Naag Mountain

A remarkable debut collection by an Australian and New Zealand poet of Indo-Fijian background, the descendant of indentured labourers.

Naag Mountain is an imagined recovery of the little-known cultural inheritance of a displaced and exploited people. Historical figures, folk characters and spirits are entwined in a narrative poem coloured by the surrealism of dreams. A community whose ancestors from India were indentured by the Colonial Sugar Refining Company, to labour on sugar plantations in Fiji, receives their dreams as messages from their friends across the Tasman. A mysterious reel of film washes ashore in Port Douglas, depicting harrowing violence under the indenture system. The historical actors walk out of the film and into the world of the living. The community walks into the projection. The naag, the thousand-mouthed snake, conjures a floating mountain, lined with flowering trees, mists and dreams.

SHORTLISTED: QLD Literary Awards – Judith Wright Calanthe Award for a Poetry Collection 2024

A mytho-poetic explosion that circles itself obsessively, draping the language of dream over a history of slavery and violent extraction. Anjali speaks directly to and through the settler colonial veil to tie this dreaming to Indigenous realities. Formally inventive and lyrically compelling…a stunningly assured and beautiful work of poetry.
Judges’ comments, Queensland Literary Awards

Naag Mountain is an exquisite work that resounds with the reminder of what can be reclaimed when a community moves towards their awakening: their dreams, their futures. This is a distinguished debut collection from a poet whose vision is urgent and consuming.
Eunice Andrada

Epic in nature, rich in detailed imagery…Naag Mountain is an important and timely contribution to Pacific Literature by one of its emerging gifted storytellers. This is a portentous beginning.
Selina Tusitala Marsh

Naag Mountain is a place where the material and immaterial are both incarnate; where incantation is commemoration, summoning the dead back to life and making visions and dreams manifest.
Declan Fry, ABC Arts (best new book)

[Anjali’s] work testifies to poetry’s power to resist propaganda – with lush and mythic imagery, she retells stories of forced removal and oppression in her community’s vocabulary.
Ariana Haghighi, Meanjin

Though it’s impossible for collective healing to be neat or conclusive, Naag Mountain presents ways that histories can be processed around the violence of archives and physical sites of trauma. It’s difficult to put faith in transitory elements like dreams, but Anjali shows that it’s precisely this ephemerality that’s capacious enough for the shifting legacies of empire.
Gurmeet Kaur, Liminal