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Stirring the plot: A Wknd interview with author Geetanjali Shree

Mar 18, 2022 12:16 PM IST

Her new book, Tomb of Sand, has become the first novel translated from Hindi to make it to the International Booker Prize longlist. Her storytelling involves unusual twists; the translation by Daisy Rockwell is a tour de force. See why Shree writes as she does.

When Geetanjali Shree turned 19 and was showing every sign of growing into an independent-minded young woman, her father gave her a hundred-rupee note as a birthday present (an unusual gesture; a hundred rupees was quite a lot of money in the 1970s, and birthdays were rarely celebrated then, even less so in small-town Uttar Pradesh), and said to her, “You may marry any boy of your choice, so long as he’s a Brahmin and in the IAS.” Her father, an IAS officer, wanted her to take the civil services exam too. Shree smiles at the memory. If he were still around (he passed away in 2002), he’d probably be delighted with what she did instead.

Shree plays with words and form in her novel about an 80-year-old Indian woman who steps back into her pre-Partition past. ‘Why must a book be easy to read? Often language is treated as just the carrier of ideas, of the story. For me, language has its own presence and independent personality,’ she says. (Sanjeev Verma / HT Photo)
Shree plays with words and form in her novel about an 80-year-old Indian woman who steps back into her pre-Partition past. ‘Why must a book be easy to read? Often language is treated as just the carrier of ideas, of the story. For me, language has its own presence and independent personality,’ she says. (Sanjeev Verma / HT Photo)

A brilliant, celebrated Hindi writer, with five novels and five short-story collections to her credit, Shree’s latest and fifth novel Ret Samadhi, translated into English as Tomb of Sand by American translator and writer Daisy Rockwell, has been longlisted for the International Booker Prize (alongside 12 other books). It is the first novel translated from Hindi to be in the running for the prestigious award. Shree has made literary history.

When the book’s UK publishers, Tilted Axis, sent her word two days before the public announcement of the list, Shree says she didn’t quite grasp the implication. “I was pleased, of course,” she says. “But I was a bit detached.”

Gradually, as the news sank in, she began to feel humbled and grateful. “It would be most disrespectful of me not to realise the maan-sammaan given to me. Can anyone claim this is the only Hindi work worthy of honour? Of course not. But I feel a sense of wonderment about my own work, that so many people, sitting so far away, have read the book and liked it.”

She’s not thinking of whether she’ll win or not. She’s not in any race, she says. “Something wonderful has happened to me. For me, it’s a proud Hindi moment. Let’s leave it at that.”

***

At a hefty 700-plus pages, Ret Samadhi / Tomb of Sand is the story of an 80-year-old Indian woman who loses her husband, turns her back on her life and her family, and travels to Pakistan, to her pre-Partition past. That description cannot begin to do justice to the complexity of the story and characters, or to the novel’s unique literary style. Some chapters, for instance, are just a single sentence; in another chapter, a single sentence stretches over three pages. An interviewer described the varying lengths as reminiscent of an ECG graph.

And then there’s the way Shree uses words, creating an almost musical rhythm, pairing words that roll into one another; pairing others that sound the same but mean completely different things.

Read an exclusive excerpt from Tomb of Sand here

This also makes Ret Samadhi / Tomb of Sand a demanding read, and an extremely challenging book to translate. “Why must a book be easy to read?” Shree says. “I enjoy the audio quality of language, I enjoy turns of phrase. Language is all about breath, not just easy breathing but fun breathing, different kinds of breathing. But you can’t have erratic breathing which will make you collapse. There has to be balance. Often language is treated as just the carrier of ideas, of the story. For me, language has its own presence and independent personality.”

When Ret Samadhi was first released, in 2019, Shree sent a copy to French translator Annie Montaut, who translated Shree’s 1993 novel, Mai. As soon as she read the book, Montaut announced she was going to translate it. “She found a publisher. I never even met them,” says Shree. “It was shortlisted for the Emile Guimet prize in 2021, which was wonderful. Both Annie and Daisy asked me such detailed questions about the book, I had to research myself and my book often, to answer them.” Daisy’s translation is a tour de force, all the more remarkable since Shree and she have never met.

***

Shree’s journey as a Hindi writer probably began when she was still a child, growing up in small towns across Uttar Pradesh, picking up Hindi in many registers — sophisticated kavi sammelans or poetry meets, the street, children’s magazines; but most of all, her mother. “I always spoke to my mother in Hindi. My Hindi was nurtured by her,” she says. “When I went away to college in Delhi, I wrote long letters to her in Hindi. She’s 96 today and she’s picked up enough English, but it’s not her comfortable language.”

When Shree started writing, she dabbled in English at first, but soon realised that Hindi was the language she wanted to express herself in. The question she is still asked most often, she says, is: Why do you write in Hindi (the unsaid rest of the question being, “when you could very well write in English”). “This could only happen in an ex-colonial country,” she says. “Here, people can say, ‘Oh, I can’t read Hindi’ or ‘Hindi is so difficult,’ without being embarrassed or ashamed in the least. In fact, some say it with pride.” She pauses, then adds, “English is the language of power, it’s the link language of the world and you must learn it by all means. But that doesn’t mean one should be ignorant of one’s own rich lineage, or be proud of that ignorance!”

Shree’s first few stories were published in the 1980s, in the prestigious Hindi literary journal Hans. Like many writers, she says she needs absolute peace and solitude to write. She and her academic husband lead quiet lives in Delhi. She often escapes to write, sometimes retreating to a rubber plantation in Kerala, sometimes to writers’ residencies abroad.

Shree has just completed her sixth novel Sah-Sa (which Hindi readers will recognise as a play on the words sahsa or suddenly; sah or together; saha, to endure; and sa or like, as in “bada sa ghar”). She hasn’t sent it to the publisher yet. Why the hesitancy? “Maybe it’s the Covid years. Maybe the world feels like it’s turning upside down,” she says. “Is there a tomorrow? Is the world going to reinvent itself or are we heading towards doom? I’ll send the manuscript to the publisher when I feel ready.”

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