Geetanjali Shree (Hindi Writer)

Geetanjali Shree, born 12 June 1957 in the city of Mainpuri in Uttar Pradesh state, India is a Hindi language short-story writer, based in New Delhi, India. She is the author of several short stories and five novels. Her novel Mai (2000) was shortlisted for the Crossword Book Award in 2001, while its translation by Nita Kumar was published in 2017. Her novel Ret Samadi (2018) — translated into English as “Tomb of Sand” by the U.S. translator Daisy Rockwell — bringing home the Booker International Prize 2022, the first time a book translated from Hindi had won in the prize’s nearly twenty-year history. Shree’s experimental and playful novel tells the story of Ma, an 80-year-old bedridden woman, who gets a new lease on life and goes on a journey back across the border that she thought she would never cross again. The novel was also longlisted for the JCB Award, 2022.

Shree is also known as Geetanjali Pandey after the name of her father Anirudh Pandey, who was a civil servant. Her family lived in various towns of Uttar Pradesh. Shree says that it was this upbringing in Uttar Pradesh, along with a lack of children’s books in English that gave her rich connection to Hindi. Ancestrally, she is from Ghazipur District, Gondaur village. She completed her BA at Lady Shri Ram College and got her Master’s degree in History from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. During her PhD on the Hindi writer Munshi Premchand at Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, Shree become keen interested in Hindi Literature. During this period, she wrote her first short story Bel Putra (1987), followed by a collection of short stories Anugoonj (1991), which turned her into a whole time writer. The English translation of her novel Mai catapulted her to fame. Mai has also been translated into several languages. Shree’s second novel Hamara Shahar Us Baras is set loosely after the incidents of Babri Masjid demolition. Her fourth novel, Khali jagah (2006) has also been translated into many languages including English by Nivedita Menon as The Empty Space. Her fifth novel Ret Samadhi (2018) has been commended by the novelist Alka Saraogi for “its sweeping imagination and sheer power of language, unprecedented and uninhibited”. It has also been translated into various languages. Its English translation by Daisy Rockwell as Tomb of Sand won the International Booker Prize on 26 May 2022, becoming the first book in Hindi and the first Indian writer to receive the accolade. Frank Wynne, chair of the 2022 International Booker judges, said it was “enormously engaging and charming and funny and light, despite the various subjects it’s dealing with”. He added that Rockwell’s translation was “stunningly realized, the more so because so much of the original depends on wordplay, on the sounds and cadences of Hindi.”

First edition cover

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                                                                          Source: https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1580961482l/51012791._SY475_.jpg

Shree also participates in theatre and works with Vivadi, a theatre group comprising of writers, artists, dancers, and painters.

Shree is the recipient of the Indu Sharma Katha Samman award and has been a fellow of Ministry of Culture, India, and Japan Foundation.  In December 2022, Shree was named on the BBC’s 100 Women list as one of the world’s inspiring and influential women of the year.

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“It’s been a sea change from my general lifestyle, which is a quiet, writer’s life,”Geetanjali Shree admitted. 

                                                      (Courtesy:  https://www.vogue.in/culture-and-living/content/after-the-booker-geetanjali-shree-on-success-serendipity- and- solitude)                       

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“Here’s the thing: A story can fly, stop, go, turn, be whatever it wants to be. That’s why our wise author Intizar Hussain once remarked that a story is like a nomad.”

(from: A Book About Storytelling by Geetanjali Shree)

“Women are stories in themselves, full of stirrings and whisperings that float on the wind, that bend with each blade of grass.”       

(from: “Tomb of Sand”)

 “Hindi chose me,” Geentanjali Shree said. “That’s my mother tongue.” She added, “Language is not just a vehicle to convey a message, it’s a complete entity in its own right.”

(Talking with journalists)

 “Behind me and this book lies a rich and flourishing literary tradition in Hindi and in other South Asian languages,” Shree said in her acceptance speech. “World literature will be richer for knowing some of the finest writers in these languages, the vocabulary of life will increase from such an interaction.”

(Geetanjali Shree’s International Booker Prize acceptance speech.)

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“The question itself says so much! That a person should be asked why she writes in her mother tongue, when it should be an absolutely natural thing. What else should I be writing in except in my mother tongue? It’s the first and most natural choice for a writer to be writing in her mother tongue. I think the question to be asked, normally, should be why you’re not writing in the mother tongue. But this says so much about our history, about our colonial past, about the place of English amongst the educated in [India], that it becomes almost unnatural that anyone who is educated to be writing not in English, but in another Indian language. So yes, I write in Hindi because it’s my mother tongue. And I think, like a lot of us middle class Indians, I’ve also grown up with an English medium education. But when it comes to something like the arts and literature, it’s somehow so close to your bones that almost automatically you go into your mother tongue rather than in the language you have learned formally in school. I must add, because too easily it becomes a story about English versus other languages, that there is no such prejudice in my head or heart about it. Those who find for whatever reasons that English is the language they’ve expressed themselves in—they’re most welcome to do it.

“You are carrying all your stories in you, from your surroundings, from your imagination, from your reality, from your observation, from your history, from your tradition—you’re carrying them all with you all the time. They’re building up. You just want to find the place where the story, for that moment, is going to emerge and begin to take shape and you can go with it. I just tried to put myself in a kind of mode of retreat and empty myself out and let the layers and whispers and the murmurs from within me become more audible and visible. And then I go along with that.”

“….when you were writing, that you had to write about society for the betterment of society, and you had to do it in a way which is very easily communicable. You had to follow a certain sort of way which can be comprehended, the proper sort of story that a reader can immediately connect with.”

I think somewhere I—when I say ‘I,’ I am not only talking about myself but a whole community of writers and artists—began to push back against social realism. Society comes into your work in so many different ways—it doesn’t have to be a verifiable, empirical, descriptive way. I think that spurred a lot of us on, and freed a lot of us….I would say that we don’t have to go looking for the society, because almost whatever we do, society will come to it. So, just let yourself free in the field of literature and creativity. And, if you’re letting yourself free, then also realize that stories will not just go straight. Stories will go this way and that! There’ll be non sequiturs! There’ll be all kinds of breaks and incompleteness, and it’s okay to celebrate all that and see what happens.

“I mean, if you go back to ancient literature, perhaps anywhere, and certainly in [India], you see it—look at our epics, take the Mahabharata. And what you’re calling experimentation I mean, come on, it’s full of every way of storytelling. It’s doing everything! It’s almost like there’s nothing new for you to do. In a way, I’m only copying. We carry on from things which have already been done, and we keep renewing them with our zeal and reinventing them and we keep trying to do something new. And sometimes, we manage with the same ingredients. And sometimes perhaps, we discover that we thought we were doing it for the first time, but it’s been done thousands of times before.”

“What’s important between the translator and the author is to share a rapport about the way of looking at things, you know, and feeling intensely about those things.”

“We must return again and again to the whole issue of hegemony of the English language. I think it’s unfortunate that English should become the pool where all literature is to be viewed. There should be more translations across languages; in fact, even across Indian languages. Why should Indians from different parts of the country have to read each other only in English?”

(Courtesy:  https://therumpus.net/2023/03/23/with-geetanjali-shree-2/)

 

***

“I do not care for writing with a worked out plan of beginning, middle and end. Creativity can be an unexpected journey for the writer also. Krishna Sobti, the great Hindi writer, once said there is no fun in writing if you already know where it is going. It is a voyage of discovery and an unexpected terrain to cross. So many things go into the making of a creative work — a linguistic-literary tradition, an entire cultural lineage, history, one’s own experience and that of others distilled through observation, new readings and lessons learnt, hope and despair and playfulness and sadness, all feeding the writers’ imagination in tangible and not-so-tangible ways. These in fact go into the intuition of the writer and stories keep forming in there, ready to fly out when their moment arrives. I would dare to say that conscious intention plays the smallest part in a work of art. Except for the moment of its conception, in which my agency is vital, every work, be it a short story or novel, evolves its own dynamics that I follow. The conception can occur in various ways. An image may appear and stay on. An idea or problem may present itself and refuse to leave. It can even be a real life incident.”

To the question, “Looking back now, do you recall any moments of writer’s block, perhaps parts that were emotionally taxing to write? Does writing emotionally-charged scenes, moments which resonate with your own life, leave you with a cathartic or enervating feeling?”

Geetanjali Shree replied, “There have been more moments of writer’s block than I can remember, not all caused by having to write something emotionally taxing. Writing emotionally-charged scenes — independent of whether they resonate with my own life — may leave me with some sort of an enervating feeling and may also produce a compensatory aesthetic satisfaction, but they can also sap me, filling me with an incredible exhaustion.” She further said, “Earlier you asked: ‘Have you always known the ending of the novel, the fates of all your characters?’ Never. You also ask if I unravel these as I go on writing. It may sound mysterious to some, but there is very little that I unravel as I write. Things unfold on their own. The poet A. K. Ramanujan wrote in his diary that he does not go in search of poems but rather puts himself where the poem can find him. I think that makes complete sense to me. The story and stories are all there and I move with them to a place and a time where I can be calm and wait for one or more to unfurl. Which indeed happens.”

 

To the question, “The manner in which you talk about the process of writing, equating it to a voyage of discovery, makes me think of the process as intuitive and subconscious – its outcome a surprise even to you, the author. Now, with the benefit of hindsight, as you step outside of TOMB OF SAND’s microcosm, is there any part of the story that you wish you could have changed or done differently?”

She replied, “You put it very well. Intuitive and subconscious is what the process on the whole is; and its outcome is never pre-designed so indeed there are surprises for the writer too. It may sound like I am speaking of some mysteriously generated inner voice called intuition and the subconscious and glorifying it like a ‘divine’ power, but it is not that at all. I am speaking of an intuition and subconscious which are created in us over the years and constantly honed as we go along. Our environment, history, geography, aesthetic and other traditions, readings, observations, thoughts, feelings, a whole range of things I cannot all list, together go into that storehouse and make it a powerhouse that throws up ideas and guides our imagination! In execution it may look like it came from nowhere but in fact everything is emerging from the rich subconscious so created. And it is from the aesthetic sensibility maturing there that my self-critique and balance and nuances get their shape.” She added, “Self-critique is always there, as part of my intuition. It is this that produces, in the event of certain outcomes, that thrill of what you call ‘surprise’. It is also the pitiless slave-driver that keeps tormenting me, saying ‘no, not this, not this.’ Once a work is out in the world, I agonise neither over what else I could – should – have done, nor over its reception. Which is not to say that my work is unswayed by the opinions, values, standards, expectations, etc., obtained in the outside world. I brook no external, indeed no extraneous, mediation between me and my writing. But, in ways more unknown than known to me, my intuition carries marks of the collective conscious and unconscious of which I am part. My self-critique, then, is also a collective critique. I should like to believe, though, that only the best of the collective has gone into that self.”

To another question, “Do you believe it is possible for you, or for writers in general, to ever achieve a complete sense of satisfaction with their published works?

Geetanjali Shree said, “Complete sense of satisfaction! Can one possibly know that bliss? And once a writer feels that, would there be any more reason to write? Because writing, for me at any rate, is not towards an end but an end in itself. Nothing stops with writing any one single thing. The process continues into the next act of writing. Trying to reach where? Some closure? Surely not. The joy of occasional ‘surprises’ is wonderful enough to keep one going. My artist friend, Bhupen Khakhar, would sign off every painting just as he felt it was at the point of completion, a principle he scrupulously followed. I think I dread completion. Always trying to reach the horizon which I will never reach. In music we say the musician is trying to get to the ultimate note, anhad naad, but that is the note none can reach. So you are just trying, just reaching out, just approximating towards a classic. Which, as Italo Calvino said, is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.

(Courtesy:  https://www.thewhitereview.org/feature/interview-with-geetanjali-shree/)

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“This is not just about me, the individual. I represent a language and culture and this recognition brings into larger purview of Hindi literature in particular and Indian literature as a whole.”

Every writer is necessarily a translator…. The translator, similarly, is also a writer…. The writer, a translator, and the translator, a writer…. A translation is always in process. A conversation. Writing is translation and vice versa.

               (Courtesy: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/18/special-series/booker-prize-translation-conversation.html?searchResultPosition=1)

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“….a lot of people think about writers and artists, that they are living a very glamorous life, it’s actually a very boring life because much of the time you are just indoors by yourself, indoors or outdoors, but in solitude, alone, and you are writing, writing, and writing. So, it’s a very lonely life.

Some books of mine had by then come out and also some interviews and reviews. A relative of mine, someone I’m very fond of, came home and said, “Yes, yes, I saw your interviews, yes, I saw your reviews.” I gave him my books and autographed them. In the course of our conversation, he asked, “So what are you doing these days?” I was surprised, I said, “Come on, we just talked about it, you have my books in your hands”. So he said, “Of course I know you write but what exactly do you do, what actually do you do?” So, again, note that writing is not considered by a lot of the ordinary people as being something, which is doing something. He saw it as something you do for pleasure, casually, but actually what do you do?

From the time that I have been writing and even today when I am better known, most people assume I must be writing in English. On learning that I am a Hindi writer, I am asked, “Why do you write in Hindi? Why not in English?” They are surprised, even sorry for me, and invariably think it is a bad choice. This is such a strange question to ask a writer “Why do you write in your mother tongue and not in a foreign language?”

I know English is not a foreign language as it used to be but even then my mother tongue is my mother tongue. Why should my writing in my mother tongue surprise anybody? Nobody asks a French person, “Why do you write in French and not in English?” This question is asked in India by educated people. It is assumed that education means that you work through English and not through your mother tongue.

I am just telling you these small anecdotes to point to you a certain casualness with which writers are taken in our society. Why is that? Think about that, what are the views people have about writers in the society. If they are very kind to the writers, then they say “Writers are innocent creatures, well-meaning entertainers. Indulge them up to a point.” Otherwise, they will say “Writers are parasites who are wasting the resources of the society, wasting time, we don’t have to support them too much, up to a point let them be, but no more than that.” And, if the writers are trying to rake up controversial subjects, then, they are pests. They should do their work quietly and not disturb anybody.

Why are they doing things that are creating controversies in society? This is how, in general, writers are looked at. You can also see this borne out by something serious like the allocation of funds and resources, not just in India, but the world over, to subjects like literature and the arts. You will see what a skewed balance it is. Much less is given to arts and literature. Always, much more to subjects like science and technology.

Again, why is that so? What is it in our way of seeing literature and writers that makes us think that this is fair? Why do we feel that the writer is not really such a useful category after all?

….it made me think again about why a writer who sits looking idle under the tree or staring at the sky and counting stars is seen as being useless to society? Or seen as wasting time?

Before I say a little bit more about the usefulness of a writer to the society, let me talk about this thing called literature and how it is made. I will speak in a few clichés, but I think clichés say certain important general things. What is literature? Literature is stories. It is the story of the world and of human beings. It is the story of you and me, of life. To tell this story, you have to sit in a place made of quiet and reflection, where you almost have to meditate. It is only then that you notice, that you observe details, which you would not otherwise.

Literature and its place is what stops you in your tracks when you are rushing through the activities of life and the world. It stops you and makes you quiet and makes you think and notice all around you. When you do that, when you observe, you also start wondering about things. Then, you start raising questions, then you start having doubts, then you start rethinking many things you thought you already knew. This goes on and on, and this is a process which, in fact, takes forward knowledge and takes you forward in the search for truth and meaning. It is an important function.

I would say that literature is about holding a dialogue with yourself and with the world. Just think about it. It cannot be done in a hurry.

What does that do? That hones your sensitivities, honing your subtleties. All of which actually makes you more civilised, I would say.

This, too, is important. Can we only look at the surface of the reality around us, describe only the surface, and be satisfied with it? That’s never enough. Because behind the surface lie many other layers of reality. And that is what starts to show when you pause to concentrate and stare, observe, experiment, and explore.

You start uncovering those layers in the world but also inside yourself. You go to the innermost recesses of yourself, to the dark interiors, and you begin to pull those out. So, a writer is not just pulling out what they are consciously knowing. A writer is also interested in what lies buried in the subconscious and the unconscious. It’s almost like pulling out your entrails and viewing them in public.

That is, of course, painful. It can also be shocking, for both the writer and the reader. It may not always be a view that everyone can accept. But, then, a writer is never somebody who represent only herself, I am part of humanity, I am part of my society. My entrails actually are also the entrails of society. What Jung calls the collective unconscious, that is what I am able to bring forth.

Literature shows you the world much better. You have to know what it is. When you know what it is, you start asking questions and only then you can move forward. Can this be a useless activity? It obviously is not.

But the question remains, why is literature not given its due? Why is a writer not seen as someone very important for the running of society? Why is literature not turned to in freedom and faith to understand how to conduct society better?

I think the reason lies at least in two things. There may be others, but at the moment I will mention only two things. One is our past, which was a colonial past. And the second is our present, which is a completely confusing, carnivalesque circus playing around us. And the notion they have both given us of usefulness, something immediate and rather obviously utilitarian.

Answers are not the protocol of writers. Clarity, offering clarity, is not the protocol of literature. Being opaque and confounding is. In this storm raging around us, we expect writers to somehow be like doctors and engineers and scientists. But that cannot be.

The times, the society, the state, market, they all put pressure on authors and on literature to take care of the society in a particular way.

But I am saying, a little provocatively, it has to be a two-way relationship. Society must also take care of literature and let it flourish and let it happen. How? By letting it be, letting it be itself. Ultimately, literature is about a literary act, which can even be auto-referential, which creates its own world, which only seeks ratification from that world.

Each genre must have its freedom in a civilised society. Literature is important as the carrier of culture. Literature preserves language, takes language forward. Language is not just a medium. Language is not just a tool. Language is a complete entity in itself. Language represents a culture and a way of being and seeing and expressing. And literature takes that forward. Good literature enriches culture and must be allowed to do that.

This takes us to the subject of freedom. To discover, to go on the search, which is literature’s purpose. It has to be free to play. It has to be free to get lost, go into the wilderness – the wilderness of the world around and within us – and find possible ways out. Literature is not just a means to an end, it is an end in itself. I think we have to think about these questions of the writer, literature, society, and responsibility. Not excluding the supreme question of what the writer owes literature.

That is why literature will play around with things, topple them over, turn them upside down, in healthy humor and irreverence, which is only something to make us laugh and love together. It is not something to divide us and create enmity between us.

The point is, in life and in art and literature, there is nothing sacrosanct in such a way that you can’t touch it. You can play with these things. Like I said, literature and art are about binding people, creating hope and humanity, bringing them together with love, not about dividing and creating hostilities.

There is play between loved ones, and it does not question/deride that love at all. There is that love in literature and the arts and this is a space of freedom, which any genre has to be allowed for it to flourish and grow. No genre can be conducted by prescribing and proscribing directives by the society, market, state, anybody.

Here, I am going to say another provocative thing. Fundamentalists are known to object to things and to tell writers and artists what they must do and what they must not. But I must say, even progressives who mean very well, start proscribing and prescribing, that a writer has to attend to this pressing evil of the society and work on that, or even that a writer should, at a particular moment, write less and become more of an activist in the way they understand activism. And I beg to differ.

But people will demur. What do you mean? How far are you going to take that freedom? How free can that freedom be? To that I would say, the curbs on freedom must not come from anywhere else. The curb on freedom, if any, must come from within.

So, what I am saying is that freedom encourages creativity, sensitivity, and confidence. Censorship crushes the soul and limits knowledge and makes dwarfs of us.

What do I say, except that for writers writing is like breathing, it is as natural as breathing. How can I not breathe? I have to breathe. If the atmosphere is conducive to good breathing, the oxygen is plentiful in the air, like in forest-covered areas of Kerala, then, I am lucky, I breathe easily. If it is like the polluted air of Delhi, even then I have to breathe. I have to find strategies of doing it. The point is the writer has to write, whether in fear, whether in stealth, whether in happiness and friendliness. The writer has to write, or else, it is death for her, her breath gone. It will be murder, or suicide, whatever!

This is what we all need to think about jointly when we think of the responsibility of the writer and of society — their relationship based on love and respect and full of fun, freedom and hope and bonding.

(Extracts from: “A Writer’s Responsibility” delivered by Geetanjali Shree for the inaugural edition of the MR Narayana Kurup Memorial Annual Lecture at Government College, Madappally, Kerala, on December 19, 2022.)                                                    

                                    (Courtesy: https://scroll.in/article/1041228/clarity-is-not-the-protocol-of-literature-geetanjali-shree-on-thewriters- responsibilities#)

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My geographical locus is South Asia, India to be precise, North India to be more so. My mental locus is literature. In a manner of speaking that sums up my world. And in another manner of speaking it sets the entire vast world upon me!

The townscape is changing fast. So much urgency in the air — which way are we going. So much confusion — what’s been right or wrong in our comprehension?

That gives me the cue. Confusion. Really that’s all I can write about. That’s all I am, we are, at that moment. A moment perhaps so fraught, so overwhelming, that the distance between thought and feeling shrinks, may be vanishes. If literature is about subtlety, understatement, deflections, detached observation, then can there be literature at such a moment? When the ‘outside’ turns so invasive that it is as if no ‘inside’, space remains for the writer? What is the writer without solitude? I don’t know. I can’t judge, though I might, when theirs leisure and time for literary debate say why not this kind of literature too, that there is no one kind of literature alone, the canvas of literature accommodates many modes, many transgressions and different times and different compulsions strain at the borders of different literary maps, reshaping them if need be.

What does strike me though is the need felt by societies such as mine to address people directly, to express ‘outwards’ in a manner of speaking, the need compounded by the invasion of ‘outer’ events into the ‘inner’ lives of people. The shrinkage of ‘pure’ private space and its take-over by public space. To write when so invaded, to write with an inner censor worrying about implications, because everything is so immediate, so volatile, I am not sure how to deal with these factors.

I just stand, like many others, caught in the ‘moment’ which will not/cannot pass me by. I cannot wait for heart and mind to emerge clear and apart before I start writing. It is like being caught in a storm which has to be dealt with right there and then. Right here and now. An inevitability, an incumbency, an immediacy. But what sense can be made of scenes whipping around in a storm? As witness, not analyst, of this moment. In which continuities are cracking up, stories are turning upside down, clarities are clouded over.

That’s what I express. A collage of life around us. Ordinary. Absurd.

The novel solves nothing. No matter. That’s probably not its role….But the novel does something else too. In writing it and despairing over the new twists and turns confronting us, I nonetheless feel reaffirmed in what we lived by and believed in. It still stands and in spite of everything that does happen, the characters do not capitulate to a monochromatising of identity, national or individual.

I am a writer. Our collective mood translates itself into a story.

The times, the writing go on.  The pressures of it. The despair and hope of it…

 

 Author’s note:

I wrote this in 2003. Mulling over the anxieties of being a writer in a time when the environment loomed large and overbearing on almost every moment of our lives. Since then, that intrusion and pressure has only worsened. The overlapping of the private and public, and the personal and political, oppresses an even larger part of the world today. How do we negotiate is the question.

 

(Extracts from “Writing in Troubled Times: Reflections of an Indian Writer” by Geetanjali Shree. Originally published on March 27, 2017, republished on occasion of the author’s winning of the International Booker Prize 2022.)

                                                                                                            (Courtesy: https://www.newsclick.in/writingtroubledtimes- reflections-indian-writer)

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