Opinion The quiet dignity of Vinod Kumar Shukla

In 1937, the year he was born, Rajnandgaon, Vinod Kumar Shukla’s village, got its first theatre. As stakeholders in the business, watching films on the big screen became a family ritual. By the time he took up poetry, the words came to him as visual cues. Their visceral, almost cinematic essence — the novels that could be short stories that could be poems that could be films — have long made the Hindi writer a titan hidden in plain sight. Now, the 59th Jnanpith Award to Shukla comes as a fitting tribute to the genius of a man whose career has been a philosophical excursion into the life of the mind, the many ways it learns to cohabit with the mundaneness of the everyday.

At 88, Shukla is the first writer from Chhattisgarh to win the Jnanpith. At a time when the job of a writer goes beyond the task of writing, into the semantics of performance — at literary festivals and book launches, on social media, in front of an imagined audience — the quiet, unobtrusive life that he has led in Raipur is an aberration – a kavita se lambi kavita (a poem longer than a poem), to borrow from his own poetry. His unhurried approach, unencumbered by the demands of a plot, resists the rush of modern acclaim, inviting readers to linger in the quiet dignity of the overlooked that he captures in works such as Naukar Ki Kameez (1979), Khilega To Dekhenge (1996) and Deewar Mein Ek Khidki Rehti Thi (1997).

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In recent years, bolstered by the 2023 PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature, Shukla’s work has been discovered by the English-speaking world in translation. But his true triumph lies in the fact that his writings continue to serve as reminders that art does not demand spectacle, that it is both mirror and light. It grows in the liminal space between silence and sound, between absence and presence. Through Shukla, literature finds its home in the gentle yet profound pulse of life itself.