“What’s Gone is Gone”: Partition, Ownership, and Loss in Geetanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand

This article focuses on the depiction of two objects, an ancient Buddha statue and the protagonist Chanda’s extensive sari collection, in Tomb of Sand (2021), the Booker prize-winning translation of Geetanjali Shree’s Hindi novel Ret Samadhi (2018), and on the ways in which these objects are bound up not only with the novel’s political but also with its philosophical underpinnings. Even though the novel is primarily set in twenty-first-century India, the 1947 Indian Partition and its continuing repercussions are some of the novel’s core thematic concerns. In examining Shree’s representation of the statue and of Chanda’s collection of traditional saris, my essay shows how the text complicates our understanding of the multilayered and intensely gendered politics of individual as well as collective ownership and loss—both familial and national—against the backdrop of divisive religio-nationalist rhetoric in twentieth- and twenty-first-century South Asia. The paper also demonstrates the ways in which the novel participates in debates about post-Partition museology and heritage, revealing the close and, at times, disturbing relationship between national and familial myths about possession and dispossession.