A Writer in Bright and Shining India

On Vinod Kumar Shukla winning the Jnanpith Award

Hindi writer Vinod Kumar Shukla, who is 88, has just been awarded the Jnanpith award, the most prestigious literary prize in India. My friend Ravish said on his show the other night that in bright and shining India, Shukla is like an old, threadbare shirt walking on the street, a shirt that despite its age retains a bit of its color, the smells gathered from a lifetime, its threadwork a little worn but in this world of fashion still managing to be of considerable use.

A critical question is: does Shukla help us negotiate the contemporary moment? This morning I participated in a live roundtable recording for my regional public radio station WAMC. My co-panelists included the writers Francine Prose, Lucy Sante, and Dinaw Mengestu. We talked about the changes in America under Trump—and I kept thinking, of course, of changes in India under Modi. Attacks on students on campuses, the suppression of dissent, the eruption of an aggressive, toxic masculinity, these are all common features in both nations. In such a context, Shukla’s observations about the world seem to come not just from the past but from an elsewhere. I don’t mean this negatively. I think of his space as a quiet place of introspection. His accounts of day-to-day struggles usher us into a substantial kind of solitude. Tyranny is not so much irrelevant in that world as it is worthless.

How to mark what makes the ordinary truly extraordinary? It has always seemed to me that Shukla work has represented the answer to that question. I have cherished the ways in which the rural parts of the Hindi-speaking belt have come alive in Shukla’s prose. In fact, I have smuggled some of the images from his novel Deewar Mein Ek Khidki Rehti Thi into my last book: a heron or an egret wandering into a classroom, fish bones found on the floor, a young sadhu sitting on an elephant. A few years ago, HarperCollins India published a set of Shukla’s stories in translation under the title Blue is Like Blue. The stories were translated by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra and Sara Rai, and what I have always remembered from the translators’ introduction to the collection is the following story: “At the Jaipur Literature Festival 2011, Vinod Kumar Shukla asked Sara Rai why there were so many people standing in line, each clutching a book. Told they were all waiting to have their books signed by J.M. Coetzee, he 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. One explanation for it could be that he reads only in Hindi, which perhaps has more speakers than Mandarin Chinese but in which little gets translated. Even if it didn’t, you doubt whether Shukla would be interested. Recently, when asked in an email if he was familiar with any European writers, for it is they who often come to mind when you read him, Shukla did not evade the question. He simply ignored it. The question did not deserve an answer. Just as the flock of ducks looks like ducks, we might say that Shukla looks only like himself, like Shukla.” This is an extraordinary account. It suggests, on the one hand, a completeness , and maybe even confidence, a sort of insuperable autonomy; and, on the other, it carries a sense of insularity, a stubborn closed-off-ness, a protectionist mentality. I’m impressed by it, and charmed by it, but I’m also mildly disturbed and confused by it. In the end, however, I accept it and even marvel at it. And, somewhat unsurely, I file away the story in that folder I keep called Indian Provincialism.

The above photograph by Shashwat Gopal accompanies an important story by Shukla in the George Review titled “College” (also included in Blue is Like Blue). Please read that piece to get a glimpse of the sensibility I’m trying to portray here. For Hindi readers, here are a few of Shukla’s poems in the original language in which they were written. Two poems in English, again in Arvind Krishna Mehrotra's translation. Mehrotra seems to have turned the translation of Shukla’s work into a kind of cottage industry and here are more poems; there is such deceptive simplicity and even clarity in Shukla’s writing that I feel Mehrotra is perhaps uniquely suited for this task. And yet, for any Hindi speaker, the original poems hold such incredible intimacy and depth!

This afternoon after my return from the WAMC roundtable, I sat down to read once again a poem of Shukla’s that I admire very much. The poem is titled दूर से अपना घर देखना चाहिए. (Here is a poem that is so expansive and generous in its embrace of humanity that it defies all the doubts I had about the writer’s insularity. Such imaginative humanism is a rebuke to the narrow, tawdry ambitions of the new, shining India.) I began translating this poem not because I’m qualified to do this but because I wanted to come as close as I could to the original by also trying to put its meaning in another language. In celebration of Shukla’s Jnanpith, here it is for you to read: