IE Opinion | Hindus and Muslims must give up rigid positions on contested places of worship

Indian Express

28 MAY 2022 View in Browser

Hindus and Muslims must give up rigid positions on contested places of worship

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Editorial: Collapse of NCB's case against Aryan Khan points to a failed witch hunt   The shabby episode does nothing for the reputation of central investigating agencies. It has been apparent for some time that the government is not above wielding these agencies to fix political rivals and others who cross its path.     Editorial: It's fitting that novel on fallacy of boundaries wins award that honours work in translation   What could a bird or a butterfly, a road or a passer-by, say about the life of an octogenarian on the cusp of momentous change? Perhaps they could iterate that timeless cliché that every end is a beginning; perhaps, they could speak of the unexpected, often exhilarating insights that come from looking into one's life from the outside. In Tomb of Sand (2021), Daisy Rockwell's English translation of Geetanjali Shree's Hindi novel Ret Samadhi (2018), which, on Friday, became the first book in any Indian language to win the International Booker Prize, they speak of all these and more. In the polyphony of voices that they present as they follow the journey of its protagonist Maiji, they make a case for diversity, but also for the inherent connections that bind us -- a befitting tribute to not just the theme of the novel, but also to the idea of translation. 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, especially those from Asian and African countries, 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. The winner of the 2022 International Booker Prize is 'Tomb of Sand' by Geetanjali Shree, translated from Hindi to English by Daisy Rockwell. (Twitter/@TheBookerPrizes) 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".

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