In 2022, Tomb of Sand became the first work of Indian literature to win the International Booker Prize. Written in Hindi by Geetanjali Shree and translated by Daisy Rockwell, the novel is Shree’s magnum opus and the pinnacle of a distinguished literary career.
Indian writers have previously won the Booker Prize, which is restricted to works written in English: Salman Rushdie (1981), Arundhati Roy (1997), Kiran Desai (2006) and Aravind Adiga (2008). But English is spoken by about 10% of the Indian population; its rightful place as an Indian language is a result of the passionately contested legacy of 200 years of British rule on the subcontinent.
Hindustani – or Hindi, as it is commonly known – has 611 million speakers around the world. Some estimates put the figure closer to 855 million. And yet the global recognition of Hindi literature, like literature in the 22 other officially recognised languages of India, each of which has its own complex history, remains hostage to Anglophone publishing regimes.
Shree notes this conundrum in one of her earliest stories, Pilaki Mane Faye (the title is a bit of nonsensical wordplay, implying the absurdity of a situation). Its central character, who wants to make a bit of extra money through Hindi publishing, comments on the comparative profitability of the English language:
Yeah, it would have made a difference had I been able to write in English. […] The British Empire ended, but did the Empire?
Shree’s protagonist marvels at another writer, who is paid a “rupee for each word” for his English-language articles: “One’s mind is tickled at the very thought.”
Shree has explored the postcolonial tension between Hindi (and by extension other Indian languages – or bhashas) and English with piercing acuity in her five collections of short stories and five novels. In the 40 years since her first story Bel Patra (Bael Leaf) was published in the distinguished Hindi literary magazine Hans, she has defied the constraints of genre and technique, linguistic and stylistic politics.
Yet it is probably safe to say that, until her International Booker win, not many literary communities around the world had heard of her.
Language as homeland
Hindustani emerged between the 7th and 13th centuries, a period of Muslim rule on the Indian subcontinent. It is a language with two mutually intelligible registers: Hindi and Urdu. Hindi has its roots in Sanskrit and Prakrit; Urdu has Arabic and Persian antecedents. As a hybrid Indo-Aryan language, Hindustani has often been framed as a tongue with the potential to transcend religious and social divisions.
Shree’s Hindustani is an audacious amalgam of literary Hindi and Khari Boli, the robust rural speech spoken in multiple dialects across northern India, especially Bhojpuri. She developed an intimate acquaintance with the hues and nuances of the language, having moved as a child between small towns in the state of Uttar Pradesh, the heartland of Hindi, due to her father’s job as a civil servant.
Shree was educated in English-language schools and university. Her decision to write in Hindi came about, she says, “almost by accident”, at a time when she was buoyed by the “osmosis of the world around” and “the sound of Hindi that [she] heard over and above the veneer and sophistication of English”.
Language, for Shree, is not merely a tool for the telling of a story. Her writing moves through different grammatical registers and regional inflections, sometimes within the space of a paragraph or a page. Her figures of speech and stylistic choices exhibit an irreverent experimentation. In an interview, she claims that language
is in itself an entity and has its own personality and must not be used just utilitarianly. My language is my homeland, motherland, my memory, and my protest too. I have inherited it, but I also reconstruct it.
Shree’s work offers a direct critique of the dominance of English, though she also alludes to the upward mobility afforded by an English-language education. But it is the manner in which she wields her tongue and grounds her imagination in the vernacular that makes her work such a delight.
Contesting narratives
Shree’s novel The Roof Beneath Their Feet, translated by Rahul Soni and published by Penguin India in 2013, has just been relaunched in an international edition.
The Roof Beneath Their Feet is set in Laburnum House,
which wasn’t one house, but a neighbourhood of a hundred or so houses that existed in one huge building, stretching far and wide, that lay drowning for centuries under the rolling, sea-like roof that was high in some places and in some places low.
The first half of the slim volume is narrated by a young man who is mourning Chachcho (auntie), now dead, who may or may not have been his mother. He nurses a grievance against Chachcho’s boon companion, Lalna, for constantly turning up at his door and intruding on his memory.
The second half of the novel is narrated in Lalna’s irrepressible voice. She stakes out her ownership of Chachcho. She claims her abode, her being, her saris and diamonds, even Chachcho’s very laughter. Addressing the young man as Bitva, a diminutive term meaning “little boy”, Lalna crows in triumph:
That’s a laugh you can never laugh, Bitva. To laugh like that you need to be a girl. A girl who is always naked. So naked that she has to wear heaps of clothes, layer on layer — and then cover it all up with a burqa. Only when that naked girl laughs can you hear that beautiful sound.
The contesting narratives of Bitva and Lalna enact a fierce dispute about who can best recall the past, especially when it comes to Chachcho’s memory. Lalna’s joie de vivre is in delightful contrast to Bitva’s self-pitying narcissism and resentment at having lost out on maternal love due to Lalna’s cuckoo-like machinations.
Lalna redefines what it is to be a self-possessed woman, united in friendship with Chachcho:
If you ask me, I will tell you that love isn’t what you all think it is — man and woman and woman and man and bodies, bodies, bodies! Love affair, love affair! […] when the darkness begins to sway with the gusts of wind, and when the sky starts turning around the axis of the roof, then no one can stop two friends, nothing can erase them.
In the last brief section of the novel, triumphant Lalna stands “in the middle of it all, as if about to light somebody’s funeral pyre – or perhaps her own”.
Canonical subversion
One of the ways Shree subverts the paternalistic Hindi canon is through her exploration of the maternal.
In her opus Tomb of Sand and her debut novel Mai (translated into English as Mai: Silently Mother), she eschews the feminist tropes of rage and rescue through which motherhood is often depicted. In stories such as March, Maa aur Sakura (March, Mother and Cherry Blossoms), she captures fugitive instants and observations that refuse to romanticise or deify the subjugated and presumed-silent figure of the woman and mother.
The Hindi title of The Roof Beneath Their Feet is Tirohit, meaning “disappeared” or “vanished”. The novel vividly captures the repressed and secretive voices of its female characters. Chachcho and Lalna trade bosom dreams and flights of fancy, recall nightmares, and share competitive custody of Bitva, about whose lineage much is in question.
These two women – one married and visible because of that, the other abandoned and thus invisible – carve out the shape of their days in snatched moments of friendship and take refuge in the community terrace that connects their different homes.
Without having a robust sense of the novel’s antecedents in Hindi literature, it is difficult to grasp just how radical it is. Soni’s translation undertakes the tough task of capturing the colour and tone of Shree’s arresting prose with great felicity and feeling for language.
This brings us to the complex issue of translation. In an incisive essay, novelist Anjum Hasan has considered the erratic manner in which translations reach audiences without the necessary sense of the literary traditions that have informed them. Hasan points out that Shree traces her lineage through Krishna Sobti, the grand dame of Hindi literature. In Sobti’s works, the familial, internal and social lives of women bloom, collide and expose the fault lines of the patriarchy.
Shree, too, is not one for the sweeping canvas and sentimentality of composite realist fiction written in the wake of male predecessors. Her stories are far more intimate. She is interested in the work of memory as it dismantles narrative certainties. Her mode is one of suggestiveness and subterfuge, of fragmentary moments that make sense haphazardly and in hindsight.
The poet Shashibhushan Dwivedi calls this Shree’s “signature tune” of “taartamya”, an extremely complex term perhaps akin to philosopher Jacques Derrida’s notion of différance. Shree’s stories gesture towards the fleetingness of presence, the inevitability of belatedness, and the impossibility of language capturing the truth.
Mridula Nath Chakraborty will be in conversation with Geetanjali Shree at the Wheeler Centre, Melbourne, on August 12 2026, and the Bob Hawke Prime Ministerial Centre, Adelaide, on August 27 2026. Shree will also be a guest at the Sydney Writers’ Festival.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
