Geetanjali Shree breathes life into Tomb of Sands

Women are stories in themselves – a concept that Indian Hindi-language novelist and short-story writer Geetanjali Shree understands all too well.

Shree, also known as Geetanjali Pandey, was the winner of the 2022 international Booker Prize for Literature for her domestic Hindi novel Tomb of Sands, a story that mirrors the India in which she grew up.

The book made history when it became the first Hindi novel to win the prestigious award. It has since been translated into 12 languages, including a US edition published by Harper Collins last year.

Shree, a guest at the NGC 2024 Bocas Lit Festival at the National Library on April 27, gave some insight into the making of Tomb of Sands.

“This tale has a border, and women who come and go as they please. Once you’ve got women and a border, a story can write itself…,” Shree read in both English and Hindi from her book, to the delight of host Ira Mathur and those present for the discussion.

The book is a combination of humour, theatre, social commentary and magical realism, and explores themes of love and family, life and death, and then some.

“Humour is a strategy we use to deal with things all the time in our lives. Family is the microcosm of everything that is going on everywhere…For God’s sake, look around, life is not about staid reality. Reality itself is about magical realism.”

Shree, like many other writers before her, has subconsciously drawn on a combination of factors during the writing process.

“My history, my geography, my experiences, the experiences of other people, imagination, my dreams – they’re all feeding into it and making it richer and richer.”

But, she insists, she never controls the narrative. Once she begins writing, at some point, the words and characters take on a life of their own and she simply follows their lead.

“I’ve been asked about my creative process and my intention and way of writing. Although I’ve spoken a lot about it, I find it difficult to articulate.

“I am not one of those writers who have an agenda at the start. More or less never…mostly for me, the creative process is an act of faith and an act of risk…

“It’s a risk because I may fail, or I may not. It is that intuition that guides me and tells me when to stop.”

For example, she said, many readers have commented on the part of Tomb of Sands when Ma, the 80-year-old heroine, is just lying in bed for a long time doing nothing.

“But I can’t do anything about it. She has to decide when to get up. And when she does, I can’t do anything about that…It slowly changes without my knowing, and all I, as the writer, can do is follow her excitedly.”

She said every writer who is describing a world, especially their world, is writing a love letter about a world they are concerned about, a world they might be losing, a world they want to hold on to.

“Similarly, this one is very much a world I have grown up in, full of variety and pluralism, polyphonic, all these languages and cultures…But I would like to say that even though a work is about a certain place and culture, it’s always about much more than that.”

So, she said, Tomb of Sands, although set in India and Pakistan, is about today’s world – the polyphony, the pluralism and a concern about losing those things in a world that is driving towards monoculturalism, crossing all the boundaries that one can cross.

“What makes anything look different is just the outer garb. Behind that it’s just humanity and its problems. We’ll be surprised by how similar they are. It has resonances in situations anywhere in the world.

“Otherwise we will never be able to appreciate literature from one corner of the world to another. Good literature will make sense anywhere in the world. Something from the most remote place will transcend its borders and make sense in any part of the world, if it makes sense and is good and powerful, and is saying something about humanity and life and death, and everything that matters to everybody.”

The book also ventures into the trans world in which the trans character, Rosie, totters on the borders of man- and womanhood, having to deal with all the stigma and discrimination that comes with his/her lifestyle choices.

“It’s difficult to be a transperson in any part of the world – much maligned, suspected, shunned.

"As a writer, it was not a conscious decision to bring in a trans character, she just walked into the book. That’s one of the things ingrained in literature; you don’t want people to go unnoticed, especially the marginalised. So a character like Rosie who changed gender when it suited her, her whole personality was about a border which flowed this way and that.”

Shree said there are lots of stereotypes that have developed about borders, and mainly, they are used as something that divide people.

“As a matter of fact, the fixation of today is doing that. That whole idea of identities with closed personalities that doesn’t spill out is not how it is in reality. We actually flow. We are many people, many cultures, a conglomerate of many, many different things all in one.

"And this is what the book kept discovering; the characters in the book made me discover, and this is what I kept following.”

In some abstract way, she said, there is no division between the personal and political.

“There will be times when it becomes much more oppressive, and times when it will be amicable, but there will be levels of control.”

While she admitted she was no expert on political matters, Shree said as a concerned citizen, she has used her tools as a writer to raise awareness of some of the concerning issues she sees in the world today.

“Some insecurities, some breakdown of ethics, some breakdown of ideals, which is turning people to dictatorial tendencies; trying to make everything uniform to better control.

“We have to save the world…What can a writer do except the only thing he or she knows to do – write? Keep that voice alive, don’t let people forget.”

Shree views her writing and words as a form of freedom that she refuses to allow to be harnessed.

“Certain things happened as I went along. A sense of complete ‘freedom’ propelled me…I wasn’t looking and listening to anybody…Words are not just some dead medium that we created, in which we blow a breath and put a meaning there; they are not just vehicles to be used for a message.

"Words are something in themselves. You say a word, it has a sound, it brings up histories, it brings up all kinds of contexts, and the same word in different languages will bring up different things. You’re dealing with something which is a live entity...that was how the book just kept becoming all sorts of things.”

As for language, Shree believes different versions of a language from different places can only help to enrich the original form.

“The official Hindi which is forced down people’s throat is not Hindi. Hindi is, like any language, a much freer entity which all the languages it comes in contact with influences it and extends it vocabulary...Just as in English: English has all its borders and it’s been enriched by all the languages it has come in contact with. English is probably getting richer with the parallel movement to make English a uniform language for everybody. Everyone who is coming in contact with English is putting in their own inputs – Trinidadian English, African countries and their English, Indian English – they’re all enriching the language and turning it on its head.

“So Oxford and Cambridge English is not English,” she said, much to the amusement of the audience.

Tomb of Sands is available on Amazon.

About Tomb of Sands

The story follows the journey of 80-year-old Ma who decides to travel to Pakistan following the death of her husband and a bout of depression. She is faced with unresolved trauma as from her teenage years, having survived the 1947 Partition of India which changed political borders and resulted in the creation of two independent dominions in South Asia – India and Pakistan. The partition had caused large-scale loss of life and an unprecedented migration between the two dominions.

Ma’s determination to go against convention – including striking up a friendship with a transgender person – confuses her bohemian daughter. Ma’s experiences help her re-evaluate what it means to be a mother, a daughter, and a feminist.