IRA MATHUR
In 2022, when I was in London, I saw Geetanjali Shree on the International Booker Prize live stream in an elegant black kurta set off by a slash of red scarf on stage after she won the International Booker Prize (awarded annually for a single book translated into English and published in the UK or Ireland).
Beaming next to her was translator and co-winner Daisy Rockwell, who shared the prize money of 50,000 pounds.
Geetanjali Shree’s novel Tomb of Sand made history by becoming the first South Asian-language novel and the first novel in Hindi to win this award.
Why had I not heard of her?
An online publishing magazine (Frontlist) revealed that “India is the third largest English language publisher in the world and the seventh largest book publishing country worldwide. More than 80,000 new titles (adjusted to 100,000 new titles in 2024) in 24 different languages are published every year by over 16,000 publishers.
According to the 2009 National Youth Readership Survey, a quarter of the youth population (an astonishing 83 million) identify themselves as book readers. I hadn’t heard of Shree, but millions in India had. I looked her up.
Geetanjali Shree, also known as Geetanjali Pandey (she’s chosen to use her mother’s last name), is an Indian Hindi-language novelist and short-story writer based in New Delhi, India. She is the author of several short stories and five novels.
Her 200-page novel Mai was shortlisted for the Crossword Book Award in 2001.
Shree was born in Mainpuri, Uttar Pradesh, India. She studied history for her first degree and got her master’s from Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. After starting her PhD at Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda on the Hindi writer Munshi Premchand, Shree became interested in Hindi literature, wrote her first short story during her PhD, and turned to writing in Hindi, which she’s been doing for 35 years.
Shree grabbed my heart when she said, ‘I never dreamed of the Booker; I never thought I could.’ She added that “it gave her a melancholic satisfaction. It is an elegy for our world in the face of impending doom.”
It was clear from her words that the personal is political for Shree. She may have been speaking of India, but she was speaking of and to an increasingly fragmented world.
And she is not a writer who kicks the ladder down after ascending it.
She said then, as she has repeatedly. “Behind me and this book lies a rich and flourishing literary tradition in Hindi and other South Asian languages. World literature will be richer for knowing some of the finest writers in these languages.”
She said what I was thinking—perhaps what every Indian exposed to India’s 22 official languages (home also to over 120 languages and 270 mother tongues) knows intuitively. The startling news was not that Hindi had reached the Booker, but that it took this long.
Shree’s win finally felt like the triumph of an India that still wrestles with the shadow of colonialism. India’s growing middle class of over 300 million people still sees English as the language of growth.
When I was a child, I attended schools across India, where I studied three compulsory languages: English, Hindi, Sanskrit, and the language of whatever state we happened to be living in. All Indian students are multilingual.
English prevailed in the home as it did among the middle classes who spoke it in the clubs while downing their gin and tonics, over bridge and rummy tables, and across tennis courts as if the English had never left.
My Muslim grandmother, a highly educated woman who spoke English and Urdu beautifully, often complained she couldn’t understand the news in Hindi. My Hindu army officer father told me Hindi was harder than any of the languages I was learning in school as it was born out of Sanskrit (a dead language like Latin), which had been around for 2,000 years in India. Sanskrit, he told me, influenced the writing of Indian epic poetry, the Ramayana, and the Mahabharata.
I never mastered Sanskrit, Urdu, Hindi, Kannada, and Punjabi—just enough to get by in different parts of India.
But when I was a child and my visits back, I also associated Hindi with all the hard stuff for women—not just a complex language to learn but a strict code for women, self-effacing, dutiful ideals of modesty, education, sacrifice, and women who are always sisters, mothers, daughters, but never just themselves. Then I began to read Shree’s Tomb of Sand.
“A tale tells itself. It can be complete but also incomplete, the way all tales are. This tale has a border and women who come and go as they please. Once you’ve got women and a border, a story can write itself ...”
I was hooked by the first few lines.
Tomb of Sand is not a book you read, but one you absorb through your pores slowly, like a glass of wine that slowly intoxicates you, fixes you, and influences you, so there is nothing but you and the words of the narrator, and you follow almost as if you are sleepwalking.
I discovered (I’m on my second reading) a book that is not a book but a home and world you enter, inhabit, and absorb as part of a collective life imagination and dreams, particular to an upper-class Indian family but universal to all families.
In this world, you feel the storyteller play dodge with you, pull you in till you suspend disbelief into a world where walking sticks are not support for an elderly woman who has been recently widowed but a gold wand bursting with butterflies that would take her flying towards freedom away from 2,000 years of doing things, and abruptly reminds you it’s a story, it can go anywhere. The storyteller is in charge.
It’s a world that echoes the world we live in, where things, language, and old forms are falling apart and building up in unrecognisable ways, where half-submerged words appear with startling insight.
Shree works in theatre with Vivadi, a group of writers, artists, dancers, and painters, so the form her novel takes is unlike anything I’ve read. Her prose is darting, quiet, and subconscious; the sun could be a character warming a fragile old woman, following her around. A sentence can go on for pages, and a chapter can be three words.
Shree sugars the pill with her compelling prose by simply showing a free woman, a fluid world without crushing stereotypes of human roles, of reality, and of lives layered with history, imagination, half-buried folklore, memory, intuition, and magic.
Anything can happen; there can be turmoil and intertwining, the world observed with the senses and imagination, yet an intricate web holds it all together, an advancing plot that the reader follows almost in a dreamlike trance.
All this in a book with a most unlikely protagonist: Ma, an 80-year-old woman who spends half the book with her back against the world, in her son’s house facing the wall because her husband has died and simply refuses to get out of bed.
But one day, after the grandson incapable of laughter brings her a gold butterfly-covered cane, Ma gets out of bed, magically free.
She goes off to live with her liberal writer daughter and manages, even there, to shock with her deepening relationship with Rosie, a hijra (transgender).
Eventually, her daughter follows Ma to Lahore, pre-partition Pakistan, where Ma lived as a girl, and then to Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, where she goes looking for her ex-husband, Anwar. She is known as Ma throughout, but in the final pages, she is reunited with her first love and becomes Anwar-Chanda.
Tomb of Sands is also a sharply observant commentary on the potential savagery of family life. It delves deep into the interior life of an elderly widowed woman, who traditionally, especially in Indian society, becomes invisible, her duty as mother-daughter and wife over.
This novel turns all that on its head as The Guardian reviewer Ankita Chakraborty observed, “This is also the story of an upper-class family. Men yell and speak to women indirectly, and women refuse to comply. Shree writes sarcastically about Indian men, and she is at her sharpest in these scenes. There is a 15-page description of a self-important man’s inability to laugh. Another insists that his wife cook fresh meals daily because eating leftovers could kill him. A boyfriend is described as kissing without consent: “A long string of saliva fell from his laughing mouth into her face.”
This keenly observed writing is no accident. Shree, like Arundhati Roy, is a keen observer of the changing society in India today and has written an academic paper addressing Partition and the Hindu-Muslim divide in an academic paper titled “The North Indian Intelligentsia and the Hindu-Muslim Question”.
If Shree, a writer with an unending imagination, is tethered to any single idea, it must be freedom.
As a Caribbean writer and reader, I am grateful to the Bocas Lit Fest for giving us the opportunity to hear Geetanjali Shree speak, read, and engage with readers at the upcoming Bocas Lit Fest on Saturday, April 27, at Nalis from 3.30-4.30.
Bocas Lit Fest appearance
Geetanjali Shree will be in conversation with writer and journalist Ira Mathur, winner of the 2023 OCM Bocas Prize for
Non-Fiction (Love The Dark Days), on Saturday, April 27,
from 3.30-4.30 pm.
The event will take place in the Old Fire Station at the National Library and Information System Authority, 23 Abercromby Street, Port-of-Spain (The Derek Walcott Theatre),
and is free and open to all.
The 2024 NGC Bocas Lit Fest will run from April 25 to April 28—entirely in-person with livestreamed events.
Bocas website:
https://www.bocaslitfest.com/
