The Miniaturist Of Everyday Life

Poet and prose stylist Vinod Shukla, who recently won the Jnanpith Award, is a writer of life as he has lived and found it both in his home and family, and next door. His Hindi novels like Naukar Ki Kameez and Deewar Me Ek Khirki Rahati Thi, and his unique poetic syntax, has brought a new dimension to Hindi literature

- ASHOK VAJPEYI

IDELY regarded as a major Hindi writer, Vinod Kumar Shukla gets the Jnanpith Award at the age of 88. His early poems, which made him appear as an 'odd' poet, were written in the late 1950s and the early '60s, and it has been a writerly career running into nearly 65 years.

All along, his locus has been everyday life, and his focus, the utterly ordinary. His creative imagination very early decided to be entirely concerned with the ordinary without any trapping of myth or history. In him, in a way the century-long creative efforts in Hindi to put the ordinary man, the everyday life at the centre of literary imagination, gets a powerful articulation. It is amazing that for decades he has been exploring the dilemmas, the ironies, the charm, the dignity, the despair, and the disappointments of the ordinary with deep empathy, unusual understanding and audacious assertion.

He has been, to borrow the title of the book of translation of his poems into English by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, Treasurer of Piggy Banks. And yet, his universe of everyday life is not dull or boring: on the contrary, it is a universe which reveals the irrepressible humanity, its humorous aspects, warmth, and irony.