Winner of Tata Literature Live! Book of the Year Award for 2023—Non-Fiction

Spare and elegant, Raw Umber is as much about the steady pulse of Sara Rai’s 1960s childhood as it is about the nature of remembering, and the role that memory plays in shaping a writer’s sensibility.

With the figure of her grandfather Premchand looming over her childhood, and with others in her family-grandmother, parents, aunts, uncles and cousins-also writers, it is hardly a surprise that Sara Rai ‘fell into’ writing. Rai is a bilingual writer travelling between Hindi and English, with her fiction primarily in Hindi. Perhaps inevitably for a fiction writer, the boundary between memory and imagination gets blurred. It is the unconscious jottings of the mind, and the cadences that enter the ears, the inner life that develops during years of unhurried living in places like Allahabad and Banaras that prepare the ground for the fiction writer.

In this intimate chronicle, some of the characters in the family gallery are vividly brought to life. Sara Rai’s Drummond Road home in Allahabad, her mother’s ancestral Nawab-ki-Deorhi haveli, and her grandmother Shivrani Devi’s Godowlia house in Banaras-all have their own tales to tell.

Raw Umber is a work of deep humanity, told with affectionate humour and an austere lyricism. In the telling of the story, Rai has stuck to her own slightly eccentric remembering of the ever-changing, fugitive past.