Geetanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand and the Story of the Hindi language

In May 2022, Geetanjali Shree won the International Booker Prize for her novel Ret Samadhi, which was translated from Hindi into English by Daisy Rockwell into Tomb of Sand and published in the UK by Tilted Axis Press. There were several reasons why Shree’s accomplishment is significant. It has brought international acclaim to a novel written in Hindi, which is otherwise conspicuously missing from discussions of world literature. The novel also centers the voice of a female author from South Asia and features an aging female protagonist. But perhaps most importantly, it has drawn attention to the violence and mass migration that accompanied the partition of India and Pakistan along communal and religious lines.

Shree’s novel continues a long tradition of writing about the Partition, which deeply scarred at least three South Asian nations—Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh—and was recorded in literary texts in several languages. In Hindi and Urdu, writers such as Bhisham Sahni, Joginder Paul, Intezar Hussein, Saadat Hassan Manto, Krishna Sobti, Khushwant Singh contributed significantly to literary explorations of the trauma of the Partition and became central to developing future generations’ understanding of the event. Shree’s own writing builds on the work of those authors in significant ways, and even allows them a brief cameo where they guide the protagonist, Amma, along her way across the border.

The novel, which is divided into three sections, follows the slow coming-to-life of Amma. When the book opens, Amma lives with her son. Following her husband’s demise, Amma has sunk into a deep depression and insistently shrinks into a small pile of bones on her bed, refusing to be cajoled by her son, daughter-in-law, daughter, grandson, or servants, all of whom look upon her with some affection and immense pity. However, something about the shifting of the household to a different location, the thick layers of dust upon furniture and objects being unsettled, and the cobwebs being aired leads, mysteriously, to Amma’s disappearance, and ultimately her being granted a fresh lease of life. Amma soon moves into her daughter’s house, being gradually enlivened by the warmth of the sun, and ultimately sets out on a journey to Pakistan to resolve the trauma she experienced during the Partition.

Shree’s use of Hindi for the purpose of writing a feminist novel about Partition is significant, particularly because of her refusal to write in the chaste Hindi that has recently been appropriated by the right wing in India. Her Hindi is not the language that the current Indian government is hoping to make India’s national language. It is instead a “mother tongue” that, through movie songs and dialogues, poetry, and novels, has developed within it the flexibility to accurately represent the contradictory and palimpsestic existence of a social universe that was once syncretic but is now divided from within. As Maya Joshi writes in her review(opens in a new tab), “Ret Samadhi dances to the cadence and music of an idiomatic Hindi-Hindustani . . . not formal school-taught uptight sarkari (official) Hindi, but one with long-neglected words rooted in non-metropolitan experience, and abundant wordplay”. The dance is aptly translated into English by Daisy Rockwell, and into French by Annie Montaut, both translators with a deep understanding of Hindi literature, and a long practice of translating it.

The Hindi language itself has a complicated history that was further complicated by the Partition. Few people are aware, for instance, that the language most North Indian speakers of Hindi use is better characterized as “Hindustani” than as Hindi—Hindustani being a register that brings together influences drawn from Sanskrit and Urdu among other languages. Many scholars have even argued that Hindi and Urdu came to be distinguished from each other and developed into separate languages only in the 19^th century, and that the initiative for doing so came from British colonizers who were hoping to better control their colonial subjects by learning their languages. It was also the British who first associated Hindi with Hindus and Urdu with Muslims—a segregation that was quickly adopted by religious factions that hoped to gain control of the newly emerging nation.

In 1949, the writers of the Indian Constitution declared that Hindi would be the official language of India. However, this declaration provoked intense protests by non-Hindi-speaking states of India, where people feared marginalization in competition for prestigious government jobs. India’s rich plurilingual landscape made it difficult for a single language to be adopted either as the national or official language. As a response to the opposition, a special clause was added a few years later that designated English as an official language alongside Hindi for a period of fifteen years with the intention of propagating Hindi in the meantime. However, to this day, Hindi and English both remain the official languages of the nation. 

India’s independence from the British in 1947 was accompanied by the large-scale carnage of the Partition between India and Pakistan. Besides displacing millions of people who lived on either side of arbitrarily drawn borders between India and East Pakistan on one side and India and West Pakistan (now Bangladesh) on the other, the Partition led to riots, unprecedented sexual violence, arson, looting, and murder, and established this trauma deep within the foundational memories India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. As Urdu came to be adopted as the national language of Pakistan, and successive Indian governments made efforts to do the same with Hindi, the division of Hindustani into Hindi and Urdu mimicked the Partition of a whole language and culture.

It is this complex history that Shree’s play with the Hindi language in Ret Samadhi points towards. In her writing, language is as unstable as the world it represents. It is the medium that reveals both the slipperiness and the inflexibility of the social forms we inhabit. In recent years, the Indian government has adopted the slogan “Hindi, Hindu, Hindustan” as part of a push to adopt Hindi as the national language. It is unsurprising that such a government has failed to react to Shree’s international recognition. This silence prompts us to consider whether and how languages represent the places we associate with them. Is a national language one that can truly represent its people? Or does it rather insist on upholding certain kinds of patriotism? What happens when that language begins to shape-shift, and paint unfamiliar pictures of the world we thought we knew?