Hindi novel’s Booker win

A “LUMINOUS novel of India and partition”, Tomb of Sand, has won the 2022 International Booker Prize, with the £50,000 reward to be shared between the author, Geetanjali Shree, and Daisy Rockwell, an American who translated the book into English from the Hindi original.

The judges provided a helpful synopsis of the novel which was first published in Hindi in 2018 as Ret Samadhi: “Tomb of Sand is set in northern India, and follows an 80-year-old woman who slips into a deep depression at the death of her husband, then resurfaces to gain a new lease on life.

“Her determination to fly in the face of convention – including striking up a friendship with a hijra person – confuses her bohemian daughter, who is used to thinking of herself as the more ‘modern’ of the two.

“To her family’s consternation, Ma 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.”

I very much look forward to reading the novel in its English translation, but I might also have a go at doing so in Hindi as well. Alas, long years in Britain have changed my fluency. As a child in the Bihar capital of Patna, we grew up learning English at school but we spoke Hindi outside and Bengali at home. Parents still take pride in sending their children to “English medium schools”. Hindi is not for the elite.

The Booker win will raise the prestige of India’s national language.