‘I am a champion of all languages’

Booker prize winner Geetanjali Shree says it is time we looked beyond the politics of language and exercise our better sense.

Geetanjali Shree is the first Indian author to win the prestigious ‘International Booker Prize’ for her Hindi novel ‘Ret Samadhi’ (2018) translated by Daisy Rockwell into English as ‘Tomb of Sand’.

A freelance novelist and scriptwriter, she has written ‘Mai’ (1993), ‘Khali Jagah’ (2006), ‘Hamara Shahar Us Baras’ (1998), Tirohit (2001), all novels, besides several short stories. Her stories have been translated into French, English, German, Polish, Czech, and many Indian languages. A founding member of an amateur theatre group Vivadi, she also writes for theatre. The group’s plays have been performed in India and abroad. Many of her works are part of the teaching curriculum in universities in the US, UK, Europe, and Asia.

In an interview with DHoS, Geetanjali Shree spoke at length on various issues including the ideas that shape her sensibilities and her creative process.

Excerpts

What does the award mean to Indian and South Asian languages?

A work of literature is the product of a certain lived tradition. One would expect this award to encourage translators, publishers and readers the world over to look for the best that is constantly being produced in various South Asian languages.

What were your early influences? What enriched your imagination and honed your literary consciousness?

Looking back, I can only mention contributing factors of which I am conscious. But there must also have been influences and forces that would have operated subliminally to make me a writer. I can recall having long believed — can’t be specific about since when — that writing was what I would do in life. The atmosphere I grew up in nurtured that impulse: growing up in various districts of Uttar Pradesh, with their regular ‘Mushairas’ and ‘Kavi Sammelans’; a household headed by a bureaucrat father, who was also a fiction writer, a household where literary stalwarts like Sumitranandan Pant and Raghupati Sahai ‘Firaq’ regularly dropped by; children’s magazines like Chanda Mama... That atmosphere also left an abiding imprint on my sense of relationship with language.

My schooling was entirely in English with the school sometimes making ridiculous rules like anyone using Hindi in the non-English periods will be fined! All this could have ruled out any possibility of becoming a Hindi writer. But, then, the Hindi I imbibed from my mother, the support staff, and in the neighbourhood, the profusion of those undulating sounds all around taught me my mother tongue richly, even if unconventionally. When I began writing in this language, the lack of formal education in it gave me an abiding sense of freedom and adventure.

Why did you choose literature despite being a History student? How far has theatre helped you understand the nuances of literary skills?

History with its protocol of objectivity and facticity never let me feel easy. It gave me much background knowledge of course, but more importantly, the realisation that I needed to be freer. Theatre has influenced my writing in more ways than I can record. It has shown me, first of all, that words are not all there is. There is silence and subtext, cuts and breaks, the entire architecture of a work. It has also alerted me to cadence. Theatre is an amalgam of all the arts and it has brought home the value of that amalgam in literature to me.

How did ‘Ret Samadhi’ happen?

It began with the image of an old recently widowed woman who has turned her back upon life. The image persisted and made me curious about what exactly it signifies. What is the back rejecting and what is it seeking? Is it waiting for death or is it getting ready for the reinvention of life? That got the tale going. I then began to unfold the image’s fascinating and unpredictable transformations.

Why did it take seven years for liberation from you?

Stories have their own momentum and their own moment of letting the writer know when it’s time for them to leave her. This one told me so in seven years. I have to listen to it.

Does the octogenarian symbolise invisible borders drawn by political factors, constraints of life or personal losses?

Let the readers decide that. Personally speaking, there is no ‘or’ for me here.

Why does the dynamic of narrative suddenly interrogate the significance of borders?

The question assumes only the India-Pakistan border as a border. For me, the entire book interrogates all kinds of borders. There is nothing sudden about this interrogation.

What makes the work, a stunningly powerful story about stories that never end and a novel of India?

Let me remain a writer and not trespass into the realms of the readers and the critics.

What challenges do you face when you start writing? Do you focus more on plot, technique or elaboration?

Writing for me is a holistic activity with a life force of its own. It takes me along and I know the futility of imposing on it any design of mine. Plot, technique, and elaboration all evolve and emerge in conversation with each other.

How far have transpositions in English and French succeeded in infusing fresh life into another cultural milieu?

Any translation — transposition if you will — takes a work into another cultural milieu giving it a new citizenship, but its new home also gets shades of its original personality. 'Tomb of Sand' has not become what it has by leaving 'Ret Samadhi' behind — it has gone forward hand-in-hand with the original and a new vocabulary of seeing, being, expressing, etc., has been introduced to the world.

Why has 'Ret Samadhi' not been translated into other Indian languages?

It is intriguing, even sad, considering that the 'Booker' for 'Ret Samadhi' has been seen as good news for all South Asian languages, not just Hindi. But this question should be addressed to those who are promoting, translating and publishing.

What has been gratifying and humbling to you as a writer?

Discovering that what, in complete solitude, I write for and with myself alone, reverberates so much for an extended world full of so many people. It is gratifying and humbling to feel part of such a large humanity.

As a champion of the Hindi language, how do you see the growing opposition to Hindi in South India?

I do not see myself as a champion of the Hindi language. I write in Hindi because it is my mother tongue. My love for other languages is no less. What I celebrate and promote are multi-lingual traditions and the parity of languages. I am a champion of all languages. The issue of growing opposition to Hindi in South India is very ticklish. While I admit that the politics of language is the most entrenched obstacle to the solution of the problem, I would appeal to the better sense of each one of us to learn to love and respect every language like we love and respect our own language. This, sooner or later, will allay the existing hostilities.