Shree’s story

It is somewhat emblematic that a novel that speaks of the fallacy of boundaries should win an award that honours a work in translation. Tomb of Sand is the first novel in an Indian language to be even longlisted for the International Booker Prize, which annually awards a contemporary writer of any nationality for a work translated into English and published in the United Kingdom or Ireland. Shree and Rockwell’s win is essential validation of the vitality of the novel in Indian languages that has, of late, benefited from the ascendancy of translated works in contemporary literary hierarchy. Tomb of Sand, for instance, was championed by translator Deborah Smith, who invested the prize money from her International Booker Prize win in 2016, for the English translation of The Vegetarian by Han Kang, into setting up Tilted Axis Press to push Asian literature to an international audience.

Often, in terms of Indian literature on a global platform, it is the work of a handful of Indian or diasporic writers writing in English that gets to share the spotlight. Frequently macroscopic, they highlight more often than not the exotica of subcontinental lives. Shree’s novel, rooted in the tradition of Hindi writers such as Shrilal Shukla, Krishna Sobti and Vinod Kumar Shukla, and contemporised in Rockwell’s robust linguistic retelling, captures the push and pull of the personal and the political in a region forever in churn. At the awards ceremony on Friday morning, Frank Wynne, the Irish translator and chair of the judges, spoke of the binaries that Shree’s novel represents, “youth and age, male and female, family and nation” that make it “a kaleidoscopic whole” — “a novel of India”.