Extraordinary in the ordinary: Tribute to Vinod Kumar Shukla

A great writer like Vinod Kumar Shukla performs a rare double movement. While leading the readers into unfamiliar and newly imagined spaces, he also draws them closer to their own inner life. This inward and outward motion gives literature its peculiar intimacy. It is felt most strongly during one’s formative years when reading becomes a mode of self-recognition as much as discovery. For me, this experience was inseparable from reading him.

What distinguishes Vinodji’s (as we called him) work is its abundance of small epiphanies. These moments arrive gently and alter one’s perception almost without effort. Through them, the reader is brought closer to the essence of living itself. His writing deepens one’s sense of the mystery of life without pretending to resolve it. To sustain such openness and to resist explanation while remaining lucid is a demanding achievement. He accomplishes it with equal grace in poetry and prose.

His writing carries a pristine visual clarity, a rhythm of attention and a patient gaze that feels inherently cinematic. These scattered memories and reflections return to me now as a single coherent impression of a writer who enlarges the reader’s world, while simultaneously allowing them to find their place within it.

One of Vinodji’s other most significant achievements lies in his ability to reveal the extraordinary within the ordinary, while maintaining a careful distance from the pathology of both self and society. He does not psychologise excessively, nor does he burden his work with moral judgment. The world appears as it is, observed with care and restraint. In his life and writing, there is a rare balance between involvement and detachment that is a way of being present without possession.

This quality runs through his work as a rigorous discipline. Its formal restraint aligns with the cinema of Robert Bresson and I believe this was the real attraction for many filmmakers at the Film and Television Institute of India, Pune. I have a hunch that Mani Kaul, a great admirer of Bresson, was drawn to Vinodji’s work for the same reason because it allowed tenderness without sentimentality and insight without intrusion.

In reading him, one learns how to see the world anew, with attention, and at the same time how to stand back from it with dignity. This creates the conditions for a rare form of compassion, one that slowly dissolves the hard boundaries between self and other, friend and adversary.

Another distinctive aspect of his writing is its subtle sense of humour, a slightly oblique wit. Consider the opening line of his short story ‘Aadmi Ki Aurat’:

Bageeche tak main Jayanath ke saath aise chala tha, jaise Jayanath ke saath nahin chal raha tha

(I walked with Jayanath up to the garden in such a way that it felt as if I was not walking with Jayanath at all.)

Two opposing ideas sit together in this single sentence: companionship and distance, presence and absence. This kind of tension recurs across his writing. In Indian aesthetical thought, such an oblique mode of expression is valued as vakrokti, a figure of speech in which what is directly stated points toward something that remains unseen. Here, meaning arises from suggestion rather than assertion.

The poet or writer introduces a slight strangeness, a turn in expression, through which a deeper perception becomes possible. This turn, the vakra, is held in high regard. At times, Vinodji repeats a sentence with a small variation yet each repetition carries a fresh inflection. The effect is a sukshma anubhuti, a finely shaded experience rather than a dramatic shift. Perhaps most striking is his ability to create an aesthetic of absence (abhav) both materially and philosophically.

Through his expression, he makes space for what remains unexpressed, allowing two opposite emotions to arise simultaneously. At the same time, he writes from within a middle class or lower middle class world and is deeply attentive to what is available, modest, and ordinary. Within this economy of means he finds beauty without denying the karuna, the inevitable pathos inseparable from being alive. There is this frequent accusation that he did not read other writers or that he showed little interest in the fashionable currents of world literature. This puzzled and sometimes amused his colleagues, and I found this puzzlement revealing.

I think one of the least noted aspects of any discussion of Vinod Kumar Shukla is his mother’s influence on him and her role in shaping his writing.

He once took a poem to his mother and admitted that it contained a few lines from an older poem by Bhavani Prasad Mishra, absorbed unconsciously. His mother replied that just as she kept separate chhanniyan (sieves) in her kitchen for different purposes, he too should keep a mann ki chhannani (an inner sieve of the mind) so that no other writer’s lines or ideas entered his work unawares.

This discipline, which he followed throughout his life, was a way of protecting attention and it is this practice that gave his writing its uniqueness.

Long before he entered wider public recognition, Vinodji was already a revered presence at FTII. His stature there, of course, owed much to our teacher Mani Kaul, whose two films based on his writing, ‘Naukar Ki Kameez’ and the short film ‘Bhoj’, revealed how naturally Vinodji’s prose lends itself to cinema.

Mani Sahab later showed me his script based on ‘Deewar Mein Ek Khidki Rehti Thi’ (he sadly could not realise it because of his untimely demise). In my conversations with Vinodji, I could sense the affection and respect he had for Mani Sahab and how deeply disheartened he was that the film could never be made.

In 2009, I was invited by the acting batch at FTII to conduct a workshop film. During the preparatory phase, we read a wide range of stories together. From these, we chose two by Vinodji: ‘Aadmi Ki Aurat’ and ‘Ped Par Kamra’. After the film was completed, I had the good fortune to speak with him several times on the phone. What I noticed was that his own voice was strikingly close to the voice of his writing: gentle, attentive, a bit distant but deeply compassionate.

— The writer is an acclaimed filmmaker