Review of Vinod Kumar Shukla’s ‘Treasurer of Piggy Banks’, translated by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra

A new anthology presents the eminent poet’s whimsical writings that leave the reader both bemused and baffled

The poet and novelist Vinod Kumar Shukla may well be called the sphinx of contemporary Hindi literature. Taciturn by temperament, soft and impassive in demeanour, inscrutable in intent and often obscure in meaning, he remains a riddle for many of his readers. Both as poet and novelist, he is highly admired by a band of fervent devotees, keeps winning prizes and awards, and leaves many of his readers bemused and mildly baffled. 

This substantial anthology of Shukla’s poems, translated into English by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, will give readers in English a fuller sample of Shukla’s writings, supplementing a collection of his short stories titled Blue is like Blue (2019), which Mehrotra had previously co-translated with Sara Rai. Earlier, Satti Khanna had translated into English a novel of his, A Window Lived in the Wall, and Mani Kaul had made a film on another novel, Naukar ki Kameez (The Servant’s Shirt). A film by Achal Mishra is forthcoming on Shukla and his world. 

The present volume contains Mehrotra’s translations of about 75 poems selected from Shukla’s poetry collections published between 1971 and 2013, and also some “new and uncollected” poems. (These have since been collected in Shukla’s latest volume just out this year.)

Hidden meanings

Obscurity in literature became a virtue, and in some circles even a desideratum, about a hundred years ago with the publication of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and James Joyce’s Ulysses (both in 1922). Both these authors were found to be difficult to understand mostly for the density of multi-lingual classical allusions in them, their recondite vocabulary, and their non-sequential fragmentariness. 

But Shukla’s obscurity is quite home-grown, as befits someone who taught in a mofussil agricultural college for most of his working life. It derives from sudden turns of thought and phrasing which shoot forth surreally now and then from the even surface of his unadorned and unallusive style. It also derives from his indirections and ellipses, so that his meaning sometimes remains buried in the rich loam of his poetic imagination.

This was illustrated to stunning effect the very first time I met Shukla. This was in January 1990 at a fortnight-long translation workshop held at the Sahitya Akademi in Delhi in which 10 Hindi poets and 10 translators participated. The procedure adopted was for a poet to read out one of his poems and then for all of us together to discuss it into translation. After Shukla read out his first poem, there was not so much a hush as a long and embarrassed silence. 

The most eminent poet present, Raghuvir Sahay, then broke the ice by saying amiably enough, “Vinod ji, so that’s your poem, fine. But now, would you please tell us in the language of daily discourse what it’s about?” In that short poem, a girl looks out of the window, whether at green trees or at tall buildings or even at a sparrow, but all she sees is the sky. Shukla did not look up, paused for a while, and then said with a diffident half-smile, “But this is a love poem.” We all burst out laughing, as if to say, “Yes, of course — if you say so!” 

High modernism

Shukla’s signature as a poet is not obliquity but oddity. He has a fanciful, almost whimsical, way of rendering a familiar act or event enigmatic. To cite some lines by which he is best known (as translated in this volume): That man put on a new warm coat and went away like a thought; Everything to be done will remain to be done; After then comes now; I’ll save my death for as long as I live. As Mehrotra says in his adulatory Introduction in which he compares him to Gertrude Stein: “Reading Shukla can be disorienting, even vertiginous.” 

The biggest wonder perhaps is that such haunting verbal magic is grounded in the meek lives of subaltern human beings, including urbanising adivasis, and amidst the low hills, trees and birds of Chhattisgarh. Shukla truly brings high modernism home.

The reviewer taught English at Delhi University.

Treasurer of Piggy Banks

Vinod Kumar Shukla, trs Arvind Krishna Mehrotra

Westland

₹399

Published - November 01, 2024 09:30 am IST