3 must-read books from the Women Writer's Prize longlist

(Representational image) The longlisted books include stories about the internet, grief, loss, life during the pandemic, oral history and extraordinary courage.

Seven years ago, SheThePeople organized its first Women Writers Fest. Last October, it announced it would be giving out a prize, too. The shortlist will be announced this month, and the winning book will be unveiled in March.

Shaili Chopra, founder, SheThePeople, said the Women’s Writers Fest and the Women Writer’s Prize share a vision - to spotlight the depths of works that women are writing through lived experiences and bringing a different lens to storytelling.

“The phenomenal richness women writers have brought is something to headline,” Chopra said.

The books that made it to the longlist cover a wide range of topics. There are tales of murder (A death in Shonagacchi, Rijula Das), a gritty coming-of-age story (A Mirror Made of Rain, Naheed Phiroze Patel), a book about abandonment and sisterhood (Sisterhood of Swans, Selma Carvalho), a mother-daughter’s journey through loss (The Illuminated, Anindita Ghose), a young woman’s unravelling of family secrets (What we Know about her, Krupa Ge) and more. If you could read just three books from the longlist, we recommend the ones below:

The Begum and the Dastan by Tarana Hussain Khan (Tranquebar)

The story of Feroza Begum (name changed) was narrated to Tarana Khan as a sort of family oral history.

Feroza is kidnapped and held in the harem of the Nawab of Shams Ali Khan in 1897, following which her husband is compelled to divorce her. Feroza navigates the glamour and sordidness of the harem after her marriage to the Nawab.

“The story intrigued me because it was supposed to be a cautionary tale for young girls,” Khan said. “I was struck and moved by the injustices she had to endure.”

Khan added that women often fall off the pages of history and one has to rely on oral history which is nothing but “intergenerational and emotional memories which fill in the gaps”.

She herself had to go through archives, diaries, historical writings and of course, oral history in order to tell the tale. In the book, the Begum’s granddaughter tells the story to her granddaughter, making it through five generations. Not bad at all.

The Blind Matriarch by Namita Gokhale (Penguin Viking)

Namita Gokhale is a stalwart in the literary circles, thanks to her role in the Jaipur Literary Festival. In addition to that she is a prolific writer. The Blind Matriarch is her latest offering - it is about a blind matriarch Matangi-Ma living in a joint family.

This is one of the few novels which appeared last year that wove in the pandemic through the story. Here, the dynamics of a joint family stuck together due to the pandemic is well played out. When the matriarch gets infected with the coronavirus, the family shows amazing grace.

“The Blind Matriarch was written in real time during the days of the pandemic and the first lockdown, with the epilogue extending into the next phase of those strange and disorienting days," Gokhale said. "It is in essence a novel about the nature of the Indian joint family, with Matangi Ma, the blind matriarch, holding centerstage.”

The Women Who Forgot to Invent Facebook and Other Stories by Nisha Susan (Context)

In her words, author Nisha Susan became an adult around the same time the Internet came to India and so, all the stories in this book have something to do with the Internet. A title so long and intriguing merits a conversation with the author.

“The title story of my collection is set in Bangalore at a time when the internet was sort of real but social media was still a glimmer in the future,” she said. “Set in Bangalore in 2018 where a group of women are working on a secret project in a large MNC which closely resembles Facebook.”

While Susan clubs the whole wide world and all its freedom with ‘getting online’, the stories actually show the first 20 years of the digital India spanning through the lives of “many, many women”.

Translations

The longlist has four translations – A Red-necked Green Bird (translated from Tamil by G.J.V. Prasad), Baby Doll: Stories (translated from Malayalam by Fathima E.V.), Loneliness of Hira Barua (translated from Assamese by Ranjita Biswas) and Budhini (translated from Malayalam by Sangeetha Sreenivasan). If there’s time for two books in your schedule this week, we recommend these:

Budhini (Penguin Hamish Hamilton)

Budhini Mahajan, 15, was chosen to garland the then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and place a tikka on his forehead when he visited Dhanbad district in 1959. But the girl was ostracized by her village for those ceremonial gestures which were misconstrued as an act of matrimony. Author Sarah Joseph evokes the story of Budhini in her inimitable style which has a huge following amongst Malayalam readers.

However, the iconic story may never have reached a larger audience but for her daughter Sangeetha Sreenivasan. The latter admitted that she was lucky to have had her mother by her side when she began the work. “It’s rare for a translator to have such a luxury,” she said.

Sreenivasan had also travelled with her mother to Budhini’s village after having learned, about five years back, that the protagonist was still alive. “My mother returned home and rewrote the ending of her story and I was lucky to have been able to travel with her and understand the culture.” A good translation work, according to Sreenivasan, retains the flavour of the original book rather than doing a literal word-to-word translation. “Knowledge of the culture and its flavour is essential,” she noted, adding that her mother was very happy with the translation.

The Loneliness of Hira Barua (Pan Macmillan India)

Written in Assamese by Arupa Patangia Kaliga, The Loneliness of Hira Barua is an extraordinary narration of stories of courage, grief and despair of ‘ordinary’ women. The courage and resolution of women navigating violence, trauma, ambition and family is clearly palpable even through the translation by Ranjita Das. Through her deft handling, the reader gets to know of Hira Barua, an ageing widow living all by herself except for her dog, the sacrifice of a group of prostitutes who save ‘housewives’ from getting assaulted by the soldiers of the invading army and other stories which are equally pierced with emotions.