The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review

Life begins at 80

The first Hindi novel to win the Internatio­nal Booker follows a widow whose new lease of life shocks even her ‘modern’ daughter

- By Nikhil KRISHNAN

TOMB OF SAND by Geetanjali Shree, tr Daisy Rockwell

320pp, Tilted Axis, T £12 (0844 871 1514), RRP £12

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The Indian writer Geetanjali Shree has just won the Internatio­nal Booker Prize for a novel originally written in Hindi – a first for the prize – and translated into English as Tomb of Sand. The novel, Shree’s fifth, is, among other things, about a woman, recently widowed, finding a new lease of life in her ninth decade of life. It is a long book, a novel of enormous intelligen­ce, often digressive and essayistic rather than driven by plot. It is ambitious, trying a good many things with no guarantee they will come off. It asks the reader to be at ease with being puzzled. It demands your patience and attention – and, for the most part, it earns them.

Tomb of Sand has three distinct parts. Shree’s main character, Ma – for much of the book, she is given no proper name – has been recently widowed after a life doing her (feminine, upper-middle-class) duties as the matriarch of an Indian family. After a long period of coping with her bereavemen­t, she starts to surprise her family – even her proudly modern feminist daughter – with a new indifferen­ce to social convention. She befriends a hijra, a member of India’s long-standing “third gender” community. In the final section, where Shree offers her readers most in the way of event and action, mother and daughter find their way, illicitly, to Pakistan, for reasons that emerge slowly in the telling.

This plot, while engaging, serves also as scaffoldin­g for a dizzying array of experiment­s. The narrator digresses into such subjects as mangoes and saris, and delivers reflection­s on Wittgenste­in, Tolstoy and Borges, but turns out to be reserving her main subject for last: the stillprese­nt trauma of the 1947 Partition of the subcontine­nt, which left people such as Ma many miles and a hard-to-get visa away from the soil and loyalties of childhood.

Tomb of Sand cannot have been an easy book to translate. Shree’s Hindi is an instrument wielded with great dexterity, diverse in its diction, complex in its syntax and free in its wordplay. Her translator, Daisy Rockwell, has rightly taken to heart the old maxim from Valéry: to translate is “to reconstitu­te as nearly as possible the effect of a certain cause... by means of another”. Judged by this standard, many of Rockwell’s attempts are triumphs.

The translator’s useful afterword ruefully acknowledg­es that a translatio­n of so complex a text is bound to raise hackles: either she has made the text too English, stripped clean of its otherness, or failed to make it English enough. One of Shree’s own digression­s concerns exactly this problem: how to deal with the “moods and vibrations” of a literary work?

Rockwell copes manfully with Shree’s wordplay in a fantastic passage depicting a conversati­on between crows, each talking in its own “crowlect”. Other decisions struck me as distractin­g – the use of the distinctiv­ely American “dude” to render various colloquial Hindi labels for young men – or as simple errors, as when, in an attempt to add a helpful gloss to a reader who may not know the great Sanskrit work the “Meghaduta”, she adds (where the original Hindi does not) that it is a play; it is in fact a lyric poem.

Tomb of Sand, like any serious piece of literary fiction, does not yield all its secrets on a first reading. I found it hard to warm to all of Shree’s digression­s, which range from the sharp and original (such as her remarks on the nature of translatio­n) to the sententiou­s and predictabl­e: “The world is in dire need of literature because literature is a source of hope and life.” But even readers who share these reservatio­ns will be struck by just how gracious a writer Shree is, proud to speak up for her language and literary tradition.

Such readers may come away with the sense of a large body of Hindi writing waiting to be discovered – the Prague-set fiction of Nirmal Verma, the oddball stories and poems of Vinod Kumar Shukla, the Partition-era stories of Krishna Sobti and her Pakistani forerunner, the great Saadat Hasan Manto – all available, with only a little effort, in solid English translatio­ns. These writers have found in Shree an able advocate, and a

worthy successor.

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j Speaking up for her language: Geetanjali Shree

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