Chhattisgarh blues

Discovering something new and unique in short fiction that was written half a century ago is like travelling back in time without having to depart from the present. Most of Vinod Kumar Shukla’s stories first appeared in Hindi during the 1960s and early 1970s.  Twelve freshly minted English translations have just been published in a compact anthology intriguingly titled, Blue is Like Blue. 

Colours are a critical part of Shukla’s literary vision. In several stories he has unnamed characters dressed in blue shirts. One of them appears and reappears carrying a bowl of curd. In a later tale, the author describes another’s clothes: “The shirt the man in blue was wearing was made from a piece of sky.” Sentences like this are simple and precise while suggesting surreal mysteries and illusions. It is the kind of imagery that allows us to glimpse the world through someone else’s eyes.

George Orwell has written that, “good prose is like a window pane,” by which he means a writer must, “constantly struggle to efface one’s own personality” from the page so that his or her language acquires a lucid clarity. Shukla achieves this through the effortless agility of his words and a self-detached perspective. At the same time, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra and Sara Rai have double-glazed the windowpane with their equally transparent translations.

Subtle humour punctuates these stories, as well as a keen awareness of the absurd. Two boys conspire to release a fish they are carrying home for their father’s dinner. A young man keeps returning to his apartment, worried that he forgot to lock the front door. After washing and drying his shirt, one character folds it neatly and places it under his pillow so that as he sleeps at night the weight of his head irons out the creases. A group of poets gathers by the roadside debating the symbolism of a bald truck tyre.

Blue is Like Blue by Vinod Kumar Shukla

Being a poet himself, as well as a novelist, Vinod Kumar Shukla has cultivated an acute sense of place based on his own experiences. He has lived his entire life in Chhattisgarh, which was, at the time of his birth in 1937, an eastern portion of the Central Provinces, later Madhya Pradesh. Subtle shifts in names as well as geography are part of the irony that fuels his fiction. Born in the town of Rajnandgaon, Shukla then settled 70 kilometres away in Raipur where he was educated.  His semi-autobiographical story, “The Old Veranda”, merges these two locations with compelling ambiguity as he describes an insular, provincial way of life. The two joint family homes, where he grew up and where he now lives, blur together into a single architectural metaphor with birthing rooms and common verandas both old and new. Though the events in his stories — mostly ordinary happenings in anonymous neighbourhoods — could be taking place today, Shukla narrates these incidents with an unmistakably 20th-century voice. At times, the tone is similar to his contemporary Nayi Kahani authors like Nirmal Verma or Mohan Rakesh but he articulates his own distinctly eccentric observations, cadences and inflections.  In 1999, Shukla received the Sahitya Akademi award for his novel, Deewar Mein Ek Khidki Rehti Thi (There Was Once a Window in the Wall — a title Orwell would have applauded).

According to the informative introduction written by his translators, Shukla developed his creative oeuvre without reference to Western or Global literature, though he catches some of the same light and casts similar shadows as writers like Kafka, Camus or Calvino. Reading his work, it is easy to imagine waiting for Godot at the edge of Gudakhu Line in Rajnandgaon or experiencing the unbearable lightness of being while bicycling through the back streets of Raipur, where a dry leaf falls felicitously into the narrator’s shirt pocket. While many of the elements in these stories arise out of mundane situations and day-to-day anxieties, they are anything but boring. As the introduction makes clear: “Strange things happen in Shukla’s fiction: a heron enters a college classroom and turns back when it sees there’s a lecture going on; a father’s dentures become his sons’ inheritance, the upper one going to the older son and the lower one to the younger…” 

In our current, so-called “post-modern” era, it is refreshing to come upon a clutch of stories that are unabashedly “modern” yet also timeless and universal. Compared to the days when Shukla began his career, writing in India is now a booming media-driven machine with many authors becoming celebrities, and celebrities becoming authors, despite the dubious quality of their work.  As competing publishers race to launch the next bestseller, it is gratifying for readers of English to be introduced to a writer like Vinod Kumar Shukla who has honed his words over the past 50 years in relative obscurity, without excessive fandom or fanfare, yet in a true and transparent manner, much like a polished windowpane.

Stephen Alter’s new book Wild Himalaya: A Natural History of the Greatest Mountain Range on Earth will be published this summer