(July 19, 2024) US-based author Sanjana Thakur is the winner of the prestigious Commonwealth Short Story Prize for her story, ‘Aishwarya Rai,’. The 26-year-old, who emerged victorious from 7,359 entries from Commonwealth countries around the world, has also received a cash prize of £5,000. She emerged victorious in a competition that saw 7,359 entries.
Elated with her achievement, Sanjana tells Global Indian, “I was so overwhelmed! They had asked if I could hop on a video call to film some footage for the award ceremony. And I had this quiet tiny hopeful voice in the back of my mind saying – “What if?” But I never dared to say it out loud. The other regional winners’ stories were so strong and beautiful that I knew any of us could win and be deserving of the prize.”
When on that video call, the chair of the judging panel, Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi, told Sanjana that she had won she was ecstatic. “All I could think, and all I still think now, is how lucky I am, and how grateful I am to have this platform and this community for my work.”
‘Aishwarya Rai’
The premise of Sanjana’s story, ‘Aishwarya Rai’ is intriguing. For her story, she imagined what ‘reverse adoption’ might look like – a scenario where a young girl adopts a mother, exploring the criteria and implications of such a case. Sanjana has always been fascinated with the complexities of the mother-daughter relationship, she says and this premise seemed like a fun way to examine various iterations of that relationship for her. “My initial idea was a store where you could browse different models of mothers and then buy them off the shelf. That idea evolved into a shelter where you could adopt and try out different mothers,” she mentions.
Talking about the idea of using a well-known Bollywood actor’s name for her story’s title, Sanjana remarks, “Aishwarya Rai (the actor) makes a cameo of sorts in my story, and exists in the protagonist Avni’s imagination as a representation of the perfect woman and a potential perfect mother.”
During the writing process, as the Bollywood actor made it into the story, Sanjana knew she had to be the title of it. For Sanjana the Bollywood actress is a perfect example of the quintessential woman, and an ideal mother, and that is why she chose her name as the title of her story. The writer looks at Aishwarya Rai as an embodiment of beauty standards, materialism, motherhood, daughterhood, and the experience of being a girl and woman in India and the world today, which her story explores.
Mumbai – a muse
Sanjana grew up in India. She lived in Mumbai until she was 15, and that is why the city ‘exists most strongly, most specifically and concretely’, in her mind. “Mumbai is my city, and I want to tell stories that are situated in my city, that reveal and celebrate how wonderful and dissonant and strange and lovely it is,” she says adding, “Often when I write, I start by capturing a specific Mumbai setting that I am curious about. The city has so much character that it is an endlessly generous muse.”
In her prize-winning story too, Mumbai is an important setting choice. “Since it is the centre of Bollywood, which is one industry that spawns ideas of the unachievable ‘perfect woman’ in the public imagination,” she explains.
Living abroad
As her family moved to Dubai for a few years, Sanjana completed her high schooling there. She then moved to the U.S., first to Boston for graduate studies and later to Texas for her Masters of Fine Arts in creative writing. Sanjana had been a voracious reader since childhood and always had an interest in writing.
Attending an international school in Dubai with students from 85 different countries had brought her into close contact with diverse cultural identities, experiences of distance, and feelings of belonging and un-belonging.
When she joined Wellesley College for a major in anthropology, she started thinking about these issues even more deeply. “There I really started to examine what it means to be an insider versus an outsider, a participant observer versus an interlocutor. I thought about positionality, and how to make the strange familiar and the familiar strange,” Sanjana shares. “My anthropology classes have so richly fed my inner life and therefore my writing life. They have helped me make sense of the space and position I occupy in the world, as well as how that position is entirely contextual.”
A global outlook
Having spent 11 of her 26 years abroad and developed a global perspective, Sanjana feels privileged to be able to come back to Mumbai twice a year and to remake the relationship with the beloved city every few months. “The city changes so rapidly that it is never exactly the city of my memories, so I try to relearn it each time I return,” she remarks.
Grateful for the opportunity to have lived in in different cities, she says, “I feel privileged to be able to capture the various cities of my memories in the stories I write.” Apart from Mumbai being the setting of most of her stories, she also writes stories in foreign settings with Indian characters.
Fiction and future
Sanjana has just completed her MFA at the University of Texas’s New Writers Project. She loved the programme. “The New Writers Project was a gift. How lucky to be able to spend three years writing, and thinking about writing, and reading good writing, and teaching writing,” she says. “The MFA expanded my idea of what a short story could be.”
The youngster is all praise for her incredible teachers at UT Austin who helped her find her voice, develop her writing practice, and become a strong editor of her own work. “I made some wonderful friends. I wrote stories I am deeply proud of,” she remarks. The 2024 Commonwealth Prize winner ‘Aishwarya Rai‘ is one of the short stories she wrote for her coursework.
Apart from looking for job opportunities, Sanjana plans to query agents on her manuscript of short stories – a collection of 15 short stories revolving around mothers and daughters. ‘Aishwarya Rai’ is one of those stories. The response to it has been so heartwarming, that it has made the award-winning writer even more excited to share her other stories with the world.
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