Muslims within Indian boundary lines left their homes and fled to Pakistan, and Hindus in the area now designated as Pakistan did the reverse. Boundary commissions attempted to draw border lines so the maximum number of Muslims would be in Pakistan and the maximum number of Hindus would be in India.Ĭhaos ensued after the new borders were announced. When Britain’s parliament passed the Indian Independence Act in 1947, it ordered that India and Pakistan, which had been integrated as British India under colonial rule, be formally demarcated into separate countries within a month. In Tomb of Sand, Shree tells the story of an old woman called “Ma” who travels to Pakistan after the death of her husband, confronting her grief along with trauma from her past as a teenager during the partition of India and Pakistan. On its website, the Booker Prize committee calls the book, which centers around the personal and political chaos created by the seemingly arbitrary drawing of borders by a colonial power, an “urgent yet engaging protest against the destructive impact of borders.” This is the first time a Hindi novel has even been nominated for the prize, and the first time a book originally written in any Indian language has won. As the New York Times’ Alex Marshall reports, author Geetanjali Shree and her translator, Daisy Rockwell, won the award and joint cash prize of £50,000 (about $63,000) for Shree’s third novel, Tomb of Sand. That changed last week when, for the first time, a Hindi author won the prize. But the prize committee has never recognized literature translated from one of the world’s most spoken languages-Hindi. The prize is presented each year to the author and translator of the best translated novel published in the United Kingdom or Ireland, and previous winners include Polish Nobel Prize-winner Olga Tokarczuk and Israeli author David Grossman. For nearly two decades, the International Booker Prize has helped launch authors who may be unfamiliar to English-language readers into international stardom.
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