The world according to Gitanjali Shree

Then, all of a sudden, the novel playfully decides to disregard linear time. This is about eight decades ago when the subcontinent was partitioned. At this point, she casually informs readers that her mother was married to a man from another community before she married their father, and whose death plunged her into depression. Rosie arrives, a transwoman, who caresses Ma from her bed and reintroduces her to her daughter’s world. As she walks from her son’s house to her daughter’s house, Ma crosses a border and begins to speak. Together, through belligerent conversation, mother and daughter travel back and forth in time, sometimes even stepping on the Silk Route, where tribes from all over Asia meet and trade goods, and tales , and smokes her hookah in companionable silence.

This spectacular time travel is reminding us that if a writer wants to find his own voice, he must refuse to stop. A creative mind must remain nomadic, so that art remains as polyphonic, unpredictable and porous as the human race. Life, what the short stories and sub-stories in Rit Samadhi tell us, is not a linear, predictable progression of events. Time reflects both the oppressed and the oppressed, the cruel men and the nations they create through violent acts. Life here presents harsh questions about the monuments that history will ruthlessly build and destroy.

But racial memories don’t die easily. Writ Samadhi leaps onto the current dominance of a tough political Hindutva when memories of a mother take her and her daughter to a dusty land. The writ samadhi or burial mound is mixed with ancient lore about Indra (in the Aitareya Brahmana): “Look, I am the truth. Study me closely for your own good. I have killed Tvastra, the creator of the thunderbolt. I irrigated Band of Aruramaga monks for Salavrik (dog or wolf). I have broken innumerable treaties made on earth, in heaven, and beyond. But not a single hair broke on my head. If after receiving this knowledge from me, you can understand the causes and causes of my actions, even if you go and kill your relatives, you will stop hesitating and never let any emotion come again on your face. Will give ,

We have yet to fully understand the peculiar past of a polyphone Hindi heartland in North India, where many races have come and fought and met. Over the past seven decades, English as the language of the rulers has been gradually losing much of its authority in the Delhi Durbar, which is today presided over by those who loudly declare that they are all Hindi, Hindu, for Hindustan. But the Hindi they are choosing has ignited fraternal, regional resentment against the proposed Rashtrabhasha (national language) of India.

Geetanjali Shree has always been a strong and vibrant voice against monotony. Even in his earlier works, his language draws readers in different directions and eras and their unsettled debts. In Mai, she writes about three generations of women spanning more than a century. In Hamara City, she writes about small towns engulfed by communal fires that have raged down and suddenly erupted. lava gushing out. Without denying the centrality of doubt and duality in life, Rit Samadhi comes across like a resonant fugitive, conjuring up its various types of history.

All writers of Indian languages, with the passage of age, incorporate many languages ​​within themselves. Simple mother tongue. Next comes the college, in which classes are taught uniformly in English. Here, a writer is faced with a choice – to directly exchange it with English, which is the language of the educated people in India’s upward mobile, or to say that not all educated people should speak in a received voice . Gitanjali has chosen the second. In India, it is an act of bravery to write in your natural voice without apologizing for your stereotyping, various tonal registers or reducing it to an exotica or political weapon or to win superficial, feminist brownie points.

Writ Samadhi brings to us an honest, though painful, glimpse of life in non-English speaking India. It is not a flat land but a series of cultural republics. Mother and daughter appear in this scenario in the novel. Together they transform into birds and flowers, move in with Rosie and through music are reunited with Anwar, the lost lover. Surrounding them is Anglophile, upper-crust India, a land that even today writes and administers unequal laws, which they regard as a barbaric society.

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The novel transcends the boundaries of race, ethnicity, gender and language as easily as migratory birds do. His life and conversations were cut off over time: when thumris and khyals were created by rulers who were losing power to plunder the Marathas and the East India Company, but remained secular and savvy patrons of the Sankara art. Nothing perishes in their world. Nothing is permanent in this. According to Writ Samadhi, this is human life for you, where even memorial tombs turn to dust one day. It reminded me of my mother’s favorite couplet by Nazir Akbarabadi, an 18th-century mystic who witnessed the fall of empires:

Flowers, dust, fire, wind, water and mud, we’ve all seen them / And after all, that’s all there is to this deceitful mirage you call your world.

(Gul, shor, bagula, aag, hawa, aur keechad pani mitti hai/ Hum dekh chuke iss duniya ko, duniya dhokhe ki tatti hai)

The author is former President Prasar Bharati