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Baldwin competes with Rushdie for Commonwealth Writers Prize

J M Shenoy

"If you had predicted that I, a second-generation Canadian living in Milwaukee, would write a book set in colonial India, in the area that is now Pakistan, about a Sikh woman in a polygamous marriage, I would have said, 'Me?'" Shauna Singh Baldwin says.

"But this novel chose its writer. Its characters, two women and a man, their husband, demanded that their story be told."

Shauna Singh Baldwin's epic novel of Partition, What The Body Remembers, has won the Best Book award in the Caribbean and Canada regional competition for the Commonwealth Writers Prize.

It is her first novel. She will be competing with, among others, Salman Rushdie, whose The Ground Beneath Her Feet, was named Best Book in the Eurasia division.

South Africa's J M Coetzee, the first author to win the Booker Prize twice, is another contender with Disgrace, the novel that earned him that distinction last year.

Winners of the regional awards receive 1,000 pounds (about $ 1,600). An additional purse of 10,000 pounds goes to the overall winner in the Best Book division; the Best First Book earns 3,000 pounds.

Baldwin's book, published by a division of Doubleday in the United States, has received positive reviews from many major reviewers.

'With her sharp focus on women in such turmoil, Baldwin offers us a moving and engaging look at 20th-century India's most troubled years,' wrote The New York Times.

Publisher's Weekly said: 'Baldwin achieves an artistic triumph on two levels, capturing the churning political and religious history of modern India and Pakistan as she explores memorable transformations...'

The novel follows two Sikh women, the middle-aged Satya, who has given her wealthy landowner husband, Sadarji, no children and the beautiful teenaged Roop, whom he takes as his second wife. Roop struggles to survive in this polygamous marriage. The domestic conflict parallels the escalating tensions that accompany India's struggle for Independence.

It is reportedly the first English work looking at Partition from a Sikh woman's perspective.

"My challenge to myself was not to tell the story of the Sikhs from the standpoint of the men -- there a few non-fiction books that cover their story -- but from the perspective of Sikh women," she has written. "This quickly became very frustrating because books on Sikh history are usually written by men. They contain, on an average, a single index entry under 'Women' or mention a maximum of two Sikh women by name. As a member of one of the few religions in the world that actually says women and men are equal, and demands that a Sikh woman be called 'princess' to show how valuable she is, I found my research running up against the difference between theory and practice. My solution was to resort to oral histories and imagination."

Hers is "a very feminist book," Baldwin notes, "if you define feminism as the radical notion that a woman is a person -- it depends on how accustomed you are to women having rights as people, including the right to own their own body."

"It comments on woman-to-woman power relations, surrogate motherhood and the two strains of feminism, strident and persuasive, that we have in operation today," she adds.

"Nevertheless, the men in this novel are also trapped in their gender, religions, times and cultures -- as we all are in every time and culture; there is nothing new in the universe."

Baldwin, who was born in Montreal, Canada, lived and studied in India for many years. She is also the author of English Lessons And Other Stories and co-author of A Foreign Visitor's Survival Guide To America.

She was an independent radio producer from 1991 to 1994. She called her show Sunno! and described it as the East-Indian American radio show where you don't have to be East-Indian to listen.

Several magazines like Calyx, Rosebud, and Cream City Review have published her fiction.

She won a $ 10,000 CBC Radio Literary Award for Satya, the story that became the first chapter of What The Body Remembers.

"I can count novels in English about Partition on the fingers of one hand," Baldwin has written. "So every story about Partition fills a huge gap in the universe of possible narratives. Perhaps we can eventually learn enough from telling the story so that it can't happen ever again, in the Balkans or anywhere else in the world."

Baldwin, who holds an MBA from Marquette University and is an information technology consultant in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, wonders if she could have written the novel without the help of the Internet.

"To write a book with Sikh characters, you can't just go down to your corner library and check out books," she explains. "Interlibrary loan brought me books from all over the world. It would have taken me about 10 or 12 years to write this novel without the Internet. Not only are library catalogs and research sources online, there are listservers where I made friends and interviewed people. When I traveled to Pakistan to research the setting of What The Body Remembers, cyberfriends smoothed the way."

The Commonwealth Best Book and Best First Book awards will be presented at a ceremony in New Delhi on April 14.

Raj Kamal Jha's The Blue Bedspread was declared the winner in the Best First Category in Eurasia.

The Commonwealth prize, Baldwin hopes, would get more people to read her novel.

"Sometimes I'm asked, 'How would you like a reader to approach your writing?'" she has written.

"I'd like readers to approach this book knowing it's not a book written solely for a white, middle-class audience. It is a book written for a hybrid, global audience -- in short, for all of us who can read. May you feel my characters' feelings and times as deeply as I did in bringing it to you."

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