Srilal Shukl’s fiction offered a new understanding of Indian society, says Virendra Yadav in this obituary of the noted Hindi litterateur who died late month.
With the death of Srilal Shukl on October 28, the curtains have come down on a glorious era of Indian literature. Shukl is most famous for his novel Raag Darbaari, written in 1968, nearly two decades after Independence. Raag Darbaari’s publishing had led to a creative revolution in the then moribund Indian literary scene. Read and loved by millions both within the country and beyond, Raag Darbaari was the first book that bridged the gap between popular and classical literature. Depicting the devaluation of social as well as political values in north Indian society in the early seventies, Raag Darbaari was a critique of Nehruvian democracy.
Unlike R K Narayan’s Malgudi, Shivpalganj of Raag Darbaari was not an imaginary village — it was based on a sleepy hamlet called Mohanlalganj on the outskirts of Lucknow, where Shukl was born in 1925 and grew up. As Shukl himself would say, “You could say about Shivpalganj what is said about the Mahabharat, that you will find things here that you won’t find anywhere else, and what you won’t find in Shivpalganj, you won’t find anywhere else.” Shivpalganj was truly a laboratory of Indian democracy where election, panchayati raj, co-operatives, educational institutions and government schemes were present in their most homespun forms. Democracy itself was on trial here.
In this era immediately after Nehru, the Congress was loosing its monopoly in the political sphere, the centralised state system was breaking down, and in the moral sphere, a feeling of disregard and distrust for social and human values such as honesty, dutifulness and generosity was taking root. Raag Darbaari is an account of this era of despair and pessimism. It has become relevant again today, in the context of the current anti-corruption drive in the country.
Srilal Shukl was a naturally-gifted and morally-conscious writer, who forged his own literary idiom infused with humour and satire. Like other classic novels of the time such as Godan, Jhootha Sach and Maila Aanchal, Raag Darbaari offered a new understanding of Indian society.
The political and social degeneration of India, a central concern in Raag Darbaari, recur too in Shukl’s other works such as Vishrampur Ka Sant, Pehla Padao, Makaan and Sooni Ghaati Ka Suraj. How a traditional, feudal society such as India adapts to modernism and democracy, often with unwittingly hilarious results, was Shukl’s focus. As we try to understand our times and society through Western post-modernism today, Shukl had worked out a homespun understanding of the same issues four decades ago.
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A unique aspect of Shukl’s story-telling is the way he smoothly and simultaneously combined several opposites — the affluent and the poor, the civilised and the rustic, the cosmopolitan and the provincial. Raag Darbaari has always challenged literary critics, who see the novel’s high comedy as a problem, whereas for readers, it is its main attraction. Immersed in typically Awadhi eloquence and satire, Raag Darbaari transforms the entire world through comedy.
It is ironic that India’s highest literary honour, the Jnanpith Award, was given to him on his deathbed in hospital. Of course, there was no dearth of awards during his life — everything from the Padma Bhushan to the Sahitya Akademi award, and many more.
Virendra Yadav is a well-known literary critic and was a close associate of Srilal Shukl