Lounge
Vinod Kumar Shukla’s world of words
Summary
Achal Mishra’s documentary on writer Vinod Kumar Shukla is a vivid portrait of a compulsive creator in his natural habitat
In Gamak Ghar (2020) and Dhuin (2022), Achal Mishra’s previous features, the filmmaker displayed a preoccupation with the many worlds that can be contained within the confines of a house. A similar throughline informs Chaar Phool Hai Aur Duniya Hai, Mishra’s latest outing, which follows renowned Hindi poet and novelist Vinod Kumar Shukla over two afternoons at his home in Raipur. It is a fitting way to render Shukla onscreen, a writer who has spent 50 years of his literary career creating universes out of bare rooms, paying attention to the vivid inner lives of ordinary people who inhabit them.
The 54-minute-documentary, now on MUBI, emerged by chance, when Mishra tagged along with actor Manav Kaul and a common friend, the screenwriter Nihal Parashar, to meet the Sahitya Akademi award-winning writer in March 2022. On the initial visit, he focused on shooting conversations between Kaul and the soft-spoken Shukla. Surveying the footage once he returned to Mumbai—then made up of straightforward interviews filmed in unbroken takes—Mishra recognized gaps. “I remember thinking that maybe if I could do one more visit, it would add something more," he says.
Ten days later, they were back in Raipur. This time around, Mishra’s camera became attuned to being an onlooker, at a remove from the action. It was while observing the 88-year-old writer interact with the space—sitting on his swing, ambling around the garden, reading by the window, reciting poems on his terrace—that Shukla’s son, Shashwat Gopal, transformed into something more than a stand-in.
“Listening to him speak about his father’s writing and the way he is around him, it felt like I was watching a younger version of Vinodji," Mishra says of his decision to let a gentle father-son story inform his portrait of Shukla. If in Shukla’s fiction a son comes to inherit his father’s dentures, then in Mishra’s film, Gopal counts his father’s way of being—his forgetfulness, his observational eye, his patience—as an inheritance.
There is little separation between the way Shukla writes and the way he lives, and its ripple effect is evident in his son’s worldview. Gopal speaks of how there’s no moment when his father is not creating. Shukla writes everyday and then recites each piece to his son, an exercise that can span days and, at times, months. It’s why Gopal suggests that before being a reader of his father’s compositions, he is first “a listener of his creative process". Mishra furthers that impression, framing Gopal as a co-author of Shukla’s artistry. A miraculous scene in Chaar Phool Hai Aur Duniya Hai captures, with a dash of magical realism, Shukla and his son sitting in the same chair by the window—mirror reflections of one another.
The more time Mishra’s camera spends in Gopal’s company, the clearer Chaar Phool Hau Aur Duniya Hai illustrates artistic expression as a language of parenting. Over the years, Shukla has repeatedly encouraged his son to start writing, even if the end result is diary entries of everything he sees around him. But Gopal maintains that he isn’t a writer, likening his inadequacy with the written word to having missed a train. Still, he understands the importance of introspection, choosing to express himself in photographs instead. It is a trait that he seems to have passed down to Shukla’s young granddaughter, who spends an hour everyday taking pictures of the mango trees in their garden. “Everyday I see a new mango tree in the picture of the same mango tree," says Gopal, amazed at his daughter’s talent of uncovering a unique perspective. In fact, the film hints that these principles—repetition as a creative discipline, wide-eyed wonder at the smallness of daily living, home as a realm of continuous discovery—underpin Shukla’s work itself.
Shukla’s insistence on preserving localism and seeing its vastness as an universal idea is what attracted Mishra to his poems and stories. “In the beginning, I encountered his poems through Arvind Krishna Mehrotra’s English translations before gradually reading his body of work in Hindi." The one thing that unequivocally stood out to Mishra was the ease with which Shukla married form and subject—the simplicity of his matter-of-fact writing belied the distinct grasp that the writer possessed of his craft. “When you watch five minutes of an Aki Kaurismäki film for example, you can see his authorship in the narrative. It is the same with Vinodji’s work. Just by the construction of one sentence, you can tell that this is a Vinod Kumar Shukla sentence."
A year after Mishra shot the film, Shukla won the prestigious PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature, becoming the first Indian recipient of the honour. Another year lapsed before he edited the footage. But even when Mishra didn’t quite know the shape that it would eventually take, he was certain of not turning the documentary into an all-encompassing profile.
In interviews, Shukla has often proclaimed that he doesn’t think in language; rather he thinks in images. Chaar Phool Hai Aur Duniya Hai—the title is borrowed from Shukla’s poem—speaks primarily in imagery. “The idea then became to capture Vinodji’s essence through the memory of those two afternoons." As a result, the film is bathed in sunlight, the interplay of light and shadow foregrounding the writer’s reclusive personality. Like Shukla, Mishra’s documentary never leaves the house. But Rohan Deep Saxena’s captivating sound design brings the world inside—alive to the chirpings of birds, the rustling of leaves, sounds of construction, and calls of street vendors. Then there is Mishra’s unobtrusive technique—static shots, stillness of scenes, meticulously composed frames in boxy 4:3—that sustain a picture of inscrutability about Shukla and bestow upon him a rich inner life, not unlike a character from a Vinod Kumar Shukla novel.
Poulomi Das is a freelance film and culture writer based in Goa.
