Organised by Susanne Klengel, project Border Temporalities and/in Literature, Research Area 1: "Competing Communities" in cooperation with the Institute of Latin American Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin. This event is part of the lecture series "Border Temporalities: Doing Literature in a World of Walls".

Speaker: Vibha Maurya (University of Delhi)

Tomb of Sand written by Geetanjali Shree, originally published in Hindi as Ret Samadhi (2018) and translated into English by Daisy Rockwell, won the 2022 International Booker Prize. It became the first Hindi novel to win this prestigious prize. Shree has woven a long and humorous story that starts in an Indian middle-class family in Delhi and culminates in an unexpected twist in Khyber region of Pakistan. By writing this novel Shree has added one more woman's voice to the partition stories. Indeed, in this novel all kinds of border crossing are visible. Be it body, gender, age, memory, or language. Vibha Maurya will critically view the varied type of crossings and transgressions in which the different characters are enmeshed. Certain historical events leave a destructive impact on the people who face those unresolved traumatic effects on their own. Has the main protagonist Ma found a way to overcome those sad experiences of her teenage caused by the partition of India?

Dr. Vibha Maurya is a former professor of Hispanic Studies in the Department of Germanic & Romance Studies, University of Delhi where she taught Spanish language and Spanish and Latin American literature for more than forty-five years. She has published dozens of research articles in Indian and foreign journals and has edited several books. She is also translator into Hindi of Spanish and Latin American novels and poetry. Her major contribution is the first ever direct translation into Hindi of Miguel de Cervantes Don Quixote. In June 2019 she was awarded the medal Official Cross of the Order of Isabel la Católica by the Government of Spain. In 2022 the Council of the Spain-India Foundation awarded her an award in Recognition of her indefatigable work in the field of Hispanic Studies in India and for the Translation of the world Masterpiece Don Quixote into Hindi. She also received the Pablo Neruda Presidential Medal of Honour by the Government of Chile in 2004 and in June 2010 she was elected to the Spanish Royal Academy as Corresponding Member in India.