Sadly, we know little about many of our literary talents until they earn recognition in the West. Last night, I attended “Geetanjali Shree in Conversation,” an event organised by Sydney Writers’ Festival at the State Library of NSW, centred on her International Booker Prize-winning novel Tomb of Sand, originally written in Hindi and translated into English by Daisy Rockwell.
The evening began on an amusing note. Geetanjali Shree, serene and composed, entered the hall and described the event as a blind date for both parties. I cannot speak for her, but for the audience it was an authentic, delightful and deeply reflective date.
Asked where she found inspiration, Shree said: “From the original idea of a novel to its subject matter, language, and textual strategies, little in my writing is thought out beforehand. Things evolve along with writing.
“For this book, I think what set me off was an image of an older adult lying with her back turned to the family, a very common sight: people who have given up on life. That image somehow formed inside me, stirred my curiosity, and created a character who reclaims her life and identity as the story takes shape.”
When asked about her writing style and use of English words in the original Hindi novel, Shree said it revealed much about India’s history, its colonial past and the place of English among educated Indians. It could feel almost unnatural, she said, to replace certain English words with Hindi or to write entirely in Hindi.
She said languages in India’s multilingual society were creatively mixed in everyday speech, crossing languages and dialects. Any push towards uniformity and monolingualism, she said, was an unwanted product of narrow historical and political developments.
India, she said, was an organically pluralistic society with a long tradition of religious coexistence and interaction.
The India-Pakistan border, both physical and conceptual, is central to the plot of Tomb of Sand. “A border does not enclose, it opens out,” Ma says in the novel. “It is a bridge between two connected parts.” In the sprawling work, Shree questions the rigidity of borders between genders, countries and family members.
As the conversation continued, Shree spoke about visiting the Wagah border to observe the ceremonial drill by security forces on both sides.
She said all she could feel was the false ideology of Partition and the loud slogans of patriotism blasting across the venue.
Hatred, violence and politics, she said, continue to plague people on both sides of the border.
When an audience member asked whether India and Pakistan could be reunified, she said: “A nation is your identity. To make a union possible, it has to be a new entity.” Her answer reflected the complexity of the question.
Asked about the role of translators in literature, Shree noted that Leo Tolstoy, whom she described as “the greatest of all novelists,” would not have reached and inspired generations around the world without translation.
On the translation of her own book, she said what mattered was the rapport between author and translator, including a shared way of looking at things and feeling deeply about them.
The playfulness of the language and the humour in Shree’s writing were certainly felt throughout the event.
Her reading of a short Hindi excerpt from the book brought back the richness and vibrancy of a language many of us have lost touch with.
The large number of Australians in the audience showed that the world of literature has opened as never before, with readers turning to books from many different places. Literary conversations are more global, and no language or literature today operates in a closed, hermetic space.
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