She grew up listening to her mother speak Hindi at home and reading Hindi children’s books and magazines, where she learned about Indian tales like the Ramayana and the Mahabharat. Shree felt the pull to study Hindi literature when entering university, but since she lacked a formal Hindi education, history was the only viable option. While she was able to study Hindi texts from a historical perspective during her academic career—a bachelor’s, master’s, and PhD in—Shree never quite felt that she was in her element while studying history. She wanted to be the one writing stories, not analyzing them.
It was during a train journey between Baruda and Delhi that the growing tension inside of her she felt about being a writer (despite never having actually written anything before) came to a head. Shree took out a notebook and started to jot down an idea. By the time the train pulled into Dheli she had a complete story. While Shree didn’t save this story, it gave her the confidence she needed to pursue writing full time and ultimately leave academia behind.
Shree has published five novels and five collections of short stories, all written in Hindi. The English translation of her debut novel Mai by Nita Humar was shortlisted for the Crossword Book Award in 2000 and awarded the Sahitya Akademi Translation prize in 2002. Her novel Tirohit was translated into English by Rahul Soni as The Roof Beneath Her Feet and Khālī jagah was translated into English by Nivedita Menon as The Empty Space. In addition to their English translations, Shree’s novels have also been translated into languages including Urdu, French, German, Serbian, Japanese, Gujarati, and Korean. Shree has received the Indu Sharma Katha Sammaan, Hindi Akademi Sahityakar Sammaan and Dwijdev Sammaan for her contribution to Hindi literature.
Her most recent novel Ret Samadhi was translated into English as Tomb of Sand by Daisy Rockwell. Tomb of Sand won the International Booker Prize in 2021, making history as the first book written in Hindi–or any South Asian language–to win the award. It was also awarded the 2022 Warwick Prize for Women in Translation. The novel follows an eighty-year-old woman as she falls into a deep depression after the death of her husband and her journey through grief, healing, and buried memories from the Partition. I had the pleasure of interviewing Shree over email where we corresponded about the importance of multilingualism in literature and the need for borderless storytelling in today’s world.
—Rose Bialer
Tomb of Sand is sweeping in subject matter and experimental in language. At the same time it manages to combine folklore and magic with a domestic familial story. It is truly unlike anything I've ever read. I am very curious about how you first conceived of the idea for the novel.
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. Of course, a novel begins only once an idea has suggested itself. But even that is not usually my doing. The world around and within me is abuzz with stories. I don’t have to look for them. Any one of them may serendipitously take possession of me and result in a novel.
This is not to suggest it is all an arbitrary process. In fact all my experience—from my history, geography, autobiography, biography, imagination, observation, memory, and many other sources—form my intuition and constantly hone it and aestheticize it. That is what is doing things, seemingly serendipitously, during the creative process and sending out a wisp of an image which unfurls and begins to take more concrete shape and fills out into a full bodied work.
Ret Samadhi—Tomb of Sand—was triggered by an image, the quite mundane image of an old woman lying always in bed with her face to the wall and back to the world. Once the image planted itself in my mind it began to stir my interest and curiosity more and more. Whatever could be going on in the old woman’s head? Had she turned away from her family and life and was awaiting her end? Or, when she looked like she was trying to bury herself alive into the wall by creeping up closer to it, she was actually thinking of the world on the other side and burrowing a hole through the wall to emerge on that side and reinvent herself? That is how the novel began—the tale telling itself—and as I shadowed the old woman, she started taking the initiative, shaping up as the woman all set to embark on a new life and doing the wonderful things she did.
Just as there was no knowing what all she would do, there was no knowing how all that would demand to be expressed. Hence the novel’s sweeping subject matter and, consequentially, its linguistic and narrative profusion. Sarod maestro Ali Akbar Khan has described this process with great succinctness and I can do no better than quote him: ‘When I start, I play the sarod and soon the sarod begins to play me.’
Perhaps the novel’s numerous narrative strategies also come from the organically multilingual, polyphonic, pluralistic society mine is. Add to that the plethora of the world that has opened up new ways of being, knowing, and saying.
In your Booker Prize acceptance speech, you describe Tomb of Sand as a “laughing elegy that retains hope in the face of doom.” What compelled you to inject humor into a novel that is much concerned with violence and political and social injustices?
Much of the humour in the novel’s portrayal of violence and injustice came from the dignified disdain with which the old woman—as unafraid of the society as of the State—could laugh even as she exposed the dangers, the cruelty, and the futility of violence and injustice. And this jelled with my understanding of the communicative power of humour, especially in tandem with pathos. Saying serious things seriously is often a dull way of doing it and even counterproductive in that it may shut off the interest and attention of a reader. Laughing along is a fun way of doing it and almost unbeknown to the reader, the most incisive things sink deep into her consciousness and impact it as she sails on.
As Daisy Rockwell writes in the Translator’s Note, the original text of Tomb of Sand (Ret Samadhi) is as peppered with English as the translated version is peppered with words and phrases in Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi, and Sanskrit. I do feel like this multilingual quality to the text made for a richer and more exciting reading experience, since in the Anglophone world (even when reading translated texts) the English language dominates and readers are not often confronted with words they do not understand. What was your experience incorporating several languages into Tomb of Sand?
I would prefer to talk of the experience of incorporating ‘several’ languages into Ret Samadhi. The one who did the same thing in Tomb of Sand is Daisy Rockwell. Most languages in my multilingual and pluralistic society are all the time happily and creatively mixing tongues and borrowing from one another. In fact, whatever drive there is towards uniformity and monolingualism is an unwanted product of certain narrow historical and political developments. Knowing more than one language was common and everyday vocabulary extended across languages and dialects. I would even venture to say that what appear to be several languages are in reality one language. Hindi is a case of eclecticism par excellence where many Hindis get spoken. Nothing is taboo (till recently when there is an attempt to ‘purify’ the language) and new inflections and expressions creep in with region, class, education, etc. I did no more than be alert to these variations and felt free not only to bring in new twists and turns but also to mint new words, idioms, and proverbs. Hindi in Ret Samadhi is held back by nothing.
Do you think moving between languages in your writing was essential in capturing the voice of the novel?
Absolutely. Essential as much for reflecting the rich and variegated polyphony around me as for uniting and bonding by transgressing borders; the two being the life and breath of the novel.
I watched the fascinating lecture you gave at Azim Premji University entitled “My Language: Why and How Hindi. At one point you say that in your career as a writer, Hindi chose you “the experience I wanted to relay, the flavours and the textures of the intimate everyday were linked more to Hindi than to the schooled English I had acquired. Even more, this everyday was part of a memory I had twisted if not entirely lost.” How has writing being a Hindi writer allowed you to access your own memories, as well as collective memories that are being/have been forgotten?
What I talked about in that lecture is part of a larger history. It’s the history, mutatis mutandis, of all the erstwhile colonised peoples. Barring, of course, those exceptionally deprived peoples whose languages were wiped off and who are now left with the colonisers’ languages as their own. The course of historical development in India, and in many other colonised societies, has been different. English was not imposed upon Indians. They sought it as they saw in it their individual and national salvation. Paradoxical though it may seem, the cultural-intellectual hold of English has progressively deepened in independent India. The adverse intellectual-cultural repercussions of this hold are evident. Yet, so deep is the lure of English—deepened even more by globalisation and the magic of America—that even otherwise intelligent people can see English only as a blessing. A blessing it surely is. But as people’s first and preferred language in opposition to their mother tongues, it can only be corrosive. English has distanced Indians increasingly from their roots. Much of what once constituted an organic culture now lies forgotten in the interstices of our consciousness. It also continues to intermittently reverberate in our own languages. No wonder, the creative writer is instinctively drawn to her mother tongue. There is no other way she can plumb, as she must, the unconscious, the forgotten, of her individual and collective conscious,
Let’s discuss the birds! Throughout the novel, you bring in animals quite frequently, giving them complex emotions and interior lives. There is a particular scene toward the very end of the novel that captures a beautiful moment between Amma and a crow.
“Whether Amma understood the crow’s cawcawing, no one knows. But the camaraderie between the two of them revealed that contact and communication are not the mere products of straightforward understanding. If there’s mutual affection and solidarity, then watching plants grow green together in total silence can be an activity filled with dialogue. Now neither was alone: neither Ma, nor the crow.” (716)
I not only love what this paragraph tells about language, but also how it gives the crow so much humanity. This is also powerful because it’s juxtaposed with soldiers–and other government officials–who lack this empathy and imagination.
The animals didn’t need my invitation to enter the novel. They came in on their own with—as you so finely put it—their ‘complex emotions and interior lives.’ You are also right in pointing to the contrast between the crow’s ‘humanity’—empathy and imagination—and the lack thereof among soldiers and other government officials. However, why not call the crow’s behaviour crow-like? It does not need ‘humanity’ to be caring and loving and concerned and be in communion with the old woman. If anything, the crow exposes the baseless arrogance of the invented binary between ‘human’ and ‘bestial.’
I wonder too, in retrospect, whether the philosophy of the unity of all things and creatures in the world—characteristic of the East and of pre-Enlightenment West—led me to conjure up a happy bonding of things animate and inanimate.
For the first 170 pages of the novel, Ma does not get out of bed. Her back is turned to her family and to the world. This decision made quite an impression on readers, who like the other characters began to wonder when Ma was going to get up. I thought it was brilliant how you chose to take your time in the novel and in doing so exposed the family’s biases (and perhaps the readers’ too) about the family matriarch. What was your relationship with pacing while writing the novel?
My relationship with pacing while writing the novel? I went along with the flow. It was Ma who took her own time to decide the course of her life. She remained in bed so long as she wished and leapt out when she so willed. It is reassuring that you and other readers felt sufficiently invested in that unhurried narrative and wondered when—also, maybe, if at all—she was going to get up. Reassuring, because many readers have found the opening section tedious and given up after the first 30-40 pages. But, then, there always is that endless range of varying tastes and expectations.
I have also, post writing the novel and in response to such questions, wondered a bit about where this pacing may be coming from. An analogy which occurred to me is of Hindustani classical music. Its structure includes an opening alaap with a chosen group of notes meant to align in creative combination and permutation to pattern out a particular raga. Performed very slowly and repetitively and beautifully, almost as if still, the alaap sets the mood and individuality of the raga that is being sung or played. We love its going on and on in that slow, meditative and deep way, emanating only sounds and not words. And then follows the rest of the structure. The novel’s opening section is the alaap of Ret Samadhi!
You also raise important questions about who can move across borders. There is the legacy of the partition and all of the individuals it displaced—those who had to leave their homeland and of course, those who were not allowed leave. Alternatively Tomb of Sand manages to capture these varied experiences. Globalization is ever present in the novel with references to Ma’s grandson working abroad, and foreigners who exotify India on their vacations. At one point you write, “a story is like a nomad.” I wonder if you felt this way while writing the book.
You bring together a great deal here. Let me try and answer item wise. One, the story in this novel, indeed, turned out to be a particularly inveterate nomad that moved as it pleased. Two, the historical event of ‘Partition’—with its still unfolding menacing legacy—is but part of a larger anxiety about partitions and borders. The anxiety that borders, which are designed as bridges to facilitate co-existence and create beauty, foment hostility and produce ugliness. As for the historical event, it was more complex and complicated than being just about those who had to, and those who were not allowed to, leave. There were many who left voluntarily and exultantly. But even they did not constitute a homogeneous category. Many were lured by the prospect of greener pastures. Many saw themselves as pilgrims undertaking hijrat to the newly created Dar-ul-Islam of Pakistan. Even those happy migrants, however, did not realise that this would mean an irrevocable severance from the land where they were born and where they were leaving so many of their kin and friends. Nor did they apprehend the disenchantment that awaited them in that land of promise and pilgrimage. This is not the place to detail that complex and complicated story. But that is what, along with a parallel disenchantment in the other part of the partitioned sub-continent, lies behind Ma’s indictment of not just the ‘Partition’ she had personally suffered but of the cruel senselessness of all partitions and borders. Hers is no idle rhetoric. For, historically, the partition of India was effected to end the ‘Muslim’ question, not to perpetuate and aggravate it.
Finally, you are right that globalisation is ever present in the novel. Its presence, however, is not confined to one individual, Ma’s younger grandson. Like in the inter-continental spread of the houses owned by that retired senior officer of the Customs Department, or in the aspirations of the young man—Champak alias Hero—who moves from one job and business to another, globalisation as a driving force across classes is numerously reflected in the novel.
Because of the word play, alliterations, and puns that are so central to the novel, it was a very complex book to translate. Did you collaborate with your translators at all during their renderings of the novel?
Yes, I collaborated with Annie Montaut for the French and with Daisy Rockwell for the English translation. I was lucky that both Annie and Daisy had a great feel for inventiveness and adventure in language and the humour it encapsulated, and that resulted in the spirit and vision of the book flitting happily across the translations.
Throughout the novel, you are very intentional with how and when you name your characters. Some characters do not receive names at all (or perhaps are referred to by a nickname like “Overseas Son.”) Ma has several names depending on the perspective of the character–or creature–who she is interacting with. She is called Ma, Amma, Granny, Mata-ji, or Baji. Though it is not until she returns to her place of birth in Pakistan that the reader discovers Ma’s former identity and her real name. What is the power of a name? And why did you decide not to reveal Ma’s name until she crossed the border?
Looking back, I can discern a pattern. Generally characters seem to have been named in accordance with their familial roles. But they acquire a proper name when they appear in their own right as individuals. Thus, unlike Rosie/Raza Master, Ma appears as Chandraprabha Devi only in the last section when her personal life comes to the fore. There was nothing about her name that needed to be revealed or concealed at any other point in time.
I am fascinated by the ways in which you approach ideas about feminism and family structures and how these notions change across generations. Your novel Mai features a matriarch whose children want to “rescue” her from a life they believe is oppressive under the patriarchy. You explore a similar topic in Tomb of Sand. Ma’s daughter Beti has a sense of superiority over Ma since she has escaped a traditional path for a woman. She has a successful career, lives alone, and has chosen not to have children. Yet, throughout the novel the reader sees how Beti’s view of the world may be limited by her own prejudices as well—especially considering her mother’s relationship with a hijra, Rosie.
Whatever connections you see between Mai and Tomb of Sand are ex post facto. There was no such design in my mind while writing the latter. But yes, rigidities of stereotypes in feminism and elsewhere always take me to exploring the myth within them. Those are simplistic ways of seeing which miss out on other layers. So Mai who is quiet and bends over house work is seen as weak and subordinate and her daughter, who speaks out and physically makes off, sees herself as strong and assertive. Or Beti, in thinking certain things, assumes she is living it, but is not equal to Ma’s unconventional makeover.
There is an arrogance in thinking that weaknesses lie with the others and with the other ways of being, failing to see them in one’s own being! The westerner often does that vis a vis the easterner, taking some visible and obvious markers of modernisation as freedom and missing their own hidden continuing fetters.
It is also about the contradictions that make us when, even as we wish to go a particular way, older ways persist within us and we know that not.
That brings us to Rosie’s relationship with Ma. Two misfits. An elderly woman and a hijra–people that are not taken seriously or really listened to in society. In some ways they are incredibly restricted due to their social position, and in other ways the fact that they act according to their authentic identity—not caring what others think—makes them the most free.
There is merit in your argument that Rosie and Ma acquire their freedom from their refusal to be held back by what others think. That refusal frees them of the baggage of conventionality and they strike out freer and newer.
It is impossible not to mention section three of the novel which evokes great writers of partition literature in a Greek Chorus-like manner, to name a few: Intizar Hussain, Bhisham Sahni, Ramamand Sagar, Krishna Sobti, and Manzoor Ehtesham. It is clear you have drawn from the rich history of partition literature in Tomb of Sand. How have these literary influences helped form you as a reader and writer?
Not all the writers making this Greek Chorus-like appearance can really be said to have overtly influenced me as a reader and writer. I would single out Krishna Sobti, Intizar Hussain and Manto as ones who I know I found utterly powerful. But they all stir up in me echoes of worlds, known and unknown, which in ways I could not possibly measure fill and fire my imagination.
Tomb of Sand made history as the first book written in Hindi to win the Booker Prize, though certainly not for lack of there being no other brilliant authors writing in Hindi and other South Asian languages. Are there any contemporary South Asian writers working today that you believe should be read by others and perhaps translated if they are not already?
You echo what I said at the Booker Award ceremony about South Asian literature. As for translations, very many contemporary South Asian writers who must be widely read have been translated into English (which is what you seem to have in mind). But those translations have only had a small circulation. More than mere translation is needed to ensure wider readerships, i.e., a sustained discourse and debate around South Asian literature. Also, most of the translations have been a result of chance individual initiatives whereas what is needed is organised institutional effort.
I will have to hunt for good writers who have not at all been translated. Perhaps a few like Nilakshi Singh are yet to be translated. But, if I have got you right, your real concern can be addressed only when good writers are translated extensively. Barring very few exceptions, only one or two works of different writers are translated and their true range and grandeur remain unknown to the outside world. Even the likes of Krishna Sobti and Intizar Hussain have not been extensively translated.
