Geetanjali Shree
Geetanjali Shree (Gītāñjali Śrī) was born in 1957 in Mainpuri (Uttar Pradesh) and lives in Delhi. After completing a degree in history, she published, under her birth name Geetanjali Pandey, several studies in English on the role of writers and intellectuals in the Indian independence movement.
Under the pen name Geetanjali Shree she writes novels and short stories in Hindi, her mother tongue. In 2022 she became the first Hindi author to win the International Booker Prize, for her novel ret samadhi (English: Tomb of Sand).
Work
From the very beginning, Geetanjali Shree was closely tied to the theatre. She wrote scripts for the Delhi theatre group Vivaldi, adapting prose texts from India as well as from other cultural regions for the stage — most famously Mirza Hadi Ruswa's Urdu classic Umrao Jaan Ada (known in German as "Die Kurtisane von Lakhnau", Manesse Verlag 1971). A recurring focus of her theatre work is the roles women are forced into, or voluntarily assume.
As an author of stories and short fiction, Geetanjali Shree displays keen powers of observation, psychological empathy, irony and humour. She has so far published five volumes of short stories. A selection of these appeared in German under the title "Weißer Hibiskus" [White Hibiscus] (Draupadi Verlag 2010).
She became best known through her novels. Her first novel Mai (Mother) engages, in paradigmatic fashion, with the traditional roles that a middle-class Indian family assigns to its members — especially to women — against the backdrop of modern social developments, above all Western notions of gender and class equality. The mother, Mai, whose quiet strength stems from her modesty, ceaselessly challenges her modern-minded children, thereby putting every stereotype in the debate of tradition versus modernity to the test.
Her second novel hamara shahar us baras ("Our City That Year") takes aim at the conflicts between Hindus and Muslims in their contemporary manifestations, from Ayodhya to the terrorist attacks in Bombay and Gujarat, addressing the deep fractures within Indian society through the example of a university with its students and teachers.
In her third novel tirohit ("Hidden") she shifts from the socially critical and political plane to the private and personal. On the shared rooftop terrace spanning several households, two women, transcending all family roles, find their way to one another through their encounters and conversations — a recurring concern of the author, who always grants women a special place within a world dominated by men.
The fourth novel khali jagah ("In the Empty Space") deals — in the wake of increasingly frequent terrorist attacks in India and across the world today, but also as a response to a specific attack within her own circle of friends — with the brutal violence that, in the sudden death of its victims, silences all talk of life stories, future plans or roots. A bomb explodes in a university café, killing nineteen young people. An eighteen-year-old student dies; a three-year-old boy survives as if by a miracle and is spontaneously adopted by the parents of the boy who was killed. In their grief, they see in the growing child only the identity of the son they lost, and in their loss deny him his own life, his own dreams and personal experiences.
The fifth novel ret samadhi ("Sand Meditations") achieves a new complexity. Here boundaries are constantly being crossed — beginning with a family history, unexpected events again and again lead to transgressions: of accepted norms between the sexes, of the boundary between animate and inanimate nature, and of what can be heard through doors or in the street. Reality dissolves into the shifting forms of quicksand.
Georg Lechner
Published in German
Geetanjali Shree is among the most widely translated contemporary Hindi authors. Since 1990, individual stories have appeared in German translation in various anthologies and literary journals. Published as standalone books:
- Mai (novel, Draupadi Verlag 2010) (in German)
- Weißer Hibiskus [White Hibiscus] (stories, Draupadi Verlag 2010) (in German)
- Unsere Stadt in jenem Jahr [Our City That Year] (novel, Draupadi Verlag 2013) (in German)
- Im leeren Raum [In the Empty Space] (novel, Lotos Werkstatt 2018) (in German)
Excerpts
- Excerpt from "Weißer Hibiskus" (PDF) (in German)
- Excerpt from "Unsere Stadt in jenem Jahr" (PDF) (in German)
More excerpts and reviews can be found on the Excerpts/Reviews page (in German). Readings with Geetanjali Shree: see Readings (in German).