Geetanjali Shree
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Contents |
Popularity outside India
In the West
February 11, 2023: The New York Times
When Geetanjali Shree’s novel “Tomb of Sand” was released in India five years ago, many didn’t know what to make of it. The story — about an 80-year-old woman who refuses to get out of bed — shifts perspective without warning, gives voice to birds and inanimate objects and includes invented words and gibberish.
Some declared it an experimental masterpiece. Others found it impenetrable. Sales in India were modest. So Shree was stunned when the book, in an English translation, captivated readers, critics and literary prize committees in the West — a rare, and perhaps unparalleled, feat for a book written in Hindi.
For Shree, who is 65 and lives in Delhi, writing in Hindi isn’t a political or literary statement, but an organic creative choice. “Hindi chose me,” she said. “That’s my mother tongue.”
Her decision, however, and her novel’s success, are having an impact in India and beyond, bringing attention to the wealth and diversity of the Indian literary landscape, often overlooked by the West, with its focus on English-language writing.
“Her insistence on holding on to her Hindi and taking it to the next level, it shows a path to other Indian writers who feel like they have to write in English because of the hegemony of English,” Jenny Bhatt, a writer and translator of Gujarati literature, said of Shree.
For decades, contemporary Indian literature has been largely defined in the West by English-language fiction writers of such renown they are practically household names, even in countries far from their own: novelists like Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, Aravind Adiga, Amitav Ghosh and Anita Desai.
Producing work in English has traditionally been seen as more prestigious and lucrative; English-language books are also more easily available to readers, both internationally and in India, a country with 22 official languages and more than 120 spoken languages, plus countless dialects, where English remains a lingua franca.
All this made Shree’s commitment to writing in Hindi particularly striking.
A fixture of the Indian literary landscape for more than three decades, with five novels to her name, Shree had never reached a global audience. That changed last year, when the English-language edition of “Tomb of Sand,” translated by Daisy Rockwell, received the 2022 International Booker Prize, becoming the first translation from a South Asian language to win. Rights to the novel have now sold in a dozen languages, and a U.S. edition was published by HarperCollins last month.
“She is of the class and the educational background where she could have been another Indian English-language writer,” said Rockwell.
Instead, Shree has pushed the boundaries of experimentation within Hindi literature.
“She’s breaking narrative conventions and testing the limits of her form,” Rockwell said, and “reinjecting it into the Hindi bloodstream.”
“Tomb of Sand” remains a rare exception. Translations into English make up a small fraction of the books published in the United States; translations from South Asian languages are a minuscule portion of the total. Of more than 3,000 translations of fiction and poetry released in the United States in the last five years, just 20 were from Indian languages, compared to more than 100 from China and around 200 from Japan, according to a database of English-language translations on Publishers Weekly’s website.
Some translators attribute that gap to the global success of Anglophone Indian fiction, which has often overshadowed the literature being written in South Asian languages.
“That’s considered enough to represent the subcontinent,” Mahmud Rahman, a writer and translator of Bengali literature, said of Anglophone fiction. “The variety of writing that is available in South Asia is much bigger and more varied and complex.”
It’s not that the translation of Indian literature into English isn’t happening. It’s just largely happening within India. Rockwell has been translating from Hindi and Urdu for 30 years, and has published 10 translations, including works by acclaimed writers like Krishna Sobti and Upendranath Ashk, but she never had a translation released outside of India before “Tomb of Sand.”
“There’s a massive world of literature that’s not being seen at all outside the subcontinent,” she said.
Several major Indian publishing houses have expanded their efforts to translate works written in regional languages into English. HarperCollins India’s Perennial imprint publishes around a dozen English language translations a year — roughly half its list. Last year, Penguin Press, a division of Penguin Random House India, released 21 English translations. It currently has translations from 16 of the 22 major Indian languages on its list, including Hindi, Urdu, Malayalam, Tamil and Kannada, as well as from historically underrepresented languages like Odia, Manipuri, Bhojpuri and Assamese.
“If we want to be truly representative of the country, we have to do translations,” said Manasi Subramaniam, editor in chief of Penguin Random House India. “Even in India, people could be looking at translations in a whole new way due to the success of ‘Tomb of Sand’.”
Growing up in towns and cities around Uttar Pradesh, where her father worked as a civil servant, Shree was exposed to a wide range of spoken Hindi registers. She picked it up on the streets and at home, from poetry meets, from songs and movies. She studied history in college and graduate school, largely in English. When she began publishing fiction in the 1980s, she wrote in both English and Hindi, but soon found she could express herself more freely in Hindi.
“I’ve not had a conventional education in Hindi, which could have been a great disadvantage, but I also dare to think that I turned it to my advantage, by not carrying a baggage of conventionality,” she said. “There’s a lot of inventiveness in the language.”
Shree got the idea for “Tomb of Sand” when an image took hold of her: the sight of an elderly woman, practically invisible to those around her. Shree grew curious about the woman’s inner life. “Is that really someone who is sick and tired of life and waiting to die,” she said, “or is there some plot waiting to hatch?”
The question gave rise to Amma, the unlikely octogenarian heroine of “Tomb of Sand,” who refuses to get out of bed. To her fretting family, Amma looks inert and lifeless. Then things take a strange turn: Amma disappears, and when she turns up later, just as unexpectedly, she’s full of life, ready for adventure.
As Shree wrote about Amma’s metamorphosis — a journey that culminates in a fateful trip to Pakistan, which she had fled after violence erupted during Partition in 1947 — she found herself composing an elegy to pluralistic, polyglot India, a place teeming with a diversity of languages, religions, cultures and dialects.
“The book kept bringing up the kinds of divisions that have crept in and the unities that are being lost,” Shree said. “That’s what we seem to be losing, now that there’s a kind of monopoly of certain languages and cultures.”
Shree didn’t expect the novel to resonate with an international audience. Several of her previous novels had been translated into English, but none were released outside of India, and she had no reason to believe “Tomb of Sand” would be any different.
Then, an unlikely series of breaks vaulted her to literary stardom. After the Hindi edition came out, the translator Arunava Sinha reached out to Shree and introduced her to Rockwell, who was looking for contemporary feminist fiction to translate. Rockwell did a sample translation, and the publisher, Titled Axis, a small, independent British press, acquired it and secured a grant for Rockwell to translate the full text.
The English version was published in Britain in 2021. The following year, it won the International Booker, which is given jointly to the author and translator. “Tomb of Sand” sold 30,000 copies in Britain, an impressive number for a work in translation from a relatively unknown author. In India, the English edition sold 50,000 copies, making it a resounding success for a work of literary fiction, and the Hindi version, titled “Ret Samadhi,” sold more than 35,000 copies. The novel became ubiquitous in train stations and airports across India; Shree’s name was a question on a popular game show hosted by the Bollywood legend Amitabh Bachchan. “Tomb of Sand” is now being translated into several other Indian languages, among them Tamil, Malayalam, Marathi and Assamese, according to Shree’s literary agent.
“It was considered a little bit out there,” Rockwell said. “Now everybody’s reading it.”
“Tomb of Sand” was a daunting text to translate, Rockwell said. The narrative is experimental, fragmented and dreamlike, full of language tricks and invented words. It’s laced with references to Sanskrit classics, Bollywood movies, song lyrics, prayers and chants, and contemporary Hindi and Urdu novelists. To capture the polyphonic flavor of the prose and Shree’s freewheeling sense of wordplay, Rockwell preserved fragments of the text from Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi and Sanskrit, leaving them untranslated.
In a way, it’s fitting that “Tomb of Sand,” a novel about the permeability of borders — between countries, religions, genders, languages, ages, life and death — is transcending linguistic barriers, despite the obstacles.
“Language is not just a vehicle to convey a message, it’s a complete entity in its own right,” Shree said. “It has a personality, it has a cadence, and sometimes it has no message.”
YEAR-WISE DEVELOPMENTS
2022
International Booker prize
Sonam Joshi, May 28, 2022: The Times of India
From: Sonam Joshi, May 28, 2022: The Times of India
New Delhi: Even before she came under the global spotlight with the International Booker Prize win for “Tomb of Sand”, Geetanjali Shree has been well-known as a critically-acclaimed Hindi fiction writer in India.
The author of five collections of short stories and five novels, her works have already travelled across the world as translations into English, Urdu, French, German, Serbian, Japanese and Korean. The Delhi-based writer has also won the Krishna Baldev Vaid Samman, Hindi Akademi Sahityakar Samman, Dwijdev Samman and Indi Sharma Katha Samman for her contribution to Hindi literature.
Born in Mainpuri, Uttar Pradesh in 1957 as Geetanjali Pandey, she changed her surname to her mother’s first name, Shree. She spent her childhood moving between different towns in UP in a bilingual atmosphere. “I was sent to Englishmedium convent schools, but my informal education was in Hindi,” she told TOI in an interview earlier. “I picked it up on many registers, from ordinary street life to serious kavi sammelans and children’s magazines like Chandamama. Not having a conventional education freed me to play with the league and be adventurous. ” Shree has also been influenced by literary stalwarts such as Krishna Sobti, Vinod Kumar Shukla, Shri Lal Shukl and Intizar Hussain.
Shree, who is bilingual, has been vocal about the hierarchy between English and Hindi. “For many, Hindi is just the language to speak to the vegetable vendor and the house help. The language of higher education is English and the skewed relationship between the two and the ignorance surrounding the rich lineage of Hindi is distressing,” she said. The 64-year-old writer said that her years in the Hindi heartland defined the themes of her writing, which were often set in the north Indian milieu. “My world was very much the north Indian small-town one till much later when I came to the metropolis Delhi. That world I’ve known is full of all kinds of men, women, Hindus, Muslims, upper castes and lower castes, and that is the circus around me. ” This playfulness could be best seen in “Ret Samadhi”, where the prose made inventive use of sounds, for example, turning the word “nahi” (no) to “nayi” through repetition.
She went on to study at Lady Shri Ram College and Jawaharlal Nehru University. She did her PhD on Munshi Premchand as an example of the nationalist intelligentsia, which she also published as an academic book. Her first short story collection was only published in 1991. She was also active in theatre, adapting Umrao Jaan Ada and Tagore’s Ghare Baire and Gora, as well as writing experimental plays.
Many of Shree’s works also feature strong female protagonists, be it Ret Samadhi’s octogenarian protagonist and her daughter or her previous novel “Mai” (1993), which is about three generations of women in a middleclass north Indian family navigating patriarchy.
“Geetanjali Shree is a towering figure in Hindi literature,” said Rea Mukherjee, commissioning editor at Penguin Random House, who worked with her on “Tomb of Sand”. “Through her writing, she provides deep sociological insight, and her characters, especially the women, are always multi-layered and challenging stereotypes, whether that is through the character of the mother in Mai, Ma in Tomb of Sand or Chachcho and Lalna in The Roof Beneath Their Feet,” she added.
2022: Ret Samadhi
Aditya Mani Jha, May 28, 2022: The Times of India
Delhi-based writer Geetanjali Shree’s 2019 novel Ret Samadhi is the first Hindi work of fiction, among six books, to be shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize. The novel has been translated into English by painter, writer and translator, Daisy Rockwell under the title Tomb of Sand , and the translated edition is now available by Penguin Random House India. The book, described by the judges as “loud and irresistible”, will compete for the £50,000 (approximately Rs 50 lakh) prize, which is split evenly between the author and translator.
Tomb of Sand is a novel that defies conventional plot summaries at every turn — at the heart of the story is an old, recently widowed woman on the verge of turning 80 (it’s not until well after the 100-page mark that we even discover that her name is Chandraprabha Devi). She lives with her son, but has to soon set off on a journey across the Indo-Pak border with her daughter (whose refusal to be tied down by gender norms doesn’t sit well with her brother).
How is this woman, who didn’t leave her bedside for weeks in the aftermath of her husband’s demise ready to embark on a trip to Pakistan? Is it possible that these grown-up children, who are in their own different ways, devoted to their mother, maybe don’t know her at all? And how exactly is the Partition tied up with all of this? These are just some of the questions Tomb of Sand tries to address.
Five things to know about the Hindi novel that made Booker history
1. Author, translator couldn’t meet because of the pandemic
Geetanjali Shree, the author who made literary history on May 27 by winning the International Booker Prize, was unable to meet the American translator of her book Daisy Rockwell in person while the novel was being translated due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The two had to communicate through email. “It's not an easy book to translate because of Geetanjali's unique style and wordplay,” Rockwell told TOI in a previous interview. "In the end, any translation is an interpretation, and when translating experimental prose, one ends up refracting the original writing through a prism for a new readership.”
2. The novel was translated by an American fluent in Hindi, Urdu
Rockwell, who translated the Hindi novel, holds a PhD in South Asian Literature from the University of Chicago. She has been reading Hindi and Urdu literature since the early 1990s. In the past, she has translated several Hindi and Urdu literary works. Bengali translator Arunava Sinha introduced Geetanjali and Daisy.
3. It was a unique cross-border collaboration
The American translator lives in Vermont, the author lives in Delhi, a Bengali translator played matchmaker and introduced them to each other, and the publisher, Tilted Axis, is based in the UK. Rockwell, who is also a painter and the granddaughter of American artist Norman Rockwell, spoke about how the book came to be. “Deborah (Smith, a publisher in the UK) had read a translation of something else by Geetanjali and heard about this book ‘Ret Samadhi’ and wanted to find a translator for it,” she said. “Like many successful Indian couples, we had a matchmaker, the prolific Bengali translator Arunava Sinha.”
4. Education in English but she chooses to write in Hindi
Born in Mainpuri, UP in 1957, Geetanjali Pandey took her mother’s first name, Shree. She spent her childhood moving between different towns in UP. “I was sent to English-medium convent schools but my informal education was in Hindi,” she says.
5. Shree was initially told the novel was impossible to translate
Shree told TOI that when the novel was first published in Hindi, some people told her that it was impossible to translate because it didn't have a simple linear plot and there was so much play with language. That made the award even more special.
Not an easy book to translate
Though this is a novel of ideas, it primarily looks at the role of boundaries and borders; those who transgress them as well as those who create them in the first place. Rockwell, who has previously translated the works of Krishna Sobti, Upendranath Ashk and other major Hindi writers, must be commended for her efforts, for this is not an easy book to translate.
Shree’s language is always allusive, agile and challenging, even charmingly archaic at times. For instance, this writer remembers watching Professor Harish Trivedi, in conversation with Shree at the 2019 Jaipur Literature Festival, where she pointed out lesser-known words like ‘sagpaita’ (a dish where daal is cooked alongside palak-saag) and ‘horha’ (fresh chana stalks burned during Holi).
In an early passage in the book, the old woman’s refrain “nahi uthoongi” starts to devolve into “nayi uthoongi” with every repetition (‘nahi’=’won’t’ while ‘nayi’=’new’), an example of Geetanjali Shree’s masterful wordplay. Rockwell translates this deftly into “Nooo rising nyooww. Nyooo riiise nyoooo. Now rise new. Now, I’ll rise anew.”
A lot of chapters begin with quick, impressionistic sketches (in the Hindi edition, these are printed in italics) that employ elements of non-fiction and even poetry — extended riffs on art (the artist and writer Bhupen Khakhar is invoked on one occasion), gender, motherhood, family dynamics, the politics of language and, of course, the Partition.
In one such impressionistic passage, two-thirds of the way into the novel, Shree convenes a kind of ‘writer’s room’ filled with people who’ve created significant Partition texts, where Saadat Hasan Manto, Bhisham Sahani, Krishna Sobti, Rajinder Bedi, Intizar Hussain, Mohan Rakesh make cameo appearances alongside some of their famous characters, their most famous lines. Tomb of Sand thus rewards both close reading and the reader’s appreciation of the history of ‘Partition literature’.
A prolific writer and an able translator
The 65-year-old Geetanjali Shree lives in New Delhi and is the author of four previous Hindi-language novels: Mai , Hamara Sheher Us Baras , Khali Jagah and Tirohit , as well as four Hindi short story collections. The English-language translation of Mai (which was originally published in 1993) first brought her to the attention of readers outside the Hindi-speaking world.
Communalism and the wounds of Partition have popped up in her stories from time to time, as well as in the novel Hamara Shaher Us Baras , which had the Babri Masjid demolition and its aftermath as the backdrop.
“Mine is not an anti-English tirade at all,” Shree told Sunday TOI in an interview. “It’s the hierarchy between the languages which bothers me. For many today, Hindi is just the language to speak to the vegetable vendor and the house help. Otherwise the language of higher education and books is English, even in my own home. This skewed relationship of the two, and the ignorance surrounding the rich lineage of Hindi is distressing. I studied in English medium convents but my informal education was in Hindi. I picked it up on many registers, from ordinary street life to serious kavi sammelans and children’s magazines. Not having a conventional education freed me to play with language and be adventurous.”
In the aforementioned literary history passage, where Krishna Sobti is invoked, Shree writes about her novelised memoir Gujarat Pakistan Se Gujarat Hindustan , which as it turns out, was also translated not too long ago by Rockwell, under the title A Gujarat Here, A Gujarat There .
Having translated writers like Sobti and Ashk, Rockwell is no stranger to the kind of freeform, polyphonic Hindi used in Ret Samadhi , which incorporates several dialects across North India (and yes, Pakistan too) and many other influences and additions and hybrids.
“Writers such as Bhisham Sahni, Manto and Sobti witnessed the devastation Partition caused firsthand,” she said. “Later works touching on it are often inspired by recent events, which authors see as rooted in the destruction caused by the Partition. Tomb of Sand is in the latter category. It argues against boundaries in general, between nations, peoples and even genders.”
Besides, Rockwell is a mighty fine writer herself and well-versed in the histories of Hindi and Urdu literature, a crucial quality for a project like this one, which invokes said histories so often and in such painstaking detail.
So, what does this nomination mean for translators of Hindi and other Indian languages? “There is much more interest in translation within India, although I believe the actual number of readers is still low, compared to work originally written in English,” says Rockwell.
“Internationally, there has not been much interest in Indian translation until yesterday! The nomination is a huge win for Hindi and for South Asian translations. Outside of the subcontinent, there is little to no awareness of the tremendous amount of high-quality translation published annually within South Asia. Even a longlist nod for the International Booker raises awareness and curiosity, which can only be positive. Perhaps foreign publishers will start to reach out to their Indian counterparts and ask to know more.” The Hindi-to-English translated sentence can often involve many more words than the original, and the average Hindi paperback uses a smaller font than its English counterpart. Because of these factors, the 376-page Ret Samadhi has become the 700-plus-page tome Tomb of Sand . Rest assured, this is a book that’s meant to be savoured slowly and deliberately.
Additional inputs by Sonam Joshi
