Writing a poem,
worldly matters occupy me.
Thus begins a poem by Vinod Kumar Shukla. By “worldly matters”, you would have thought Shukla meant political disputes, grocery shopping, landlords, the weather, train timetables. As it turns out, at least in this instance, it is none of the above, though all of the above figure in his work. “If I’m writing,” the poem continues,
and there’s a knock on the door,
I go open it
when I hear the sound.
It’s a short poem, and I’ve already quoted two of its four stanzas. The poem was written in 2008.
Sometime in 1970, there was a knock on Shukla’s door. The person knocking had been specially sent to fetch Shukla’s manuscript for a poetry series that Ashok Vajpeyi, whom Shukla knew, was bringing out. Vajpeyi, a civil servant, was at the time posted in Sarguja, a district to the north of Raipur where Shukla lives, and his letter asking for the manuscript – and sent in his capacity as a poet, critic, and, now, editor of poetry chapbooks – had gone unanswered. Shukla’s poems, which had been appearing in Hindi literary magazines since 1959, were to be part of the series, if only Shukla would cooperate.
The chapbook eventually appeared and was titled Lagbhag Jai Hind [Hail India, Almost]. The phrase “Jai Hind”, which translates as “Hail India” or “Long live India”, had been a stirring political slogan from pre-Independence times. The irony of the “Almost” – especially at a time when the nation was newly independent – marked Shukla out as someone who stood at a slight angle to a rallying cry meant to give goosebumps. It’s a bit like having the second line of “Hail to the Chief!” read “Hail to the Chief! We almost salute him, one and all.” Vajpeyi’s chapbooks appeared under the series title Pehchan [Sign]. For Shukla, Pehchan was particularly apt.
In the poems of Lagbhag Jai Hind are lines like, “This flock of ducks/was like a duck./It had a duck’s bill and wings” and “Six in the morning was like six in the morning.” The lines are unique to Shukla, like a fingerprint. You could put them on a cheque and it would be honoured at any literary bank. Similar, even identical, sentences occur in his prose as well. “The crowd was like a crowd”, “Blue is like blue”, and “The flock of ducks looked like ducks. They had ducks’ bills and feathers” are from his story “Man in the Blue Shirt” in which the narrator sees a man – the man in the blue shirt – walking in the same direction twice, but he hadn’t seen him returning after the first time he went. “I am sure it was the same man,” the narrator says. In another story, a man has two noses.
A thing, a person, a thought is incomparably itself, inhabiting its own starkness, untouched by the consolating diversion of metaphor. Shukla is an undescriptive poet. “The people I met on the way were like the people one meets on the way” is from his autobiographical essay “Old Veranda”. For Hindi readers, Shukla’s selfetaphorising images have the same familiarity that Gertrude Stein’s rose has for others.
Shukla’s poetry and prose overlap in other ways too. “A Poem Lived First in the Novel”, the first poem in the present selection, does not appear in any of his books of poems but comes after the dedication page of A Window Lived in the Wall (1997), a novel dedicated to his wife. The title of the novel is then repeated in the title of a poem, “There was a window that lived in a wall” in Nothing Surplus (2000).
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.
As vertiginous his work may be for the reader, if you were to ask Shukla he’ll say, “I don’t have wings.” The line, from “Do birds sit on the ground”, could be a metaphor for the kind of writing Shukla does, whether poetry or fiction. He compares, in the poem, the flight of a bird with the flight of a butterfly and concludes, “There’s a small yellow butterfly/flying above the earth.”
Smallness is the dominant feature of Shukla’s work, and in his small bare pictureless rooms live modest people with vivid interior lives. In “There was a window that lived in a wall”, there’s more than a window that lives in the wall. Concealed from the world there’s also a man, someone like Shukla himself, living in it. He is “so absolutely the average man”, as Alfred Jarry says of Marcueil in The Supermale, that his very ordinariness makes him “extraordinary”. The busy shopper of “A street in the bazaar”, his frayed bag filled with potatoes, leafy vegetables, and spices, is observed by another who wishes he were a ten-rupee note and could find shelter in that bag, away from his own anxieties. In “Through the window screen”, the room chases out the terrified occupant, unless it is the occupant who flees the room, chased by his own thoughts. And in “To my friend I said”, when friends meet they talk about “egg stalls and fighter jets”, then enter into an argument. They could have talked about anything, and argued over anything, and remained friends.
Friendships (and neighbourhoods) are important to Shukla; they help fill the emptiness of the day. You meet friends at street corners and shoot the breeze. In “Continuously”, the mahogany leaves fall as though they were seconds. There’s little else to do except count them. To tell the time you don’t have to bend your neck and consult your wristwatch but look at the tree. Addressing no one in particular,
“Anyone for Moti Park?” the rickshaw puller asks.
The friend’s nowhere around.
Returning from work, to brighten up their walls, fathers bring home colourful posters
… of chubby, pink-faced
children – so unlike our own,
who’re neither as chubby,
nor as pretty, nor wear
such nice clothes.
Not everyone lives poorly, and even the tallest of men, like others in the neighbourhood, may not be any taller than 5 feet 6 inches. In the Jurassic Park of humanity there are no dinosaurs:
Oi! Are these the great heights you’ve reached?
Mind your head and you’re shorter by a few more inches.
Quietly, by stealth, Shukla raises and leaves the concerns that draw him, and us, again and again. Only in our case they flicker and vanish in the mind’s peripheral vision before we can quite see them. As the title poem of Shukla’s first full-length collection has it, “That man put on a new woollen coat and went away like a thought.” While the man in the woollen coat (who can stand in for the reader) disappears into the winter chill, the speaker of the poem, the one in rubber flip-flops, comes into view, along with a tree and “a horse of inferior stock”. “There was only one horse. I wasn’t that horse,” protests the speaker, but in the eyes of the boss he is “a horse at a gallop, horseshoes nailed to [his] boot soles.” The working man has changed places with the workhorse. The boss remains what he is, an unattainable idea of wealth, someone snug in the woollen coat of his printed thoughts.
“Worldly matters” come knocking all the time. In a bus queue you find there’s a tree standing in front:
When the bus arrived
I waited for the tree to get on first when it struck me
that trees
do not board buses.
Shukla’s images, like the one above, only pretend to be like children’s drawings. The playfulness is deceptive. The tree is trying to escape to the city before it, too, is turned into a log. “It hasn’t rained yet” begins:
It hasn’t rained yet.
The tree in front of our house
had been cut down.
Is that the reason?
The absence of trees, whether “in front of our house” or in the forest, is in the short term a portent of drought; in the long term of what has been described as a climate “doom loop”. The word “climate” has spawned a whole new literary genre, but this is not what Shukla is talking about. He’s been living in the knot of that loop, seeing it tighten. For him, the end has already come.
O adivasis! The trees did not desert you,
nor did you leave the forest on your own.
I saw groups of you walking down city streets this year,
bedraggled children in tow, forest people without forests.
Is that the reason?The year’s now ended.
In the groups of families
I noticed there were no infants.
Is this the beginning
of the end of the adivasis?
The decimation of what is euphemistically called “first peoples” is no surprise when read about in the news or in history books. To come upon it unexpectedly, in a different context, is to make what had been forgotten or pushed to the back of our minds, resurface once again.
“There is nothing of me except what is here,” Shukla says in “When everyone thinks I’m dead”. Shukla’s “here” is a specific place, Raipur and, before that, Rajnandgaon, both cities in Chhattisgarh, one third of whose population is adivasi. Born in Rajnandgaon in 1937, he went to school and college there. His family were Saryuparin Brahmins who hailed from Uttar Pradesh. Raipur is where he taught agricultural extension at the Indira Gandhi Agricultural University. He retired as associate professor in 1996. This is not your usual trajectory of someone who’s been described as the greatest living writer in Hindi and been awarded the 2023 PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature, but therein lies the paradox of Vinod Kumar Shukla.
Though there was until the 1970s little to distinguish Rajnandgaon and Raipur from the other small stations on the Bombay–Howrah rail line, in Shukla’s eyes they encompass the known world. The middle of nowhere is also somewhere. In “The Chhattisgarh to Bilaspur”, the Chhattisgarh Express, for part of the way, takes the same Bombay–Howrah route. Were it left to him, Shukla would still be living in the house of his childhood that he writes about in “Old Veranda”:
Ours was a family of four brothers living under one roof. The roof ’s shadow belonged to my youngest uncle, who was called Chachaji. He was called this at home and also outside, but wherever he was he largely kept to himself. Everyone was in awe of him. If he stepped out of the house more than he usually did, he came up against the world as if against a wall. He came up against it even when he was at home.
As happens in joint families, there would be quarrels.
Guns would come out but were never fired. The women never quarrelled. Perhaps this was because of Amma, who continued to work quietly despite the chaos of marriages, births, and deaths.
I don’t know how, but her quiet would have a calming effect on those who were grieving, and those who were full of joy would find the space around them expand to accommodate their laughter.
Amma would be up when it was still dark and would be the last to sleep. You could hear her in the kitchen putting things away, the clattering sounds like a lullaby for the night, sending it to sleep. Even the plants listened to her. As soon as it was twilight, the guava, the drumstick tree, and the tulsi in the courtyard would doze off, as would the soft grass in the corner and the two tomato plants that had appeared on the rubbish heap. The tall peepul tree to the east of the house would look in, and seeing the other plants asleep, go to sleep itself.
If she saw an ant in the fire crawling on a dung-cake she would pull out the dung-cake and save the ant. In the same way, she would save us from small everyday fires and hope that they wouldn’t recur. The burn on her hand would not have healed before she burned herself again. Her daily routine was like a thread going through the different things she did, stringing them together. She never felt the needle’s prick, but I did. In the papers I read about a man who was hospitalized and discovered to have hundreds of needles in his body. Was my condition similar to that man’s?
The large family living under “one roof” is an idea that he returns to in “Would that we all had lived together”. By the time the poem ends, though, a particular family has become the human family, and the “one roof” is not the roof of a house in Rajnandgaon but the sky. The earth we dwell on is the only mailing address we have, collectively. A particular childhood memory has here opened out into a feeling that is not dissimilar to what WH Auden called a “vision of Agape”, that is, of shared unerotic love. Going a step further, Shukla shares the feeling with all of creation:
Without knots,
there’s one wind circling the earth, together with our
breathing.
Apart from Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh (1917–1964), whom Shukla first met in 1958 when Muktibodh was teaching in a college in Rajnandgaon, and who suggested that Shukla send his poems to a magazine where they subsequently appeared, an influence on Shukla has been films. According to his son Shashwat Gopal, some of the names he heard from his father while growing up were Kurosawa, Tarkovsky, Satyajit Ray, Mani Kaul, and those of Iranian directors. Shukla himself has much to say on watching films in “Old Veranda”, albeit as a baby:
Krishna Talkies was inaugurated on the day I was born. The Talkies was built opposite our house. It was Rajnandgaon’s first cinema hall and a big moment for the town. It’s entirely possible that when, after five weeks, she [Amma] came out of the birthing room, someone who was going to see a film took me along.
Krishna Talkies was owned by the Sapre brothers. They were my father’s and uncle’s friends, and they may all have had some business connections as well. The ushers knew us and we had free run of the place. Krishna Talkies was almost a part of our house. When one of us, to escape from the bath that we were being subjected to in the courtyard, slipped naked through the bars of the gate and ran into the Talkies, members of the family would go in search of the chowkidar to have the gate opened. Passersby would stop to see what the fuss was about …
The third class was right up in front, where the stage and the projection screen were. Children would lie down on the stage and watch the film from there. I’d often fall asleep. Phulesar Dai would then come looking for me and carry me home. If you knock on the door of the past, the past will come out. Some of it you’ll recognize. It will have its age stamped on it. It’s not very remarkable to say that I spent my childhood watching the world and watching cinema. Seen from the cinema’s point of view, I was just another cinemagoer.
As Shukla told an interviewer, “My work comes to me visually.” It is no surprise, then, that Shukla’s poems appear projected on the page as much as printed on it. “Even at night in the forest” is made of scenes rather than stanzas or verse paragraphs. There are in the poem, as in a film, moments of suspense. At times, you can hear the soundtrack:
If you hear a sound
it’s probably an adivasi
hiding to save his life
or a man hiding
to kill another man
Filmmakers have recognised the visual quality of Shukla’s writing. His first novel, Naukar Ki Kameez (1979), was made into a film The Servant’s Shirt (1999) by Mani Kaul, and The Man’s Woman and Other Stories (2009) is a triptych by Amit Dutta of three Shukla stories.
At the Jaipur Literature Festival 2011, Vinod Kumar Shukla asked Sara Rai why so many people were standing in line, each clutching a book. Told that they were all waiting to have their books signed by JM Coetzee, Shukla looked puzzled. Hindi writers sign books, but privately, and seldom is there a line of people waiting for them to do so. Moreover, the name Coetzee meant nothing to him, nor did the names of the other world writers present on the occasion. And this despite the fact that his own books have been translated into French, Italian, and English.
One explanation for Shukla’s indifference could be that he reads only in Hindi, the local language, which has over 345 million native speakers but into which little gets translated. Shukla may be quite unaware of what the poets in Slovenia are doing. Recently, when asked in an email if he was familiar with any American or European writers, for it is they who sometimes come to mind when you read him, Shukla did not evade the question. He ignored it. The question did not deserve an answer. The world’s literatures are forever creating new islands on which no writer, no poem, is alone. Shukla’s island neighbourhood is variously populated. Unaware of some of the variousness though he may be, it’s where you will find Shukla (“There was a window that lived in a wall”) and English nursery rhymes (“There was an old woman who lived in a shoe”), or Shukla (“I’m a large gathering/and I’m each person in it”) and Whitman (“I am large, I contain multitudes.”), or Shukla echoing Rilke:
Swiftly the deer runs, leaping
as though inside
the iron bars of a forestThe bird doesn’t seem to fly
as far as it can go, …* His vision, from the constantly passing bars,
— Rainer Maria Rilke.
has grown so weary that it cannot hold anything else.
It seems to him there are a thousand bars;
and behind the bars, no world.
Wherever I go, I carry this inborn death with me.
— Rainer Maria Rilke.
I’ll save it
for as long as I live.
I climbed this pyre, faggots piled to fearful heights,
— Rainer Maria Rilke.
convinced I’d never sacrifice
my soul’s uncounted sum to gain a future.
Or Shukla and Jack Spicer sitting on a park bench in Vancouver, looking at sunsets:
Where it rises in the sea,
the sun is like a sea bird
trying to rise,
but with the oil on the surface
sticking to its feathers,
it’s unable to.Nothing but the last sun falling in the last oily water by
— Jack Spicer.
the docks.
They fed the lambs sugar all winter
Nothing but that. The last sun falling in the last oily
water by the docks.
One of Spicer’s “true propositions” reads “that poems cry out to each other from a great distance.”
Shukla, who seldom travels and has been outside India perhaps only three or four times on literary junkets, would agree with Hazlitt that, “Foreign travel especially makes men pedants, not artists. What we seek, we must find at home or nowhere.” Shukla must be among the few writers alive whose work has appeared in journals and anthologies where world literature is published or discussed – Granta, Modern Poetry in Translation, Some Kind of Beautiful Signal, The Georgia Review, The Baffler, n+1 – but who has heard neither of these journals nor of world lit, a category whose centre is everywhere and periphery nowhere. In contrast to his unawareness of the term and his indifference to the subjects that keep the assembly line of global publishing moving smoothly (historical events, personal turmoil, accounts of origins and extinctions) is the attention he lavishes on the fleeting observations, thoughts, memories, and gestures that for most of us, regardless of where we live, constitute our lives. To read him is to read not a version of what is already known, but what is constantly being inscribed in and erased from the margins of our consciousness. Every once in a while, though, he casts a glance at where we’re coming from (“When I went to see Bhimbetka”) and where we’re headed (“The dry well is dead”, “The last cheetah is dead”, “It hasn’t rained yet”). Shukla is still answering the knock on the door. It’s one more poem come looking for his Raipur, Chhattisgarh address.
This is the introduction to Treasurer of Piggy Banks by Vinod Kumar Shukla, a bilingual edition of his poems, selected and translated by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra.
This article first appeared on Literary Activism.
