Vinod Kumar Shukla: The writer who wrote of the sublime in the ordinary
Vinod’s emergence as a Hindi poet in the late 1960s was marked by a poetic language and perception that was unconventional
In the death of Vinod Kumar Shukla, the world of literature has lost an unusual writer. Vinod was a major poet and a major novelist in Hindi. The centre of his writing was the non-heroic life of ordinary human beings, the everydayness of it. He never took the path of mythology or history. A writer of the simple and stubborn present, with almost no echoes of the past, his was an imagination that pushed the real until it verged on becoming surreal. His poetry had elements of narrativity, his fiction had resonances of the poetic. He did all this and more, spending his life and career largely in Raipur, Chhattisgarh, almost on the margins of the Hindi belt.
In his daily dealings, Vinod was a person of few words. In the company of the like-minded, he spoke very little. He kept away from literary controversies and ideological battles of the Hindi world. He refused to define or assert his commitment to any ideology. His life and creative effort were almost exclusively committed to life and literature. He taught for a living at a government agriculture college and led the life of a literary recluse.
Vinod’s emergence as a Hindi poet in the late 1960s was marked by a poetic language and perception that was unconventional; indeed, he freely deviated from the conventional syntax of language. In the dominant ethos of confident certainties of ideology and belief, Vinod came with alluring uncertainty, no visible belief. By distorting grammar, he forged a new syntax of imagination; an imagination that was rooted in the mundane realities of the small town, neither rural nor cosmopolitan.
And, yet, he was able to discover, as it were, the inexplicable humanness, the magic and mystery, the dignity and ironies of the utterly ordinary, of everydayness. He could discern the cosmic in the ordinary, the cosmopolitan in the mundane, the disturbing in the tranquil and calm. His fictional characters were drawn from the lower middle-class Hindi area – a clerk, a school teacher, etc. Through his vital and vitalising creative imagination, he not only turned them into full-blooded human beings, but also people who contained and revealed the human condition of our times. He had an enduring fascination for the ordinary, the non-heroic and, perhaps, an unarticulated disdain for the grand and heroic, the assertive heroes of our time.
One can recall that his first collection of poems, a small booklet, was published in 1970, called Lagbhag Jaihind (Almost Jaihind); his first novel was written under the first Muktibodh fellowship of the government of Madhya Pradesh called Naukar ki Kameez (The Servant’s Shirt) and published in 1979, and he got his first ever award, the Raza Puraskar for his poetry in 1980 or so. Much later, the novel was converted into a remarkable film by Mani Kaul in 1999. His first hardbound collection of poems carried the longest title in Hindi: Vah Aadami Chala Gaya Naya Garam Coat Pehinkar Vichar Ki Tarah (That Man Went Away Putting On a New Warm Coat Like an Idea).
In his long career of writing, lasting more than half a century, Vinod enjoyed popularity amongst readers and also invited serious attention from critics. His works were translated into many Indian and foreign languages, and some of them were converted into drama and film. But he remained a reluctant, modest, unambitious person, a man devoted to his family and home, a person unwilling to make any large claims for his writing. There was a time when the Left establishment in Hindi spurned him as a writer, but many leftist critics and writers appreciated his writing. He was accused of being an aesthete, at best a stylist, unconcerned with the toiling masses. Vinod did not attempt to placate these forces and continued to write, to walk almost alone on the path “not taken”.
At some point, Vinod also took to writing for children, especially for the new adult. In these works, he allowed his imagination to go wild, and the difference between reality and fantasy was allowed to cease. Implicitly, he believed that both life and creativity cannot be apprehended or understood without imagination. For him, the dualities of time and timelessness, self and others, individual and society, the temporal and the cosmic, almost did not exist; or, they could be superseded by imagination.
While he continued to explore the lower middle-class life and reality, Vinod moved on to face the abysmal displacement of the adivasis of Chhattisgarh, the forced immigration, the erosion of their natural habitat, and their loss of home and hearth. His later poetry is imbued with wide and moving empathy with this particular phase of human suffering and degradation in our times. The geography of his empathy and imagination notably expanded. His innate disbelief in grandeur, pomp and show, and the grandly visible, only deepened as he proceeded in his writing to manifest the nobility and dignity, the interminable suffering of the tribal and the deprived, the glow and grandeur of the denuded.
In the last analysis, Vinod Kumar Shukla was a master who made us feel and realise the vast suffering, the small pleasures, the possibilities and contradictions, the dignity and nobility of the human condition in our times. Also, he made, inter alia, politics, urbanisation, smartness, and social manoeuvres appear trivial, lacking in human liberties, life-affirming substance.
Ashok Vajpeyi is a Hindi poet and critic. The views expressed are personal
