie image in literature (and as a literary critic I believe he is responsible for coining the term "coolie experience" in literature), and shows within "boundary situations" (Karl Jaspers called it Grenzsituation, lit. "rock bottom existence") how the individual becomes isolated from the ideology. Again the problem lies not in his romantic presuppositions or

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in his underlying sense of the der entfremdete Menschen or, in San­skrit, sa ekakin manusah, the alienated man in society, but in the text's lack of ironic, potential, the text's inability to mediate the falsification. "The Guru" therefore, captures the surface textures of Fiji Indian life, its infectious humour, but fails to split upon the anxieties, the un­derlying fragility. There is, moreover, perhaps an excessive collusion between the implied reader and the implied author. The footnotes, the intermittent parenthesis (does he still have the Australian overseers in mind?), I believe preclude the deeper searching going on in the mind of the Tasmania-trained lawyer who, God alone knows why, except that Tasmania and Auckland have produced most of our western educated lawyers, has returned home via Auckland. Here are some instances of that collusion at work:

(about the 'lines') .... these barracks were erected several girmits ago to house the descendants of indentured labourers who worked on the CSR Company's pineapple plantations. The temporary shelter of the father had become the per­manent homes of the children who had accepted their lot with deepening fatalism.

Or again referring to katha:

Katha, I recalled, was one of the most popular Hindu ceremonies performed on auspicious occasions.

Beckaroo, in spite of his name, does have a problem or so we are told. He has become a Christian and wishes to marry a memia from Tasmania. It is a moment of some importance. He goes through a ritual and recalls his childhood (some glimpses are exceptionally funny) but the act of the katha does not authenticate being, the "boundary situation" in the short story remains a far-fetched potential. (II digress here to suggest that if we were to look for the poetics of narrative in Fijian fiction generally, perhaps a useful generic term may be talanoa, a word which has been incorporated into Fiji Hindi. Its formal features would include rambling, all inclusive story-telling, point-scoring, jab­bing in the arm, reader-audience collusion and so on).

Raymond Pillai similarly works within situations where fundamental questions are asked, where a choice must be made with reference to certain "immutable values" or ritual, and perhaps his short stories may be analysed better from within generic and structural notions of the short story form. Within the medieval ampltficatio-brevitas spectrum of the narrative form, his stories fall very much towards the brevitas end, being scarcely more than five to six pages in length. In the short stories included in The Indo-Fijian Experience the "boundary situations" offered are in the case of "The Celebration," the ritual of slaughtering a goat for Christmas and, in the case of "Laxmi," an act of violence which brings a recently married couple closer together. The first is rural. extended-family based; the second an ur­ban, bed-sitter tale. I think typologically at any rate, Pillai's relationship with the formations of the girmit ideology (a world-view where we still carry with us), seems to me to be at least artistically somewhat more meaningful than that of Satendra Nandan. The literary act does

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defamiliarise, is less mythic and certainly more symbolic. Pillai zooms in on the ritual of slaughter with some intensity to offer, symbolically, a re-allocation of one's values. Ram a's act of defiance (I think the choice of the name is significant - there is a way in which the character Rama is the primeval girmitiya ) offers a critique of old values, and the need to enter into the falsification, especially as the context of the en­tire situation seems to be rife with contradictions. A Hindu family, slaughtering a goat to celebrate the birth of a christian god. The situational irony itself makes the dilemma of Rama allegorical and I think, quite rightly, the act of slaughter, one of the most sustained pieces of description in Indo-Fijian fiction, becomes in itself the con­text for the resolution of a Grenzsituation. I think the slaughter also heightens the phenomenon of the disruption and the breakdown of the Girmit ideology which we find as a somewhat "advanced coherence" in Pillai's short stories. The short story form as Martin Heidegger obser­ved in a footnote to Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyitch is capable of crystallising and demarcating crisis, such as death, the classic Gren­zsituation, within a short space of time. 26 In terms of achieving a heightened consciousness, a race must produce its Ivan llyitch or its Mohun Biswas.

Like Nandan, however, Pillai still writes within a mode which has been exhausted. The form with its basis in realism does not seem to be able to make meaningful gestures towards an ideological nexus which is anything but holistic, or if holistic it is an holism based on an illusory structure of belief. In other places a new st¥le develops because the old style has exhausted its expressive possibilities, in other words, in these places the style based on classical realism produces simply, as Roland Barthes would have it, lisible (readerly) texts and not scriptible (writerly) texts. 27 Henry Lawson's The Drover's Wife is hence re-writ­ten by Murray Bail within a style of writing which is closer to metafic­tion.

I think the problematics of writing in the seventies against the background of literary exhaustion which leads to a rethinking a formal possibilities in fiction is faced most adequately, though incompletely, by Subramani whose "Marigolds" I propose to examine in the light of the model (s) I have outlined so far. Its title, much more so than either Pillai's "The Celebration" or Nandan's "The Guru" is a lexias, a unit of reading, which encapsulates within itself a riddle which must be un­folded progressively in the course of the text and a mystery whose relationship to the text remains oblique. Along with Roland Barthes we may call it a hermeneutic code2B (and in the audience I can feel the presence of the phenomenologist-critic Bill Ashcroft!) which articulates a question, and is a signifier which will occur in several places in the text. "Marigolds," plant of genus Calendula or Tagetes, Middle English from Mary (probably the Virgin) plus dialect gold, in Hindi gemda, the flower that appeases the gods, the symbol of Hinduism, is a word which occurs five times in the text. It controls symbolically the narrative pat­tern, it is an offering to Dharma, which she refuses; it is an image of

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fragmentation, a point of reference which unites illusion and reality. Yet it is also as a signifier within a total Indian-Fijian cultural complex that the flower is significant. It comes closest to what may be termed in Fijian se-ni kai Idia, "the flower of the Indians." As a title it offers at the onset the possibilities of plurality, the categorical denial of a univocal reading of the text. It is simultaneously based on ideology ("marigolds" are central to Hinduism) and a denial of ideology (it enters into relationships which fragment and carve open the construct). The Grenzsituation of Mr. Chetram is more centrally existential -existence itself is the questioning of ideological assumptions - Dhar­ma's workship, a man's relationship with his wife, his mother, all seem to have been a carry over of oppressive Indian relationships. But I believe that the ironic mode constantly corrects one's perspectives and offers the text as an act of mediation, not simply as a transcription of values. Whereas the Tasmania-educated lawyer in Nandan's "The Guru" was simply a purveyor of the situation whose mind reflected reality, Chetram belongs to the character in fiction who "typifies" the ideological tensions. The idea of typification I think is central to the act of mediation performed in "Marigolds." Art, by figurative means, wrote Luckacs typifies "the elements and tendencies of reality that recur according to regular laws. although changing with the changing circumstances." 29 Mr. Chetram 's dilemma (and note that typologically he belongs, on a much higher level, to Dhanpat in "Sautu") constitutes, fictionally, the ideological falsification within the girmit ideology and his actions, his mental fragmentation, respond inversely to the inner truth of that falsification.

The fiction offers, transcends, the falsification by denoting in the in­trinsic concentration of its central character actions which, whilst reflecting the crisi'S of a hundred years of banishment, demonstrate simultaneously an awareness of where the ideology has gone wrong. In other words, Chetram recognises that, as he agonises towards the end, "Everything • history and custom, had prepared me for this impasse. There is no alternative: a hundred years of history on these islands has resulted in wilderness and distress." Like "Sautu," fiction which recog­nises social reality as a dynamic process and "reflects" not the super­ficialities of that "reality" but its inner constituent processes of which the outer "reality" are mere, and superficial transformations, mediate the falsification and offer "types" within which the falsification no longer operates. "Marigolds" pre-eminently achieves that purpose. And I think that the mental crisis of both Dhanpat and Chetram are therefore significiant. In art, then, as my argument proceeds, the con­scious falsification is shown to be inappropriate. People who recognise that, of course, like even Ram a in "The Celebration," must pay a price because they have broken a mythology which has sustained a migrant race for a hundred years and will continue to do so, so long as the problems of a nation continue to be discussed within the categories of the bourgeois myths of racial oppression. A false consciousness necessitates an act of practical commitment, a drastic reorganization of

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the fundamental economic base within the matrix of which ideology and art are mere superstructures.

I think that Subramani has performed, structurally, the Iingusitic act necessary for thechange in direction of Indo-Fijian fiction. Fiction as I have said, does not create a known, knowable, objective, reality, it sim­ply re-models other models, which in this case go back to the construct of the girmit ideology, a model which, in the case of "Marigolds" is shown to be a transformation of other constituent elements within the ideology. Recognising the fact that the possibilities of fiction have been exhausted Subramani, like short story writers in Australia, notably Murray Bail, Frank Moorhouse, Michael Wilding, Peter Carey and Peter Cowan (among others) has found an idiom, a style, a fictional way of organising perceptions to which other fictions can be related. He has written, in other words, a scriptible short story, not a classic, lisible text, one which can be constantly read by the critic and re-written by the artist. In Trinidadian Indian writing (comparisons which can be made more fruitfully by Dr. Helen Tiffin who is an authority on the subject) Seepersad Naipaul did achieve something like this and left his son to complete the act. Subramani, one hopes, will combine the role of father and son. 'The world is what it is: men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it' so begins Naipaul's latest work, A Bend in the River. 30 I think that the Indo­Fijian literary artist must see that he too is not just "nothing."

Even artists can become nothing if the mechanism of their artistic production is controlled by other peope; or if they have to write for a consumer market and sell their products accordingly. The outline of the political economy of Indo-Fijian writing is therefore important. The writers I have mentioned in the course of this paper are all attached to the University of the South Pacific and I should imagine are committed to upholding the values of the University. I don't know what exactly these values are but at a superficial glance they do not seem to be those which can accommodate literary activity which is in someways aligned to a "world view" contrary to the one which it, as a regional, Pacific institution, upholds. It is also significant to note that a number of short stories written by these writers have been offered as entries to competitions organised in Australia. "Marigolds" won the 1978 short­story competition organised by SPACLALS, Brisbane. One wonders if there is a certain constraint imposed by this very act upon the nature of creativity. The works also get anthologised very quickly and even before criticism and judgement have given them a certain placement (F.R. Leavis's term I believe) they become part of English literature syllabuses in Fiji. The fndo-F1jian Experience was published by the University of Queensland Press and the comments of Australian critics are crucial for its sale there. Another centenary volume, Ram as Banishment, was published in London and Auckland and again the product will have to suffer the vagaries of the market forces which

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operate in England and in New Zealand. I think that the act of collusion which I have cited in the works of Nandan reinforce my belief that unless both production and distribution of the literary text lie completely in the hands of the artists themselves (with Mtchael Wilding I don't see any reason why the Pacific writers cannot form a publishing company in Suva, or use the facilities of the South Pacific Creative Arts Society more fully) there may be a tendency to write with the members of SPACLALS in mind and end up writing as Bails and Moorhouses and not as lndo-Fijians. 31

"Humankind," wrote T.S. Eliot, "cannot bear very much reality J2

and the girmit ideology perhaps was also an answer to the incapacity of people to bear "very much reality." Acts of literary mediation offered here as acts which transcend a flawed world-view, of course, remain a criticism which is based on the limitations of the model and is clearly theoretical in intent. As a girmitiya, the literary works of my people, challenge and alter, in terms of the reception aesthetics of Hans Robert Jauss, my own horizons of expectations 33 and these are, inevitably, for­med precisely on the basis of the experience recounted by Vijendra Kumar and carried, as a psychological totality, by V.S. Naipaul. Moreover, fiction, and more centrally, the novel, becomes authentic only if it is aware of its problematic status, that is aware of its own '"impossibility " of existence, given the shifting nature of its context. I feel that Nandan, for instance, writes what is no longer possible to write, because he creates a world which signifies what is no longer sig­nified. But of course, I am aware that proof of the girmit ideology as I have defined it will have to wait until historians have fully explored gir­mitiya as well as "colonial" history.

I may end up uttering T.S. Eliot's memorable defense of the "dissociation of sensibility" in his second lecture on Milton (194 7): " .... and for what these cause were, we may dig and dig until we get to a depth at which words and concepts fail us." 34 But, in the process, as Honor Klein's Severed Head I may have uttered prophecies which the academic industry pays me to utter ("a morsel of gold" were Iris Murdoch's words) and which by some unforeseeable twist of fate, may even lead to strange knowledge. Or did I hear Chetram's wife Dharma recalling the words of a Vedic sun-god: ekam satyam viprah bahuda vadanti? The Kangaroo tick has been discovered.

NOTES • The historical basis of the girmit "ideology" may be followed up in the researches of

Ahmed Ali, K.L. Gillian, C. Jayawardena, Brij La!, Adrian Mayer, Hugh Tinker and others. See the relevant chapters in Vijay Mishra (ed) Rama 's Banishment: A Cen­tenary Tribute to the Fiji Indians 1879-1879 (London & Auckland: Heinemann, 1979) for further details. The definitive version of "Indo-Fijian Fiction and the Girmit Ideology" was published in Chris Tiffin (ed) South Pacific Images (Brisbane: SPACLALS, 1978), pp. 53-67. The word girmit is an abbreviated form of "agreement," the document indentured labourers" "thumbed" (rarely signed) to give away, initially, five years of their lives to a colonial administration. Hence, in the characteristic Fiji Hindi fashion, girmitiya

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.....-......_

1 2 3

4 5 6

7

8

9

10 11 12 13

14 15

16

17 18 19 20 21 22 23

24 25 26 27

28 29 30 31

32 33

34

(nominative singular with visarga which drops, plural with the English s) for inden­tured labourers.

(London, 1961; rpt. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969, p.182. George Steiner, '''Critic'/'Reader,"' New Literary History X, 3 (Spring 1979), p 436. In John Barnes (ed). The Writer in Australia: A Collection of Literary Documents i856-i964(Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1969), pp. 8-32.

New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 197 4. Mark Twain, Following the Equator, 1897. Terry Eagleton, Marxism and Literary Criticism (London: Methuen, 1976), p.6.

Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), Chapter 4. V.S. Naipaul (foreword), Seepersad Naipaul, The Adventures of Gurudeva and other Stories (London: Andre Deutsch, 197 6 ), p.13.

Chandra Jayawardena, "Social Contours of an Indian Labour Force during the In­denture Period," in Vi jay Mishra op. cit. p. 63.

Raymond Williams, op. cit. Suva: The Indian Times, 194 7. Raymond Williams. op. cit, p.76. Subramani (ed.), The Indo-Fijian Experience (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1979). Unless otherwise stated, all Indo-Fijian texts have been taken from this volume. Raymond Williams, op. cit. p. 69. A.L. Basham, The Wonder that was india (London, 1954; 3rd, rev. ed .. London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1967), p.355. See Vi jay Mishra, "Mythic Fabulation: Naipaul's India," New Literature Review, 4 (1978). 59-65. Raymond Williams. op. cit., p. 98. Sydney, 1972; rpt. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976. Sydney. 1937; rpt. Pacific Books, 1969. Karl Marx and F. Engels, The German ideology (London; 1970), p14. Vincent Buckley, ''Capricornia," Meanjin, 19 (1960), pp. 13-30. Satendra Nandan, Faces in a Village (Delhi: Deepak Seth, n.d., 1976?).

I owe this reference to Dr. John Frow of the Comparative Literature Programme, Murdoch University. J-P. Sartre, Between Existentialism and Marxism (London, 1974) pp. 13-14. G. Lukacs, The Theory of the Novel (London: Merlin Press, 1971 ), p. 75. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1973), p. 495. Roland Barthes, S/Z (London: Jonathan Cape, 1975), p.4. See also Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero (London: Jonathan Cape, 1967). Roland Barthes, S/ Z, p.1 7. Quoted by Raymond Williams, op. cit., 102. London: Andre Deutsch, 1979, p.9. See, for example, Michael Wilding's comments in Australian Literary Studies, VIII, 2 (October. 1977), New Writing in Australia -Special Issue. T.S. Eliot, "Burnt Norton." See Hans Robert Jauss, "Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory," New Literary History, 2 (Autumn 1970), 7-37. T.S. Eliot, On Poetry and Poets (London: Faber and Faber, 1957) p.153.

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