Summer reading special: take the Booker Prize... to India

Tomb of Sand by Geetanjali Shree, translated by Daisy Rockwell (2022) 

Geetanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand, winner of the 2022 International Booker Prize, introduces us to a truly unforgettable central character. Ma has spent most of her life in calm obedience to the demands of her station as mother and wife, but upon the death of her husband, at 80 years old, Ma’s stable vision of life is shattered and she sinks into a deep depression, refusing to get out of bed. Ma is no ordinary octogenarian, however, and the loss of her husband provides her with a new perspective on life, manifested through her friendship with a hijra (trans woman), an affront to her daughter who had thought of herself as the more modern of the two. 

Emboldened by Ma’s new lease on life, they journey back to Pakistan as a means of engaging with the trauma of Ma’s teenage experiences of Partition. The traumatic memories of this time are mixed in with a humour and liveliness that is wonderfully rendered by Daisy Rockwell’s translation, which retains the wordplay of the original Hindi to dazzling effect. This book will have you thinking about what it means to travel, through its moving appraisal of the concept of borders of all kinds: 

‘Border, Ma says. Border? Do you know what a border is? What is a border? It’s something that surrounds an existence, it is a person’s perimeter. No matter how large, no matter how small. The edge of a handkerchief, the border of a tablecloth, the embroidery around my shawl. The edges of the sky. The beds of flowers in this yard. The borders of fields. The parapet around this roof. A picture frame. Everything has a border. However, a border is not created to be removed. It is meant to illuminate both sides. You removed me. Should I leave? No. A border does not enclose, it opens out. It creates a shape – it adorns an edge.’ 

Words to remember when you’re standing in the queue at Passport Control… 

Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie (1981) 

‘Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems – but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems more and more incredible.’ 

A visit to a new country also necessitates an encounter or reckoning with its history, in order to understand its present. We would argue that there’s no better way of doing this than to pick up a copy of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, winner of the 1981 Booker Prize and the first of Rushdie’s seven Booker nominations. The novel charts the life story of Saleem Sinai, who is born just as the clock strikes midnight on August 15, 1947, the moment at which India gained its independence from Britain. Upon his birth, he is welcomed by jubilant crowds, a grand display of fireworks and even the prime minister Minister Nehru himself. Rushdie takes the life of this young man as a mirror of the history of the newly birthed nation – the two are united, as are the fates of many other ‘midnight’s children’ born in the hour of independence and who all possess magical gifts. 

Rushdie’s epic of Indian nationhood manages to take in political repression, the tragedy of Partition, as well as linguistic and religious feuding, while rampaging through a range of eclectic delights offered by the presence of hilarious aunts, gilded palaces and snake charmers. An unforgettable read. 

Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi (2020) 

‘Talking has never been easy. Neither has listening. There was a breakdown somewhere about what we were to one another, as though one of us were not holding up her part of the bargain, her side of the bridge. Maybe the problem is that we are standing on the same side, looking out into the emptiness. 

‘Maybe we were hungry for the same things, the sum of us only doubled that feeling. And maybe this is it, the hole in the heart of it, a deformity from which we can never recover.’ 

The delicate unravelling of a mother-daughter relationship is handled with utmost precision and care by Avni Doshi in her 2020 Booker-shortlisted Burnt Sugar. Originally titled Girl in White Cotton when it was first published in India, the novel tells the story of Tara and Antara. As a young mother, Tara was wild; she absconded from a disappointing marriage to find herself in an ashram, living as a penniless artist with her daughter beside her. As old age creeps in, she is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and it is left to Antara to take care of her. But as she does so, the novel seems to ask: how do you take on maternal responsibility for someone who failed in their motherly duties towards you? 

This book follows the co-dependent but often ambivalent and negative relationship between a mother and daughter. It charts the gravitational pull, both circumstantial and emotional, that tethers them, despite their best efforts to be separated. It questions the reliability of memory in the construction or maintenance of personal relationships and looks at how care exists at the fault line of obligation and willingness. As Antara says early on, ‘I would be lying if I said my mother’s misery has never given me pleasure.’ 

Staying On by Paul Scott (1977) 

‘…Because when I look back on it, when I sit back and concentrate on it, I feel that India brought out all my worst qualities. I don’t mean this India, though Heaven help me I sometimes don’t see a great deal of difference between theirs and the one in which I was memsahib, but our India, British India, which kept me in my place, bottled up and bottled in, and brainwashed me into believing that nothing was more important than to do everything my place required me to do to be a perfectly complementary image of Tusker and his position.’ 

Paul Scott’s 1977 Booker winner took its name from an expression used by British expats in India during the twilight years of the Raj – the minority of whom (officials, military officers and commercial traders) chose to remain in India after spending their working lives there, rather than returning to Britain on a comfortable pension.  

In Scott’s erudite and insightful novel, married couple Colonel Tusker and Lucy Smalley choose to remain in India, where they now find themselves very visible as outsiders in the absence of other expats, and with their routines and daily rhythms running counter to those of the other inhabitants. Theirs is a life in decline and loneliness, cut off from their English peers and out of step with a country in transition. Meanwhile, their landlady Mrs Bhoolabhoy, presents herself as an obstacle to their peaceful retirement. 

A novel about the trials and tribulations of a 40-year marriage, as well as the decline of Empire, Staying On is Paul Scott’s assured follow-up to his Raj Quartet that remains essential reading for a modern understanding of the British Raj and its demise. As Philip Larkin, chair of the Booker judging panel in 1977 said, the book ‘covers only a few months, but it carries the emotional impact of a lifetime, even a civilisation’.