Ret ki Samadhi: The first Indian language book to win the Booker Prize
You may be familiar with the International Booker Prize. It is an international literary prize given to the best English-language novels released in the United Kingdom or Ireland. But do you know of the first Indian to win the Booker Prize? It is Arundhati Roy who won the award in 1997 for her novel ‘The God of Small Things.’ Recently, another Indian novel got the chance to win the Booker Prize.
Ret ki Samadhi by Geetanjali Shree is the first fiction novel originally written in Hindi to receive a Booker Prize in 2022. It has been translated to English by Daisy Rockwell and is named Tomb of Sand. Let’s find out more about the author and this book!
Unique narrative style
The novel ‘Ret ki samadhi’ narrates the tale of an 80-year-old woman in north India. She falls into severe depression upon the death of her husband. The novel tells us how she then rises out of depression with a new approach to life.
The story goes like this. The old woman leaves her house and travels to Pakistan with her daughter. She visits Lahore, where she lived as a child before India’s partition. She then goes to Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa to search for her ex-husband Anwar. Throughout the entire book, she is referred to as Ma. But in the final few chapters, she reclaims her true self and becomes Anwar-Chanda while being held by her first love. As she faces the unresolved grief of her childhood memories of partition, she confronts what it is to be a mother, a daughter, a woman and a feminist!
What do you think impressed the judges of the Booker Prize? Well, it was Shree’s playful tone and words that resulted in an engaging, funny and unique story instead of a tragic seriousness. This book also serves as an immediate protest against the damaging effects of borders and boundaries between religions, nations and genders.
The world of Geetanjali Shree
Geetanjali Shree was born in the state of Manipur on 12th June 1957. She is 65 years old and has been writing for about 30 years! She has written five novels and many short stories in Hindi, and many of her books have been translated into English, French, German, Serbian and Korean. Women’s isolation is a common theme in Shree’s writings, with a special focus on women’s private lives. Her first work, ‘Mai’ (Mother), reveals how living with men impacts women’s spines. ‘We always knew our mother had a weak spine,’ she writes at the beginning of her book. The paragraph continues with the line, ‘Those who bend constantly have this trouble.’ Ret Ki Samadhi was first published in Hindi in 2018 and is Shree’s fifth book.
Who is Daisy Rockwell?
Rockwell was born in Massachusetts in 1969. In 2022, she translated Ret Ki Samadhi to Tomb of Sand, which made Shree win the Booker Prize. She has also translated several well-known pieces of Hindi and Urdu literature, such as Falling Walls by Upendranath Ashk, Tamas by Bhisham Sahni and The Women’s Courtyard by Khadija Mastur. In 2019, she translated A Gujarat Here, a Gujarat There by Krishna Sobti, which received the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Translation Prize’ from the Modern Language Association in 2020. Modern Language Association is an organization based in the United States comprising writers and scholars of the literary world.