Mumbai-based writer Annie Zaidi won the 2019 Nine Dots Prize on Wednesday, May 30, with a $100,000 grant to boot and a book deal to develop her essay Bread, Cement, Cactus.
The prize was created to foster and award innovative thinking that addresses contemporary issues around the world; in its sophomore cycle, it tasked entrants to answer the question Is there still no place like home? in a 3,000-word essay.
Zaidi’s essay, according to a press release, deftly combines “memoir and reportage to explore concepts of home and belonging rooted in her experience of contemporary life in India”.
In Annie Zaidi, we have found a powerful and compelling voice with a unique insight into what home means for citizens of the world today. We are very excited to see how Annies work will develop over the coming year and hope that it will help further current conversations around the concept of belonging worldwide, said Professor Simon Goldhill, professor in Greek Literature and Culture, fellow of Kings College, Cambridge University, and chair of the Nine Dots Prize Board.
What’s next for the honouree?
Appreciating the grant, Zaidi, in an interview, said it will help her develop a project she has been mulling over for a long time but didnt have “the financial, or even mental, bandwidth to do it justice”.
“The Prize will allow me to dedicate time to the examination of this question, which is of critical importance in the modern worldand it will help fund the necessary research trips, which, as a freelancer, is something I appreciate hugely, she said.
Zaidi, 40, now has six months to develop the first draft from her book proposal, with the final book release scheduled for May 2020.
It will address a number of themes, including politics and economics of death in India, the inter-relations between caste and religion in marriage, how industrial townships lead from disenfranchisement and displacement, a citizen’s evolving relationship with cities, and the Partition of India as a great cultural and emotional sundering.
A wearer of many hats
Besides being a freelance columnist and writer for various publications, Zaidi is an award-winning playwright, with two of her plays going on to win The Hindu Playwright Award 2018 (for Untitled- 1) and the BBC International Playwriting Competition (for a radio play called ‘Jam’).
She is also an accomplished essayist; her collection ‘Known Turf: Bantering with Bandits and Other True Tales was nominated for the prestigious Crossword award. Her work also includes an anthology of short stories titled Love Stories # 1 to 14, poetry, films, and novellas.
We could rage and plan lawsuits
-Inheritance 2, Annie Zaidi
Around this incalculable wrong
If we only knew what to blame
All things become speakable
Once they have a name
A wherefrom
A how to how not to
A how do I live with this song.
Besides writing and directing five short films, Zaidi also made a documentary ‘In her Words: The Journey of Indian Women to trace the lives and struggles of women as reflected in their literature. Besides this, Zaidi has co-written The Good Indian Girl and edited Unbound: 2000 Years of Indian Womens Writing.
Themes, motifs, influences, and grudges
But the long-form essay that enables her to blend memoir with journalism is most likely her favourite mode of expression, even though she insists “Form is not a hidebound thing. Art is not insular.”
What really appealed to me about the Nine Dots Prize was the way it encourages entrants to think without borders or restraints,” said Zaidi. “My work has often crossed over genres, traversing between memoir and journalism, and this timely but wide-open question encouraged us to approach it with methods that were equally far-ranging.”
Zaidi explores a number of interesting themes in her work, for example, how we use metaphors to depict ourselves, the role of everyday feminism, and social justice. But the notion of home stages a return time and again.
Her grandfather, the late Ali Jawad Zaidi, clearly played a formative role in shaping her artistic sensibilities. In interview after interview, she mentions how she inherited his discipline and imbibed his rootedness, also referred to as “a call of blood” that reflects in the award-winning essay as well.
Mom says, wherever you can trace your bloodline, that place is yours. Yours as much as anybody elses. By that measure, the province of Uttar Pradesh is flecked with my blood. Not just Uttar Pradesh, not just India. Pakistan too. My fathers side of the family came from that side of the border. Their traditions, their connection to the soil were lost when the country was carved up in 1947.
-An extract from Bread, Cement, Cactus
Speaking to The Wire, she asks, What is this call of blood?
All I understand right now is that the call exists for me. I know my cousins do not feel as strongly about that village. So this is also an investigation of how responses are shaped. Part of it is just the person I am, and part is, how do you define blood? Its not literal DNA. Im talking about something else.
In one of her plays, she tackles difficult subjects, namely surveillance and freedom of expression, and specifically about an authoritarian States attitude to artists and how that affects the final outcome. “Pre-censorship or self-censorship is the end of art,” she tells Bound India in an interview.
In the same interview, she cites Vijay Tendulkar, Girish Karnad, Mohan Rakesh, Mahasweta Devi, and Manjula Padmanabhan, all modern Indian playwrights, as the literary influences on her dramatic works, and Ismat Chugtai, Saadat Hasan Manto, and Paul Zacharia as the homegrown pioneers of short fiction.
Meanwhile, Zaidi’s disdain for the mainstream publishing industry is also well-documented. In a panel on women writing crime fiction, she claimed that publishers hold the view that novels written by female authors wont be picked up by men if they didn’t use gender-neutral or manly sobriquets.
She also hopes to broaden the perspective people have with respect to crime writing and its subgenres. The research for Known Turf… while being essentially journalistic, ought to be able to qualify for crime fiction, she believes. “Female Foeticide is a crime. Fraud, too, is a crime,” she tells SheThePeople.
Three of her plays have been published by indigenous publishing house Dhauli Books, while the book that will emerge from the Nine Dots Prize will be made available online for free as an open-access PDF. A great thing about Nine Dots is that its not invested in books per se, Zaidi tells The Wire. The focus is more on ideas that are relevant in contemporary society. Getting the book out is just a way to get you to think about that idea.
About the prize
The Nine Dots Prize is judged anonymously and funded by UK-based non-profit Kadas Prize Foundation. It was established to enable researchers in finding out-of-the-box answers to questions that normally escape scholarly interest. Besides founder Peter Kadas and Prof Goldhill, the Nine Dots Prize Board comprises nine other prominent academics, authors, and journalists.
The winner receives financial support and an offer for residency at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, Cambridge University, in return for developing the proposal into a full-length book, which the Cambridge University Press will publish next year.
The inaugural Nine Dots Prize challenged applicants to answer ‘Are digital technologies making politics impossible?’ Former Google employee-turned-Oxford philosopher James Williams‘ response went on to become the critically acclaimed book Stand Out of Our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy.
Prarthana Mitra is a Staff Writer at Qrius