Tribute | The singularity of author Vinod Kumar Shukla

Author Ashutosh Bhardwaj, in a 2023 article in The Hindu, notes that when he made the “pilgrimage” to the home of Hindi literary giant Vinod Kumar Shukla, along with his actor friend Sushant Singh, Shukla asked Singh if he could touch him to ensure he was indeed the same person he had seen on television.

It must have generated a giddy feeling in Singh, and Bhardwaj must have savoured this encounter as one among the precious moments in his writerly life. 

However, if one scrutinises this response in relation to Shukla’s literary works, it becomes clear how — and why — the author was able to illuminate the ordinary in his works, unlike his contemporaries or other writers before him. Shukla, winner of the 2023 PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature, approached everything in life with a childlike curiosity. This curious child left the world on December 23, 2025. 

In A Window Lived in a Wall (2005), translated by Satti Khanna, Shukla’s protagonist Raghuvar Prasad arranges a pile of bricks “to see that he was not in his room”.

Re-reading this novel after Shukla’s demise, it made me curious if, from somewhere far away, the author was observing his absence from the face of the earth. He had done so much in his literature. He could do this as well.

The ‘self-metaphorising’ imagery

Shukla’s writing concerned places and people that he observed keenly. He was born in Rajnandgaon and lived in Raipur. “They are two cities on the map, but in his imagination they are one. As he says in his essay ‘Old Veranda’, “The old veranda of our house in Rajnandgaon is now in the house in Raipur.” Arvind Krishna Mehrotra and Sara Rai note this in the introduction to their translation of Shukla’s Blue Is Like Blue: Stories (2019).

If in Shukla’s fiction, bicycles could have consciousness, a pair of slippers could go on looking for their owner, and a man could look at his absence in his room when outside the room, then why couldn’t the Rajnandgaon veranda be in Raipur?

Shukla wasn’t interested in projection or transposition. He didn’t rearrange people and objects in his stories to ascribe meaning to the former’s actions or render some form of meaningful presence to the latter. He toyed with experiences and shared possibilities. For example, coins would empty themselves from their owner’s pocket “whether they were in his pocket or not” (The Windows in Our House Are Little Doors, 2020).

It bears asking, then, if many writers do that, how can one claim that Shukla wrote like Shukla? Mehrotra, in his introduction titled ‘Grass Lives Next to Grass’ for Treasurer of Piggy Banks (2024), a select translation of Shukla’s poems for the Literary Activism series by Westland Books, provides the most definitive answer. He writes, “In the poems of Lagbhag Jai Hind [trs Almost 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.”

Vinod Kumar Shukla’s original Hindi titles.
| Photo Credit:
PTI

The “self-metaphorising” imagery in Shukla’s writing made “[a] line of Shukla” read “like a line of Shukla”. His works strip themselves of any other comparisons, which is perhaps why if someone would’ve said that his works remind them of some European avant-garde writer, artist or movie, Shukla wouldn’t have anything to offer as a response.

In his writing, Shukla wasted few words. Often, it appears that he had a hard time saying all that there was for him to say. Mohini Gupta, in an essay titled ‘The Caged Bird’, recollects Shukla lamenting the fact that he couldn’t help “gather [him]self completely” given so much of what he wanted to say was “scattered all over the place”. 

Whatever is reflected or refracted from that scattering is still significant. In fact, it’s a blessing for Shukla’s readers, who may as well be wondering if their maverick author did adhere to what he professed in his 2021 novel A Silent Place: “Stop before you’ve finished saying all there is to say.”

The author is a Delhi-based queer writer and culture critic.