Writer who wrote of the sublime in the ordinary

In the death of Vinod Kumar Shukla, the world of literature has lost an unusual writer.

- Ashok Vajpeyi

Vinod was a major poet and a major novelist in Hindi. The centre of his writing was the non-heroic life of ordinary human beings, the everydayness of it. He never took the path of mythology or history. A writer of the simple and stubborn present, with almost no echoes of the past, his was an imagination that pushed the real until it verged on becoming surreal. His poetry had elements of narrativity, his fiction had resonances of the poetic. He did all this and more, spending his life and career largely in Raipur, Chhattisgarh, almost on the margins of the Hindi belt.

In his daily dealings, Vinod was a person of few words. In the company of the like-minded, he spoke very little. He kept away from literary controversies and ideological battles of the Hindi world. He refused to define or assert his commitment to any ideology. His life and creative effort were almost exclusively committed to life and literature. He taught for a living at a government agriculture college and led the life of a literary recluse.

Vinod’s emergence as a Hindi poet in the late 1960s was marked by a poetic language and perception that was unconventional; indeed, he freely deviated from the conventional syntax of language. In the dominant ethos of confident certainties of ideology and belief, Vinod came with alluring uncertainty, no visible belief. By distorting grammar, he forged a new syntax of imagination; an imagination that was rooted in the mundane realities of the small town, neither rural nor cosmopolitan.