Opinion The radical gentleness of Vinod Kumar Shukla’s world
Shukla, who died on December 23 at the age of 88, occupied a singular place in Hindi — and Indian — literature, a writer whose work stood slightly apart from its moment, quietly undoing expectations about narrative and form
Mediated by translations and a growing interest in voices outside the familiar circuits of global literature, Shukla’s wider recognition arrived when his work had already settled into an assured quiet. In the introduction to Vinod Kumar Shukla’s Treasurer of Piggy Banks, poet and translator Arvind Krishna Mehrotra sums up the oeuvre of the poet and writer from Chhattisgarh: “A line of Shukla is like a line of Shukla. It ‘mirrors nothing’ but itself. Reading him can be disorienting, even vertiginous, like seeing Op art.” Shukla, who died on December 23 at the age of 88, occupied a singular place in Hindi — and Indian — literature, a writer whose work stood slightly apart from its moment, quietly undoing expectations about narrative and form, about what and whom great literature must speak for.
There is an anecdote about Shukla that appears in the introduction to a collection of his short stories translated into English, Blue is like Blue (2019). At the Jaipur Literature Festival one year, he was bemused to see a serpentine queue of readers waiting for J M Coetzee to sign their books. Shukla did not know who Coetzee was, but more importantly, he could not understand spectacle around writing. He wrote from the margins of experience, where life unfolded quietly and meaning arrived without announcement. His novels and poems — among them Naukar Ki Kameez, Deewar Mein Ek Khidki Rahti Thi and Kavita Se Lambi Kavita — inhabited modest rooms and ordinary jobs, attentive to the textures of routine and the inner lives of those whom history tends to pass at a distance. What distinguished him was not only style but temperament. Shukla resisted the pressure to perform or persuade. His words ambled rather than marched; his sentences carried a faintly surreal charge even when they emerged organically from the everyday.
Mediated by translations and a growing interest in voices outside the familiar circuits of global literature, Shukla’s wider recognition — the PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature and the Jnanpith Award — arrived when his work had already settled into an assured quiet. Yet, it is difficult to imagine that the wider recognition altered his perception of what truly mattered. Shukla made a moral and aesthetic principle of noticing, of trusting stillness and ellipses as forms of truth. His allegiance lay with the act of writing itself and with the delicate, untold stories it could conjure up. In this, he leaves behind an example: That fidelity to one’s own rhythm can be an act of startling originality.
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