Narrative Disruptions and Fluid Identities in Geetanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand (2022)

Abstract

Borders are defined as lines that divide and demarcate areas - physical and abstract - but occasionally borders merge to create a canvas of overlapping memories. Geetanjali Shree’s novel Tomb of Sand (2022), translated into English from Ret Samadhi (2018), became the first Indian novel translated into English to win The Booker Prize in 2022. It is a richly layered narrative that challenges conventional storytelling by embracing fragmentation, multiplicity, and linguistic play. This paper offers a narrative analysis of the novel through the lens of Jean-François Lyotard’s petit récits (small narratives), exploring how the text subverts the grand narratives of history, identity, and nationhood. The story revolves around an eighty-year-old protagonist who navigates her way into her past after the death of her husband. Through linguistic play and its refusal of neat resolutions, the novel offers a postmodern critique of rigid demarcations, urging a rethinking of binaries that define gender, memory, and nationhood as fluid and process-based. In doing so, it positions itself as a literary intervention in contemporary South Asian fiction. This paper argues that Tomb of Sand exemplifies a postmodern literary paradigm in which the act of storytelling becomes an act of defiance, embracing multiplicity and fluidity over fixed ideological constructs.