‘A writer shouldn’t stay with his story for too long’: Manoj Rupda on ‘I Named My Sister Silence’

Manoj Rupda’s novel, I Named My Sister Silence, translated from the Hindi by Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar has been longlisted for the 2023 JCB Prize for Literature. Scroll spoke to Rupda and Shekhar about the origins, themes, and writing and translating of this novel.

In I Named My Sister Silence, a little boy follows an elephant into a forest, fascinated and as if in a trance. His foray ends in tragedy, for the elephant is eaten alive by wild dogs even as the boy is sitting on it. Remembering this years later aboard a giant ship, he wonders if it is his destiny to witness the destruction of immense things. Like the land of Bastar, like the elephant, like his ship that will soon be decommissioned. He recalls his half-sister’s silence too. Madavi Irma, the silent girl who nurtured him and gave him a good education by selling what she collected from the forest. Until one day, she left home to join the Maoist Dada Log. When he returns home, Bastar is on fire. The Adivasis had mounted an armed rebellion to protect their land and lives. In retaliation, whole villages have been razed to the ground and their inhabitants stuffed into dingy camps. Determined to seek out his sister, he enters the forest once again, this time as a young man, and is soon confronted with the elaborate deceptions of those who rule and of those who profit from the land they do not own or understand.