When Geetanjali Shree’s novel “Tomb
of Sand” was released in India five years ago, many did not 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.
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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 is not 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 effect 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.
The choice of HindiFor 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.
“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.”
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
US 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,”
Rockwell said.
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.”
Translating India“Tomb of Sand” remains a rare exception.
Translations into English make up a small fraction of the books published in
the US; 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 US
in the past five years, just 20 were from Indian languages, compared with 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.
“There’s a massive world of literature that’s not being seen at all outside the subcontinent.”
“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 is not that the translation of Indian
literature into English is not happening. It is 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’.”
An octogenarian metamorphosisShree 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
is 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.”
‘Everybody’s reading it’Shree did not 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.
“If we want to be truly representative of the country, we have to do translations.”
Then, an unlikely series of breaks vaulted
her to literary stardom. After the Hindi edition came out, 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 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.”
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