About the Book

THE BIGGEST LITERARY MEMOIR OF THE YEAR.
The autobiographical essays in Raw Umber are as much about the steady pulse of Sara Rai’s childhood in the 1960s, as they are about the nature of remembering, and the role that memory plays in shaping a writer’s sensibility. 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. 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 ‘fell into’ writing. In this literary memoir, some of the characters in the family gallery are brought to life. In chronicling the life and times of one of India’s most illustrious literary families through the prism of her childhood, Sara Rai always keeps to her own remembering of the ever-changing past.
A work of great tenderness and beauty.

About the Author

Sara Rai is a fiction writer, literary translator and editor. She is the author of five collections of short stories and a novel in Hindi. She has translated, among other books, Premchand’s Kazaki and Other Marvellous Tales (Hachette, 2013) and, with Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, Vinod Kumar Shukla’s Blue Is Like Blue (HarperCollins, 2019) which won the Mathrubhumi Book of the Year in 2020. Some of her work has been translated into Urdu, German, French, English and Italian. The Labyrinth, a collection of her stories translated into German by Johanna Hahn and published by Draupadi Verlag, Heidelberg, won the Coburg Rückert Prize 2019 and was nominated for the Weltempfänger Literaturpreis, Frankfurt, 2020.
Sara Rai is Premchand’s granddaughter and she lives in Allahabad.