This week, our editors from around the world highlight literary festivals, events, and publishing trends in India, along with accolades for previous contributors to Asymptote from Lebanon. Read on to find out more!
Matilde Ribeiro, Copy Editor, reporting from India
Geetanjali Shree’s novel Tomb of Sand was shortlisted on April 7 for the International Booker Prize. This is the first novel written in Hindi to have come this close to winning the prestigious award. The novel was translated to English by Daisy Rockwell, who emphasized the polyphonic nature of the text, which uses loanwords from other Indian languages like Punjabi, Hindustani, Urdu, and Sanskrit.
This linguistic choice, which mimics the way in which speakers of many dialects of Hindi borrow words from other languages, is especially important in light of persistent attempts to “purify” and standardize the Hindi language by removing all non-Sanskrit words. Moreover, in a literary field that is still dominated by twentieth-century authors like Premchand and Yashpal, Shree’s achievement could encourage more contemporary authors writing in Hindi.
However, there remains in general a fundamental disconnect between Indian literary awards and festivals and the choices of the Indian reading public, especially in non-English languages. This was one of the problems addressed during the online discussion “Karimeen for the Soul,” a panel on Malayalam literature hosted by the Bangalore International Centre on March 28, featuring Sahitya Akademi award-winning author Paul Zacharia, publisher Karthika VK, translator Nisha Susan, and journalist Nidheesh M K. Karthika noted that a major problem with regard to “mainstream” publishing and awards is their reliance on the novel as the main form of storytelling, rather than the short story, based on relative sales figures for the two forms. In the meantime, regional newspapers and magazines continue to publish experimental, pathbreaking local-language short stories, a medium that, Zacharia noted, “comes alive when innovation is dead.”
The author Rajkamal Choudhary’s short stories, originally written in Hindi and scheduled to be published by Kolkata-based Seagull Books this fall, in a translation by Saudamini Deo, are an important example of what Zacharia spoke about. While Choudhary’s works have never been translated into English, he is well known in India for his avant-garde writing and association with the Hungryalist movement in Bengali literature. This literary movement aimed to disrupt the structures of the perceived canon in postcolonial India, and has been compared to the Beat generation in the United States or the work of Latin American surrealists like Octavio Paz.
A month after the first post-pandemic edition of the globally known Jaipur Literature Festival, the Dehradun Literature Festival opened on April 1 in the eponymous capital of Uttarakhand state, headlined by speakers like the author Ruskin Bond, journalists Karan Thapar and Barkha Dutt, the film director Imtiaz Ali, and the transgender rights activist Laxmi Narayan Tripathi. However, this edition was marred by controversy, when a session featuring the movie director Vivek Agnihotri and his wife, actress Pallavi Joshi, had to be canceled because of “security reasons.” Agnihotri’s latest film, The Kashmir Files, a polarising and Islamophobic take on the exodus of the Pandit community from Kashmir, has been heavily promoted by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party government, despite criticism of its rewriting of history, stereotyped portrayals of communities, and oversimplification of facts.
April began with the news that a major upheaval in the Indian publishing industry may finally have settled down, albeit in a way that suggests fundamental shifts in the manner the Indian public may consume literary content. On April 1, it was announced that Gautam Padmanabhan, Karthika VK, and other members of the erstwhile Westland imprint would be starting a new publishing company under the aegis of the online self-publishing company Pratilipi, which allows authors to publish content in English and eleven other regional languages. Westland was a multilingual Amazon-owned imprint, known for publishing experimental and groundbreaking fiction and nonfiction. Ranjeet Pratap Singh, the co-founder and CEO of Pratilipi, clarified in a Twitter thread the next day that, while Pratilipi had not acquired Westland or its publishing catalogue, they planned to “get as much of the catalogue as possible available across all mediums with new contracts.”
This new development is interesting in many ways. Padmanabhan hinted to The Times of India that the print medium in which Westland had specialized would now be transmuted into a range of digital avatars, such as podcasts, web series, or even graphic novels. The new medium-agnostic approach to publishing would help works that would otherwise have been published only in print reach a much larger audience, including through streaming media services. Described as a meeting between the old and new, the collaboration between India’s oldest English-language publishing house and a startup founded in 2014 could provide a model for reviving stagnant publishing industries worldwide.
MK Harb, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Lebanon
It’s always extra special to start the roundup with some celebratory news: Karim Kattan, Palestinian author who we previously interviewed at Asymptote won the Prix des cinq continents de la Francophonie on March 31 for his novel Le Palais des deux collines! For those of you who do not speak French and are still interested in his work, you can read his recent article “Footnotes of Desire,” on Egyptian director Mohamed Shawky Hassan’s vibrant musical Bashtaalak Sa’at.
In other exciting publishing award news, Lebanese-American author, Rabih Alameddine, who we also profiled, has won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, for his riveting novel, The Wrong End of the Telescope, which chronicles the experiences of a trans Lebanese doctor volunteering on the island of Lesbos during the Syrian refugee crisis. Alameddine is known for the incendiary voices of his protagonists and this novel does not shy away from this quality (if you have not read him before, I would recommend you start with Koolaids).
Recently, Beirut concluded its international book fair after a three year hiatus, a small but relevant cultural reprieve in what is otherwise a cruel financial situation in Lebanon. The Beirut Art Center continues its pandemic-inspired experimental publication, “the derivative,” with a focus on the examined letter and the examined life. I would recommend reading this piece by anthropologist, Sumayya Kassmali, which looks at the precarity of migrant domestic workers in Beirut. In other publishing news, Lebanese poet, Zeina Hashem Beck, has a new poem out in the Atlantic, while her new collection, O, is forthcoming in July 2022.
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