Writing is regardless of awards

Muscat : The writing journey is different from winning awards for International Booker Prize winner Geetanjali Shree. Her Hindi Novel Tomb of Sand earned her the Booker in 2022. Daisy Rockwell has translated the novel in English.

Shree is in Oman to attend ‘Eighth Session: On Achievement’ organised by Bait al Zubair featuring Dr Jokha al Harthy and Geetanjali Shree. To be held on Wednesday at Shangri - La Barr al Jissah, the event will be moderated by Azhar Ahmed.

“Two different trajectories... The writing journey is regardless of the awards. You may or may not get the awards and you will still write on because you are not writing for awards. You are writing because of some inner impulse and inner turmoil, which makes you want to unravel the world around you and the world inside you. And that is the impulse that takes me on the writer’s journey,” explained Shree.

Love for stories has definitely played its part in making her a writer and according to her, some go further in putting together the disorder stories into a creative experience.

“This is what I started doing and it became my expression and the medium for dealing with my confusion and my living. And that is how writing became my breath, although not my bread and butter,” noted the writer who has authored many short stories.

She has a bilingual background with Hindi being informal and English formal mode of education, but she feels Hindi chose her.

“I don’t have a prejudice with languages, it is just that Hindi is closest to my bone,” she explained.

It was in her late twenties when she began to take up writing seriously. She writes fiction, which she defines as “playing with the reality of your own as you perceive it and around you – It is there to unravel some confusion or emotion.” ‘Tomb of Sand’ is not just the first Hindi language book that has won a Booker Prize but the first South Asian language and this has brought about the importance of translation of books.

“It is an important moment but it is not about me or my achievement alone. It is about lighting up a rich area of literature which many people outside it has not known about. So certainly it is a moment full of potential and with Booker shining its light on this linguistic area, there is a lot more interest in what is going on here,” she said.

There is a trend in picking up translations but this kind of excited interest is not enough, she pointed out, “We need serious, practical steps, we need funding of translations and publishing, we need publishers to change their way of working and actually pick up these translations and bring them out and publicise them. That is something at the moment we cannot see it happening in a big way, it has begun but the real scenario would be when we see a profusion of translation in the world market in a huge way with big publishers and funders. It is happening gradually but I hope it moves forward.” Her books cover various subjects from history, communalism, terrorism but most importantly life. In ‘Tomb of Sand’, it is the loneliness of an elderly lady who is engulfed with loneliness after her husband’s death. But her life takes up new perspectives and experiences.

“Women as a subject, I don’t have to try, it is not a deliberate choice, I am sensitive to women, I happen to be a woman myself, I can see a lot of things happening to women, my mother’s generation of women and the generation before that. And I think it is very natural for writers to pick up stories which are lying on the margins not necessarily brought to the centre stage or may not even be heard or noticed. So I think it was a very natural and organic process. I don’t have to try,” she reflected.

Reflecting on her visit to Oman she said, “Oman is a fascinating country and I have just touched the tip of Oman. It enlivened my curiosity and my desire to know more about it. I think it is quite inexcusable that the way the world has been made and the way power has been allocated to some places more than others. We see the west as the centre of the world and most of us look toward the west, whereas in fact there is so much more culturally that we can feel with each other. We know so little about each other but we know so much about Paris, New York and London even if we had not been there.” “So I feel my sense of ignorance and I would like to rectify that and have a lot more interactions with my neighbours,” said Geetanjali.