Vinod Kumar Shukla leaves behind a unique literary legacy

The renowned Hindi writer Vinod Kumar Shukla passed away on Tuesday at his hometown Raipur following an extended period of illness battling interstitial lung disease. He was 88 years old. During his illustrious career that spanned over five decades, Shukla was awarded the Sahitya Akademi, the Jnanpith and the PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature.

His body of work includes acclaimed volumes of poetry like Lagbhag Jai Hind (1971), Sab Kuch Honaa Bachaa Rahegaa (1992) and Kabhi Ke Baad Abhi (2012), and iconic novels like Naukar Ki Kameez (1979, adapted into the eponymous 1999 film by Mani Kaul), Khilega Toh Dekhenge (1996) and Deewar Mein Ek Khidki Rehti Thi (1996). The last two were translated into English by Satti Khanna as Once It Flowers (2014, HarperCollins India) and A Window Lived in the Wall (2019, Eka/Westland) respectively. Some of Shukla’s best short stories were translated into English by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra and Sara Rai and published in Blue Is Like Blue (2019, HarperCollins India).

Shukla’s writing style was, in a word, inimitable. There are no real precursors of, or successors to, Shukla in Hindi literature—or in any other literary tradition for that matter, since the man himself famously did not read Western writers. His characters were middle-class men and women, leading simple but emotionally complex lives. Their imagination and sensitivity chafed against the inequities and harsh realities of the world, even as they sought solace in their rich inner lives. The protagonist of Naukar Ki Kameez, for example, is Santu, a somewhat bumbling but well-meaning clerk whose employer gives him a runaway servant’s shirt. But the simple present of a hand-me-down soon snowballs into a Kafkaesque socio-political ordeal for Santu; soon, everybody (including his friends and neighbours) starts behaving with him as though he were in fact the runaway servant himself. The way they speak to him, order him around, seem to see right through his submerged fears and insecurities—all this convinces Santu that the shirt is merely a symptom of a deeper, more profound malaise in his life.

Shukla’s poetry, too, sought to capture the extraordinary and the sublime trapped within the stifling constraints of ‘ordinary’ life as well as the frequently disorienting effects of modernity. In a poem about his granddaughters, he wrote that his younger granddaughter “picked up the morning as though it were a doll / when her sister wakes / she will pick up the rest of the day”. In his book of poems Atirikt Nahi (2000), he wrote, “Hataasha se ek vyakti baith gaya thaa / Vyakti ko main nahi jaanta thaa / Hataasha ko jaanta thaa / Isiliye main us vyakti ke paas gaya / Maine haath badhaaya” (A man sat down out of hopelessness / I did not know the man / But I knew the hopelessness / And so I went up to him / and extended my hand). And yet, this approach marked by simplicity, directness and genteel philosophizing would periodically give way to a berserker lyricism, one that led some critics to attach the much-abused term ‘magical realism’ to his work.

In his famous story Mahavidyalaya (translated as ‘College’ in Blue is Like Blue), for example, we meet a heron who enters a nearby classroom—only to respectfully exit when he realizes a serious lecture is underway. In Shukla’s other works we see agency being bestowed upon animals, leaves, trees, even forests. His short novel Chuppi Jagah (2018) (translated into English in 2021 by Satti Khanna as A Silent Place) is an excellent example of this strategy. In this book, a group of precocious children are quite attached to a forest that “has fallen silent out of grief”; a poetic metaphor for ecological strife. Together, the children set out to make the forest rediscover its voice, the trees whistling in the wind and the birds singing at dawn.

Shukla’s usage of ‘the everyday extraordinary’ and his anthropomorphism are very different, however, from the magical-realist modes of both Western and Indian English literature. A Rushdie or a Garcia Marquez or a would typically deploy these techniques in the service of satire or farce. Shukla however, was not interested in quick, scornful postmodern laughter. But he would be fascinated as to why a specific giggle-burst stopped mid-flight, and what that might mean for the old, crumbling house that has gotten used to enjoying its humans’ peals of laughter.

In his personal life, Shukla was known as a quiet, soft-spoken man generous with his time, especially with former students—he taught at an agricultural college in Raipur until his retirement in 1996. He was also widely admired and revered by his colleagues in the Hindi literary world. During the late 1950s, Shukla’s hometown Rajnandgaon played host to the celebrated Hindi writer Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh (1917-1964), whose meeting with Shukla is depicted in the latter’s story Old Veranda. In March 2022, the Hindi writer and Bollywood actor Manav Kaul recorded scenes for a documentary at Shukla’s Raipur residence. Among other scenes, a sobbing and visibly distraught Shukla alleged that his Hindi publishers had cheated him out of a significant chunk of his royalties—a grievance whose impact was softened the following year, when he won the $50,000 PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature.

During his last years, Shukla would often jokingly complain about his physical decline being faster than his pace of writing, claiming that he had tons of stuff that would be doomed to incompletion as a result. But a fast Shukla rapidly churning out tomes would defeat the purpose of the enterprise, in my humble view. After all, this is the man whose writing was imbued with slowness on several different levels—the luxuriant slowness of thought that allowed a man to stop and stare, the merciful slowness of a small town that insulated its residents, the tactical ‘slowness’ of his language that eschewed the money-shot line in favour of a genteel piling up of metaphor and idiom, cause and effect, thought and afterthought.

Of Shukla, therefore, we can safely say: the likes of him will never be seen again.

Aditya Mani Jha is a Delhi-based writer.