The Lowland Achieves New Heights

“I began writing this book 20 years ago. I’ve been working on this novel in some sense ever since I started writing,” said prizewinning novelist and short story writer Jhumpa Lahiri, who has just won the biggest prize in South Asia, the $50,000 DSC Prize for South Asian Literature.

The Lowland, shortlisted for the 2013 Man Booker Prize, is the tale of two brothers who come of age in the 1950s and 60s in Calcutta, where the Naxalite movement becomes a part of their lives; one brother joins it. Their lives take them to different places, one man moving to the United States and one staying behind for the movement; the novel’s story is the result of this decision. Lahiri, the beloved author of two novels and two short story collections, first found big fame with The Namesake, her 2003 hit, made into a Mira Nair film. Her debut collection of stories, Interpreter of Maladies, won the 2000 Pultizer Prise for Fiction.

Vijay Seshadri, 2014 Pulitzer Prize winner for Poetry and Chief Guest, awarded the prize to Lahiri’s publisher; the author spoke over Skype from Rome, Italy, where an extended project had kept her, away from the festival. “As a young girl growing up in America, this was a story I heard about. Its themes are he abandonment of one’s country, one’s political ideals and a mother’s abandonment of her child; what binds us to one another,” said Lahiri, her face held up to the microphone and projected onto a screen for fans who watched and listened, in the audience. “It came out of a desire to feel closer to India. When I published the book it was with some apprehension that I hadn’t done justice to it.”

The five shortlisted authors and books in contention for the DSC Prize this year were Bilal Tanweer for The Scatter Here is Too Great, Kamila Shamsie for A God in Every Stone, Romesh Gunesekera for Noontide Toll and Shamsur Rahman Faruqi for The Mirror of Beauty, culled from more than 75 entries sent from around the world. The jury consisted of distinguished poet and writer Keki N Daruwalla, Lahore Literary Festival founder Razi Ahmed, critic John Freeman, Maithree Wickramasinghe of the University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka and the University of Sussex, and Michael Worton, Emeritus Professor at the University College London.

Daruwalla spoke as chairman of the jury, commending the winner: “The Lowland is a superb novel written in restrained prose with moments of true lyricism. It starts with a sense of loss and trauma due to the death and then the ongoing presence of a key character. The novel is partly political and partly familial, starting with an unromanticised account of the Indian Naxalite movement and ending with a series of individual emotional resolutions.The Lowland is a novel about the difficulty of love in complex personal and societal circumstances, inhabited by characters which are finely drawn and where the lowland itself is a metaphor running through their entire lives. This is a fine novel written by a writer at the height of her powers.”

"The prize will now be announced in other south Asian countries," the Narulas announced. It is to be hoped that more such rewards will come to writers, from what they call the festivalisation of literature.

2014 Pulitzer PrizeDSC PrizeJhumpa LahiriKamila ShamsieRomesh GunesekeraThe LowlandVijay Seshadriwere Bilal Tanweer