After losing out on Man Booker Prize, Jhumpa Lahiri bags DSC Prize at Zee JLF

Indian-American writer Jhumpa Lahiri was on Thursday declared the winner of the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature 2015, which carries with it a cash award of $50,000. The prize was announced at the Zee Jaipur Literature Festival. This is the fifth edition of the prize, which is given to an outstanding novel written anywhere that has South Asia as its subject.

Lahiri won for her novel 'The Lowland'. It is a tragic tale of two brothers, Subhash and Udayan, who grow up in suburban Calcutta into young men of very different temperaments, political beliefs, and professions - but end up loving and marrying the same woman, Gauri. Udayan, impulsive and charismatic, has radical left beliefs and becomes enmeshed in the violent Naxal students' movement that swept Bengal through the 1970s, while Subhash is studious and a dutiful son, and ends up in the US where he studies and later teaches in university. A critical and commercial success in India and the West, it was nominated for the 2014 Man Booker Prize but lost out to Eleanor Catton's The Luminaries.

The jury citation for the prize praised Lahiri's novel thus, "The Lowlands deals with the difficulties of love in complex circumstances inhabited by characters… finely drawn, and with the lowlands as a metaphor running through their lives."

Lahiri was not around to receive the prize, but she thanked the jury over the phone from Rome. She said the prize was especially meaningful because it was for the first book she started writing, over twenty years ago. She added that she was apprehensive that she may not have done justice to the time and events that had inspired the story, and that was why she was particularly proud of this prize.

Lahiri was one of five nominees, a list which included Pakistani writers Bilal Tanweer for 'The Scatter Here is Too Great' and Kamila Shamsie for 'A god in Every Stone', Shamsur Rahman Faruqi for 'The Mirror of Beauty', and Sri Lankan Romesh Gunesekera for 'Noontide Toll'.

The jury was headed by senior Indian poet Keki Daruwalla.

Daruwalla said the novels shortlisted for the prize were proof enough that the novel was in a hale state. "If you believe critics, the novel and poetry are in a crisis," he said, quoting a critic who said that cinema had done the novel in. He pointed out that critics were not in agreement on this; yet another critic had said that too many novels were being brought out and that the wrong kind of unappreciative readers were now reading novels.

Daruwalla quipped, "I will not cavil about the intelligence of the reader just as a politician does not cavil about the intelligence of the voter."

Daruwalla said that the shortlist reflected the truth-seeking tendencies of novelists. He pointed out that Shamsie's novel was about the British brutalities against the Khidmatgar movement, Gunesekera wrote about the Sri Lankan civil war, Tanweer's spoke of the bomb blast in Karachi, and Faruqi harked back to the domination of the East India Company over Delhi.