NEW DELHI: Even before she came under the
global spotlight
with the
International Booker Prize
win for “Tomb of Sand”,
Geetanjali Shree
has been well-known as a critically-acclaimed
Hindi fiction
writer in India.
The author of five collections of short stories and five novels, her works have already travelled across the world as translations into English, Urdu, French, German, Serbian, Japanese and Korean. The Delhi-based
writer
has also won the Krishna Baldev Vaid Samman, Hindi Akademi Sahityakar Samman, Dwijdev Samman and Indi Sharma Katha Samman for her contribution to Hindi literature.
Born in Mainpuri, Uttar Pradesh in 1957 as Geetanjali Pandey, she changed her surname to her mother’s first name, Shree. She spent her childhood moving between different towns in UP in a bilingual atmosphere.
“I was sent to English-medium convent schools, but my informal education was in Hindi,” she told TOI in an interview earlier. “I picked it up on many registers, from ordinary street life to serious kavi sammelans and children’s magazines like Chandamama. Not having a conventional education freed me to play with the league and be adventurous.” Shree has also been influenced by literary stalwarts such as Krishna Sobti, Vinod Kumar Shukla, Shri Lal Shukl and Intizar Hussain.
Shree, who is bilingual, has been vocal about the hierarchy between English and Hindi. “For many, Hindi is just the language to speak to the vegetable vendor and the house help. The language of higher education is English and the skewed relationship between the two and the ignorance surrounding the rich lineage of Hindi is distressing,” she said.
The 64-year-old writer said that her years in the Hindi heartland defined the themes of her writing, which were often set in the north Indian milieu. “My world was very much the north Indian small-town one till much later when I came to the metropolis Delhi. That world I’ve known is full of all kinds of men, women, Hindus, Muslims, upper castes and lower castes, and that is the circus around me.” This playfulness could be best seen in “Ret Samadhi”, where the prose made inventive use of sounds, for example, turning the word “nahi” (no) to “nayi” through repetition.
She went on to study at Lady Shri Ram College and Jawaharlal Nehru University. She did her PhD on Munshi Premchand as an example of the nationalist intelligentsia, which she also published as an academic book. Her first short story collection was only published in 1991. She was also active in theatre, adapting Umrao Jaan Ada and Tagore’s Ghare Baire and Gora, as well as writing experimental plays.
Many of Shree’s works also feature strong female protagonists, be it Ret Samadhi’s octogenarian protagonist and her daughter or her previous novel “Mai” (1993), which is about three generations of women in a middle-class north Indian family navigating patriarchy.
“Geetanjali Shree is a towering figure in Hindi literature,” said Rea Mukherjee, commissioning editor at Penguin Random House, who worked with her on “Tomb of Sand”. “Through her writing, she provides deep sociological insight, and her characters, especially the women, are always multi-layered and challenging stereotypes, whether that is through the character of the mother in Mai, Ma in
Tomb of Sand
or Chachcho and Lalna in The Roof Beneath Their Feet,” she added.
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