decoding borders and divisions

Tomb of Sand becomes first Hindi novel to win International Booker

When Delhi-based writer Geetanjali Shree encountered an old woman lying with her back turned to her family members, apparently with no interest in living any longer, the image stuck in her mind.

She recounted, “My curiosity grew as to, is she turning her back on the world and life, or is she preparing to get up into a rejuvenated, reinvented new life?”

The seeds were sown for her Hindi novel Ret Samadhi (Rajkamal Prakashan, 2018), which was translated by American writer Daisy Rockwell (Penguin India, 2022) as Tomb of Sand.

It is the first Hindi novel, and the first book originally written in an Indian language, to win the prestigious International Booker Prize.

The “extraordinarily exuberant and incredibly playful” book, according to the chair of judges Frank Wynne, is about an 80-year-old woman, Ma, who falls into a depression after her husband’s death.

To her family's consternation, she insists on travelling to Pakistan, simultaneously confronting the unresolved trauma of her teenage experiences of Partition, and re- evaluating what it means to be a mother, a daughter, a woman, and a feminist.

Despite this tragic premise, however, it has been applauded by critics and readers alike for being engaging, funny and original.

“(Tomb of Sand) is a luminous novel of India and Partition, but one whose spellbinding brio and fierce compassion weaves youth and age, male and female, family and nation into a kaleidoscopic whole,” said Wynne, a translator himself.

In her acceptance speech, Shree said she was “delighted, honoured, and humbled” by this huge recognition.

“There is a melancholy satisfaction in the award going to it. Ret Samadhi / Tomb of Sand is an elegy for the world we inhabit, a lasting energy that retains hope in the face of impending doom. The Booker will surely take it to many more people than it would have reached otherwise, that should do the book no harm,” she said.

The win, it has been noted, could potentially encourage more translations from other Indian languages - tens of thousands of books are published in Indian languages every year.

“Behind me and this book lies a rich and flourishing literary tradition in Hindi, and in other South Asian languages,” Shree observed. “World literature will be the richer for knowing some of the finest writers in these languages. The vocabulary of life will increase from such an interaction.”

The judges considered over 130 books for this year’s award. The other books in the shortlist included Heaven by Mieko Kawakami, Elena Knows by Claudia Pineiro, A New Name: Septology VI-VII by Jon Fosse, The Books of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk and Cursed Bunny by Bora Chung.

The Booker Prize fund of around AUD 90,000 will be split equally between Shree and translator Rockwell.

Tomb of Sand has also been the winner of the English Pen Award.

Author of three novels and several story collections, Geetanjali Shree’s work has been translated into English, French, German, Serbian and Korean. She has received and has been shortlisted for a number of awards and fellowships.

Daisy Rockwell is an artist, writer and translator living in northern New England, USA. Apart from her essays on literature and art, she has written Upendranath Ashk: A Critical Biography, The Little Book of Terror and the novel Taste. Her highly acclaimed translations include, among others, Upendranath Ashk’s Falling Walls and Bhisham Sahni’s Tamas, published in Penguin Classics.

Rockwell’s translation is longer than Shree’s original. Explaining this, Shree noted, “Translation is dialogue and communication. It is never a fixed, frozen and complete exchange. It is ongoing, live and enriching – some things are explained better, some remain confounding, just as in any communication. Some things may also get lost, but some things also get added. Just as when two people talk, they enrich each other and enlarge each other's way of seeing, being, and experiencing, so also is communication underway in translation.”

She added tellingly, “Dialogue, which is what translation is, is the best thing in human life, and the way forward.”

From IANS reports