Goa Book Makes the Asian Prize for Fiction

[Selma Carvalho]

Set in Goa around the time of Liberation, Mrinalini Harchandrai’s novel Rescuing a River Breeze (Bloomsbury, 2023) makes the longlist for the prestigious Asian Prize for Fiction 2023. She shares this honour with other worthies such as V. V. Ganeshananthan for Brotherless Nights, which won the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2024 and the Carol Shield’s Prize for fiction, R. F. Kuang for Yellow Face which made the NYT bestseller list, and Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀ for Spell of Good Things, who was long-listed for the Booker prize. A review of Rescuing a River Breeze can be read here. In conversation with Selma Carvalho, Harchandrai discusses the implications of being longlisted for the prize.

"To be honest, this is one of the reasons I wanted to tell this story. Goa and its diaspora have such a rich tradition of storytelling but somehow they aren’t reaching the bookshelves outside of the state."

The One Book to read from the Asian Prize for Fiction 2023 Longlist — Joao-Roque Literary Journal est. 2017

The One Book to read from the Asian Prize for Fiction 2023 Longlist — Jo... Longlisted for the Asian Prize for Fiction 2023, Mrinalini Harchandrai discusses her book. This story was inspir...

All best wishes,

Selma

[Frederick Noronha]

On Sat, 15 Jun 2024 at 14:23, 'Selma Carvalho' via GoaWriters2 <goawr...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

"To be honest, this is one of the reasons I wanted to tell this story. Goa and its diaspora have such a rich tradition of storytelling but somehow they aren’t reaching the bookshelves outside of the state."

That's a good argument, but it somehow makes it sound as if the goal of a society to write is to reach "the bookshelves outside" the region.

What strikes me as more important is (i) create a local market for local writing (ii) build acceptance for the diversity of Goan writing -- across languages, scripts, even dialects and religions.

At one stage, for a short window in the sixteenth century, Goa was where the rest of Asia came to get published. Not just religious texts, but works on language, geographies, plants and more.

Later, Goa shifted to the periphery of the world of printing, and Goan authors struggled to get published in a wide range of places. Like Bombay, Delhi, Karachi, Madras, Calcutta, Poona, Mangalore, Hyderabad, Sawantwadi, Malvan, Jubbulpore (sic), Shimla, Lisbon, Porto, Coimbra, Luanda, Beira, Lourenco Marques, Nairobi, Rio de Janiero, London, Paris, Moscow, Singapore, Malaya, Malaysia and even Praia in Cabo Verde.

All this while, Goans were writing for distant audiences, mediated by editors and publishers or printers who knew little or nothing of the local reality. While authors would understandably like to get the largest audience possible, and feel very "global", this doesn't come without its price. The latter also comes with the possibility of prizes and recognition, while Goa remains the classic case of talent not being recognised at home. A scholar or two (Filipa Vicente, for example) have also studied how the Goan writer would need to suit or adapt their work to their distant and even remote audience.

Till now, Goa is yet to build a sufficiently-large audience, market or researchers for its own writing -- due to a set of complex reasons, and which one need not go into here. Meanwhile, writers who might have little of a lived experience or understanding of the local reality, continue to define this tiny region. Which could also be a challenge in terms of how a tiny place ultimately gets defined.

I think there could be a clash between the small-is-beautiful and the size-does-matter approach to authoring and publishing. To me, the former has a better chance of authenticity. FN