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Shortlisted, 2025 TA First Translation Prize, Society of Authors
Seeking to escape captivity, Lakshmi the temple elephant sets out on a stirring journey toward freedom. On her way, she briefly experiences life as a film star and encounters a colorful cast including a three-legged dog named Tripod Dog Baba, other elephants in the Bandipur Forest, a chameleon facing an existential crisis, a moon who dances with an elephant, and a flying fish called Alphonse.
Lakshmi’s Secret Diary is a remarkable Indian Francophone novel set in Pondicherry, the former capital of French India. Blending philosophical meditations, retellings of Sanskrit mythology, and social critique, Ari Gautier tells the story of Lakshmi’s attempt to escape her fate. From the point of view of animals, the novel explores concepts of destiny, freedom, and identity. It illuminates the paradoxes of animal-human relations in India, where animals are both abused and worshiped, and provides an imaginative critique of the caste system. Gautier’s vivid portrait of Pondicherry brings to life the religious, cultural, culinary, and visual diversity of the city’s districts and sheds light on the little-known history of French colonialism in India. An afterword explores issues such as reincarnation and Indian translation traditions in relation to the novel. At once tragic and comic, satirical and surreal, Lakshmi’s Secret Diary is a surprising, compelling, and moving novel from a gifted storyteller.
— Maryse Condé, author of Segu and I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem
This is a tale that goes back through the ages, but that reaches out to us, now, as we subjugate nature to our own ends. Filled with humour, it is nonetheless heart-breaking.
— Ananda Devi, author of The Living Days
Fusing history, memory, mythology, and the immediate present, Lakshmi’s Secret Diary is Ari Gautier’s gift to a lost humankind. Meditative and melancholy, whimsical and funny, it breaks free of its location in colonial Pondicherry to meditate on the human condition, on fate and freedom and choice. It lingers long after you’ve read it.
— Geetanjali Shree, International Booker Prize-winning author of Tomb of Sand
Translating a text as subtly complex as Ari Gautier’s Lakshmi’s Secret Diary with the litheness of Sheela Mahadevan’s English is a considerable accomplishment. In her translation, Gautier’s Pondichéry is rich with unforgettable characters, history, and wisdom.
— Matt Reeck, translator of “Muslim”: A Novel
Vibrant.
— Asian Review of Books
A rare and remarkable achievement, a work that is at once poetic, political, whimsical, and weighty.
— The Daily Star
[Mahadevan] succeeds admirably.
— Hopscotch Translation
Ari Gautier is an Indian Francophone writer and poet from the former French Indian territory of Pondicherry, now based in Norway. One of the few contemporary Indian writers who adopts French as a primary literary language, he is also the author of the novel Le Thinnai and the short story collection Nocturne Pondichéry.
Sheela Mahadevan is lecturer in French and Francophone studies at the University of Liverpool.
Translator’s Note
Lakshmi’s Secret Diary
Translator’s Afterword
Acknowledgments