Gamak Ghar director Achal Mishra’s latest film was made in 2022 but was completed only in April this year. Mishra’s documentary echoes its subject’s observation that the creative process requires patience – everything does not need to come out immediately.
Chaar Phool Hain Aur Duniya Hai (There are four flowers and then there’s the world) is strung together from vignettes of the renowned Hindi writer Vinod Kumar Shukla in his home in Raipur in Chhattisgarh. The film is framed as a conversation between Shukla and the actor Manav Kaul, himself a writer of recent repute. Shot and edited by Mishra, the documentary will be premiered at the Dharamshala International Film Festival (November 7-10).
Chaar Phool Hain Aur Duniya Hai emerged out of a meeting between Mishra, Kaul and a mutual friend, the screenwriter Nihal Parashar, in March 2022. When Kaul said that he was planning to visit Shukla in Raipur, Mishra tagged along with two cameras and sound recording equipment.
Mishra had been following Shukla’s work for a while, reading him first in translations by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra and later in the original Hindi. “There is an innocence, an almost child-like purity to his writing, it doesn’t seem calculated,” Mishra told Scroll. “The craft looks so easy even though it isn’t – there is a play of words, the writing is a way of seeing the craft being balanced with the expression.”
The 54-minute documentary evolved over two afternoons. In the first, Mishra shot Kaul quizzing Shukla about his creative process and philosophy. In the film, the 87-year-old author and poet shares his views on how his peers should react when their works are adapted for film, as happened with Mani Kaul’s Naukar Ki Kameez, based on Shukla’s novel of the same name.
The Sahitya Akademi Award-winning writer also reveals his thoughts on the importance of rootedness (the most universal idea is to bring the vastness of the local into the global, he says). All their lives, Shukla says, writers work on only one piece, which is broken into fragments in different formats such as novels, poems or short stories.
The film includes an interview with Shukla’s son, Shashwat Gopal. Mishra did not want to make Manav Kaul the focus – “Manav had a few ideas [about the film] but they didn’t sit well with me,” Mishra said.
Mishra had been following Gopal’s efforts to photograph his father. “I had also heard a speech by Shashwat about his father, called Ekant Ka Bahar Jaana,” Mishra said. “You go to the house imagining something like conflict, but instead find pure love and sincerity. Talking to Shashwat was like hearing a younger Vinod Kumar Shukla.”
On his second visit, Mishra filmed Shukla’s routine – eating a meal, ambling on his terrace. The documentary never leaves the house. This decision did not have anything to do with the film’s modest production budget, Mishra stated. Rather, Shukla has written frequently about the idea of the house being a universe unto itself, Mishra said.
Instead of a comprehensive account of one of Hindi literature’s most celebrated figures, Chaar Phool Hain Aur Duniya Hai unfolds like a chapter from Shukla’s oeuvre. The documentary gives a taste of Shukla’s thinking, rather than a complete banquet.
For instance, Chaar Phool Hain Aur Duniya Hai does not address Shukla’s allegations that he was not being paid proper royalties by is publishers, a controversy that broke out at the same time that Mishra was making his documentary.
Had Mishra met Shukla in different circumstances, the film might have panned out differently too, he said. The edit took two years.
“I kept revisiting the footage – the idea was to accept that it could become something more than an interview,” Mishra said. In the interim, he completed a feature film, which is set in Darbhanga, where he grew up.
“In between, I read so much more of Shukla’s work and loved him so much more,” Mishra said. “I had been give an opportunity to visit him, and I felt that I didn’t deserve more.”
Also read:
Vinod Kumar Shukla: An artist forever seeking to be one with his conscientious creation
Writer Vinod Kumar Shukla’s allegations remind us of the author versus publisher battle no one wants
Manav Kaul interview: ‘I am 98 per cent a writer, the remaining two per cent, everything else’
