“I am thrilled and overwhelmed,” says Namita Gokhale, winner of this year’s Sahitya Akademi Prize for her novel in English. Things to leave behind. In an interview with The Hindu, The multi-faceted Ms Gokhale said the award “is more than just a milestone”.

“The Sahitya Akademi Prize is very important to me because of its living history and heritage. As the prize is awarded to 23 Indian languages, including English, it makes me feel even more deeply connected to the multilingual literary heritage of our culture, ”she says.

Since announcing her entry into the literary scene with the sparkling Paro: Dreams of passion in 1984, the prolific Ms.Gokhale wrote 18 works of fiction and non-fiction, but none could match the breadth, pace and drama of Things to leave behind that she wrote in 2016. Set in Kumaon from around 1840 to 1912, Ms. Gokhale says it was written and rewritten over a long period of time.

Central character

Linked to Congress pillar Govind Ballabh Pant, she drew her roots in the region and the time she spent with strong women in the family, including her grandmother Shakuntala Pande and her aunt Shivani, the famous Hindi novelist. It reads like a careful dissection of the desires and dualities with which we live, best represented by the central character, Tilottama.

The complex hierarchies of caste and community and the call of the human heart are reflected in the interwoven stories of fiery Tilottama, her daughter Deoki and Deoki’s husband Jayesh Jonas as they seek new life in Eden Ashram – with the Parallel and Cross Tales of Rosemary Boden and William Dempster.

“It’s a novel about change that tells about the mixed heritage of the British Raj as well as the emergence of a fragile modernity. I was looking for something elusive while writing it, and I left it to the readers to understand and interpret it as they wished, ”explains Ms. Gokhale, who does not attribute to literary influences“ because they are often insidious ”.

“The writer I most admired for style and strategy was and continues to be, Muriel Spark. Tolstoy and War and peace, Dostoyevsky The idiot, Herman Hesse Magister Ludi – The Glass Bead Game and Tale of Genji by Lady Murasaki, ”she says. And, the Indian mythical aspect comes from the founding and epic text of the Mahabharata, which she repeated for young readers.

In many of her works, she has etched the natural beauty of the Kumaon Hills in a pictorial way. Here Lake Naini becomes a character and a metaphor for alien control over our culture and spirit.

Ms. Gokhale says her childhood at Nainital is permanently etched into her inner landscape. “Lake Naini is indeed a character, a permanent presence, through the story. The trees, plants, birds, the quality of light, in Kumaon come from personal as well as cultural memory. The harsh and harsh rules that governed the lives of Brahmin women, and the joy they still managed to extract under these circumstances, are things that I have seen and experienced, ”she said, adding that“ the novel do not speak of “” a bag full of tangled tales springs from it.

From Paro to Tilottama, strong female characters have marked his works. They are strong, sometimes feminist, but they also have a certain naivety that makes them realistic.

“Indian women have enormous reserves of strength, even though they are socially vulnerable. This is even more true of the mountain women ‘Pahari’, of the Kumaoni sorority that I grew up with. It’s no surprise that the kind of women I have known and admired come to inhabit my novels! », Notes Ms. Gokhale.

She has a flair for tackling deeper and more complex issues with a light touch while maintaining a steady pace. “I tend to see the stories in the stories, the patterns and the concentric circles in the narrative structures. I tend to ramble, which I try to control, ”explains Ms. Gokhale.

Deep links

As one of the forces behind the Jaipur Literature Festival and successful publisher, Ms. Gokhale has meticulously fostered a link between English writing and works in Indian languages. “The growing importance given to translations in literary circles creates deep links between English and other Indian literatures, as well as between different Indian languages. It is a precious and crucial development. However, she argues, “the easy multilingualism of previous generations is not as prevalent now, for some reason.”

Ms. Gokhale started publishing at a young age with Great, a magazine that covered Hindi cinema. She retains constant respect for the medium and feels “that a magnificent web series could emerge from Things to leave behind – full of spectacular scenery and historical details. I live in hope!

Finally, what are the emotions that 2021 will leave behind? “The mind-boggling changes we experienced in 2021 affected me as I tend to reconsider all the things I previously took for granted. This was reflected in two short stories I wrote in this weird year – they have a rambling structure and a search for a pattern in a setting of chaos.