What the Body Remembers

About the book

What the Body Remembers is the first novel of the Punjabi Canadian writer Shauna Singh Baldwin, published by Alfred A. Knopf Canada in 1999. Set in the Punjab of undivided India between 1937 and 1947, it tells the story of Satya and Roop, the two wives of a wealthy Sikh landowner known to everyone as Sardarji, in the decade that ends with the Partition of India. It won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best Book in the Canada and Caribbean region in 2000 and was longlisted for the Orange Prize the same year.

Baldwin based the novel on her family history. It became a national bestseller in Canada, listed for 42 weeks on the National Post bestseller chart, and in 2014 readers voted it into the Top 10 books on Canada Reads.

What is What the Body Remembers about?

The novel opens in 1937. Roop is a sixteen-year-old girl in a small Punjab village: her family is respectable but poor, her mother is dead and her father is deep in debt. She is elated when she learns she is to become the second wife of Sardarji, a wealthy Sikh landowner whose first wife, Satya, has failed to bear him children. Roop trusts that the strong-willed Satya will treat her as a sister. Instead, the proud first wife fights her young rival without compromise, and their relationship becomes far more ominous and complicated than the girl expected.

Across ten years the balance of power between the two women shifts and shifts again, while Roop grows from a naive, ambitious girl into a responsible woman. Around the house, the politics of the 1940s close in: the independence movement, rising communal tension, and at last Partition itself, in which Sardarji, a Sikh and so neither Hindu nor Muslim, is caught in the middle as the departing British carve the country into two.

Themes: two wives and a divided country

Baldwin has said she was interested not in the institution of polygamy itself but in how social and economic power is used and felt by the people inside it. In the world of the novel there is no social security: the family is the only safety net, and the price of a woman's nonconformity is set by economics. Reviewers read the household and the country together: the Virginia Quarterly Review wrote that the two wives' struggle for the favour of an aloof husband becomes a metaphor for the subcontinent itself, divided by its rulers.

India Today made the companion point: Partition had been written about mostly by men, yet women suffered most when homes were uprooted, so a woman's account of it is the more intimate history. Kirkus described the book's theme as the gruelling uses to which women's bodies and spirits are put, joined to the political story of India's struggle for independence.

The author

Shauna Singh Baldwin was born in Montreal in 1962 into a Punjabi family and raised in India. She holds an MBA from Marquette University and an MFA from the University of British Columbia, and lives in Milwaukee. What the Body Remembers grew out of the audience she had first built as a radio host and short story writer: her collection English Lessons and Other Stories (1996) had already won the Friends of American Writers Prize. She turned to the Second World War for her second novel, The Tiger Claw (2004), a finalist for Canada's Giller Prize.

Reception and legacy

The chairman of the Commonwealth judging panel, quoted in the Toronto Star, predicted the novel would be hailed as one of the most important and original novels about Indian history. Publishers Weekly called it an artistic triumph on two levels, capturing the political and religious history of modern India and Pakistan while following its three central lives. The novelist Bapsi Sidhwa praised it as a gripping story of one Sikh family that also reflects the Sikh position in the politics of the Punjab at Partition.

The book has been translated into fifteen languages, and a twentieth anniversary edition appeared from Tara Press in 2020. Scholars of Partition writing keep returning to it: university bibliographies list a shelf of theses and studies on Baldwin's fiction, and the novel is still taught as the Partition story told, distinctively, from inside a Sikh home and through women's eyes.

Read it if

Read it if you want the Partition of 1947 told from Punjab itself, through the kitchen, the fields and the marriage chamber rather than the conference table; if you are tracing how Sikh experience fits into the larger story of independence; or if you want to meet two of the most fully realised women in Partition fiction, Satya and Roop, before you meet the history that divides them.