With Geetanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand in frequent contributor Daisy Rockwell’s English translation taking the International Booker Prize recently, Indian literature is having its moment. Editor-at-Large Suhasini Patni’s contribution to this edition of A Thousand Lives could not be more timely then, spotlighting as it does another pioneering female Punjabi author. Sign up for our newsletter to get these recommendations delivered right to your inbox.
Amrita Pritam, the first female poet to win the Sahitya Akademi Award, is one of the most prominent feminist figures in Indian literary history. Not only did she take a public stance against marriage, she also openly wrote about female sex and desire, and questioned gender-enforced roles. According to writer and translator Khushwant Singh, her poems about the plight of refugees made her “immortal.” Written in 1950, the book’s title, Pinjar, means ‘skeleton’ in Punjabi. In this radical novel, a Hindu girl, Puro, is abducted by a Muslim man, Rashid, as an act of revenge against her community. She’s given a new name, Hamida, and her life from before is erased. When she tries to go back to her parents, she is seen as tainted and turned away. Forced to return to Rashid and settle into a new life, she eventually has a child with him. During the fraught years of partition, women had to become skeletons, “with neither a face, nor mind, nor a will, nor identity.” Hamida is enraged at the condition of women like herself: “Some had been forced into marriage, some murdered, some stripped and paraded naked in the streets.” The book details unexpected brutality, acts of desperation, and highlights the struggles faced particularly by women in 1947. It was adapted into a successful Hindi-language film in 2002.
—Suhasini Patni, Editor-at-Large for India
Yuri Herrera’s Signs Preceding the End of the World (2015), and its unsettling opening paragraph, which would doubtlessly throw the reader into a vertigo-like state, is a captivating read bound to make you question (if you haven’t done so already) the significance of borders, their concrete reality, and multiple figurative dimensions. Makina, a switchboard operator, is sent on a mission to find her older brother, who, lured by the empty promises of a substantial inheritance, had chosen to undergo a dangerous water crossing in order to reach the neighboring country—an almost mythical land to which his fellowmen flee in search of the so-called “better life.” The Mexican author’s use of symbolism and his timely focus on the issues of migration, immigration and war reveal the fragility of one’s identity and the various traps that await the self. As for the language of the book, I would simply like to mention translator Lisa Dillman’s note, which informs us that the Spanish original “is nothing short of stunning, and translating it is both fulfilling and daunting.”
—Andriana Hamas, Editor-at-Large for Bulgaria
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