Vinod Kumar Shukla obit: A writer who illuminated ordinariness of the ordinary

Shukla, until the last decades of his life, lived with that kind of oblivion. Though he won the Sahitya Akademi Award for his novel Deewar Mein Ek Khidki Rehti Thi in 1999, and a film by director Mani Kaul was made the same year on another of his well-known works, Naukar Ki Kameez, even that was not enough for his discovery by new readers. Perhaps the major reason was Shukla’s reluctance towards any kind of celebrity status. He spent a major part of his life in his residence in Raipur (Chhattisgarh). He was barely familiar with world literature.

Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, in an essay for a literary symposium organised by writer Amit Chaudhuri titled ‘I Don’t Have Wings’, writes: “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, 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. And this, despite the fact that his own books have been translated into French, Italian, and English. ”

A writer who wrote ‘lightness’

Shukla created and lived in his own world. That made him a storyteller who challenged conventional storytelling, who made his own genre: one that carried a kind of magical realism rooted in the ordinariness of the ordinary. Shukla was born in 1937 in Rajnandgaon of Chhattisgarh. After completing his master’s degree in agriculture, he joined the Agriculture College in Raipur as a lecturer. Shukla was inspired by the celebrated poet Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh. In a letter, now widely circulated online, he wrote to Muktibodh, enclosing Rs 50 from his Rs 275 monthly salary and requesting him to accept it in 1964. In this exchange, Shukla requests Muktibodh to not get upset, not even a bit. The gesture speaks of Shukla’s reverence for his inspiration.

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Actor and writer Manav Kaul, who is relatively known, discovered him and brought him into the world of pop culture around 2021. In March 2022, a video of Shukla went viral in which he accused trade publishers of hiding Hindi book sales figures and paying him a pittance. That was the moment when proponents of “new Hindi” accepted him as a celebrated writer, at times even to the extent of romanticising him.

The irony is hard to miss, because Shukla is not an easy writer to read. He is boring. His prose possesses the boredom of an afternoon and the lyrical poetry of the ordinary; qualities that require readers who derive pleasure from reading itself. The act of reading, with Shukla, takes on another dimension. He was a writer who, throughout his life, wrote what Mehrotra, riffing on Italo Calvino, calls “lightness”: a way of removing the heaviness of language and narrative to speak of the ordinary.

In stories like ‘The Burden,’ which is about the fleeting anxiety of a man about an unlocked room that becomes the centre of an entire story, and captures universal human experience that usually goes unnoticed, Shukla shows why he was the most important writer of our time.

His writing: A long retreat

Shukla’s approach to his characters is marked by empathy, not ideological sympathy. There is a difference. Ideological sympathy often produces a sense of otherisation and is easy to consume, easy to applaud. Poetic empathy, on the other hand, asks the reader to come closer, to engage with what the author has written, and to ask why ordinary experiences, long left unsaid in storytelling, matter. Because they are, in the end, not very different from our own.

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In the last three years of his life, Shukla became one of the biggest literary celebrities in India. He won the PEN Nabokov Award in 2023. In 2025, a Hindi publisher, HindYugm, paid him a royalty of Rs 30 lakh, a huge amount for a Hindi author. This event became one of the most discussed issues of this year in Hindi literary circles. This year, Shukla also won the Jnanpith Award, India’s highest literary honour.

A documentary film, Char Phool Aur Hain Duniya Mein, directed by Achal Mishra, was also made on Shukla early this year. The film, in a real sense, brought his ordinariness closer to readers, allowing them to see and hear him speak. Reels cut from the documentary amassed a following for Shukla; it connected with the beauty and magic of the ordinary, and lyrical prose that he wrote and spoke in.

Least discussed in conversations about Shukla’s craft is his children’s literature. With remarkable ease, he creates worlds that blur the boundaries between prose and poetry through magical realism. His children’s novel Hari Ghaas Ki Chhappar Wali Jhopadi Aur Bauna Pahad does exactly that. The child, Bolu, who can fly, lives a life that forms a beautiful relationship with the nature around him. Shukla wrote this novel in a very exciting way unlike his other stories.

Shukla’s demise at the age of 88 (he would turn 89 on January 1) is a big loss to Hindi literature. Still, what brings some consolation to his readers is that he received his due before the end: the royalty battle he had long fought, and the celebrity status he garnered in the final years of his life. These moments have left behind a sense of excitement for new readers who will continue to discover him. In a world driven by the pursuit of constant dopamine highs, Shukla’s work feels like a long retreat; slow, quiet, and attentive to life. Shukla is a writer who will be celebrated and loved.