Opinion Vinod Kumar Shukla: A writer beyond genres

From a junior clerk trying to keep his head above water in an unforgiving system to a village school master who loses his home and school to a gale, but continues to prepare his students for hunger — for over five decades, Vinod Kumar Shukla, 86, has captured the story of a changing India through the lives of its invisible citizens. Having spent a lifetime in Chhattisgarh’s Raipur, his works —  several volumes of poetry, such as Lagbhag Jai Hind (1971), and novels that include the seminal Naukar ki Kameez (1979, later made into a film by Mani Kaul) — capture not the frantic pace of city lives but the slow cadence of small towns, its struggles and aspirations. It is only fitting that the writer, a towering figure in contemporary Indian literature in Hindi, has been honoured with the 2023 PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature, one of the most coveted global literary prizes.

One of the hallmarks of Shukla’s writing has been his ability to play around with language, moving seamlessly between the quotidian and the transcendental, the imagined and the real. He has been called a poet, an essayist and a novelist, his works compared to the magic realism of Jose Saramago and Gabriel Garcia Marquez for the way he inhabits the possibilities of the imagination. But it’s difficult to pin him down to any one genre. A poem hovers on the cusp of prose-hood, a novel is ruminative enough to count as an essay. Shukla’s writing is like the ebb and flow of life, comforting and capricious at the same time.

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By his own admission, it has never mattered to Shukla why he writes. It has simply been enough that he can. At a time when a global readership is waking up to the potential of literature in South Asian languages and major literary awards are breaking the mould and erasing regional boundaries, it is also enough for readers — those who can read his works in the original and those who can do so in translation — that he does.