Booker Prize to Geetanjali Shree well-deserved

The award of the International Booker Prize to Geetanjali Shree’s Hindi novel Tomb of Sand, translated by Daisy Rockwell, is at the same time a recognition and a revelation. It is the first literary work in Hindi or any Indian language to be chosen for the honour. The International Booker Prize is awarded to a book which is translated into English and published in the UK or Ireland. It is different from the Man Booker Prize, which is awarded to a work written in English, and has been won in the past by Indians. The award of the International Prize is a recognition of Geetanjali Shree as a writer and an acknowledgement of the fine literary traditions of Hindi. It also reveals the potential of all languages to be vehicles of creative vitality at the international level.

Tomb of Sand opens with the statement that this particular tale has a national border and women who come and go as they please. It says once you have got women and a border, a story can write itself as women are stories in themselves. It is the story of an 80-year-old woman who, after the death of her husband, sinks into depression and then travels to Pakistan to re-live her experiences and trauma as a teenager there during Partition. She crosses the border without a visa because she came that way. Her journey makes her understand better what it means to be a mother, a daughter, a woman, and a feminist, and gives the reader insights into how individuals live various roles in both normal and exceptional times. There is much Partition literature in both India and Pakistan, with all kinds of human stories. This is a great addition to it, but it cannot be categorised as a Partition story. It is at the same time tragic, serious, playful, exuberant, sincere and original.

At the awards ceremony, Tomb of Sand was described as representing the binaries of “youth and age, male and female, family and nation” which make it “a kaleidoscopic whole” and “a novel of India”. It is about identity and belonging, and about borders and boundaries between nations, between languages, and between the real and the unreal. But it tells the truth that a “border does not enclose, but opens out”. Persons, events and things from history, literature, politics, and society appear, talk, and mingle and create a new reality. The book in English retains the authentic Indian sensibility of the Hindi original. Daisy Rockwell has recreated it with finesse and great aplomb. While the original has words in English, the English version has many words in Hindi, too. It is a celebration of polyphony, diversity and interrelatedness which make us Indian and human.