Geetanjali Shree
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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
