New Delhi: Well-known Hindi writer and poet Vinod Kumar Shukla, renowned for his easy use of language and ability to present everyday topics in an accessible manner, will soon be the subject of a film about his experiences and life.
At the launch event of two books, Treasurer of Piggy Banks and Against Storytelling at India Habitat Centre, photographer and filmmaker Achal Mishra discussed the upcoming film he has made on Shukla. Without revealing much, he said, “The things Vinod Kumar Shukla mentions in his poems and stories—trees, flowers, huts, jungles, birds, empty chairs—are all visible around him. This illustrates how he imbues even the simplest things with a special significance.”
To capture the everyday life of Shukla, how he writes, where he writes, Mishra spent some days at the writer’s house to follow his routine.
As soon as Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, who has translated Shukla’s Hindi poems into English, began reading some of the passages at IHC, everyone holding the brightly coloured mustard-yellow and purple books immediately started searching for the page numbers.
“While translating, I ensure that the English translation captures the same emotional impact and essence as the original Hindi version,” Mehrotra said.
Against Storytelling is a collection of essays that explore the meaning and significance of telling stories. Edited by Amit Chaudhuri, the essays, originally presented as lectures at a literary activism seminar, reconsider assumptions that lie at the core of understanding of storytelling and storytellers.
Chaudhuri criticises traditional storytelling’s emphasis on plot and dramatic structure. Instead, he values literature that captures the essence of ordinary experiences, which he believes is often overlooked in mainstream narratives. “Storytelling often overlooks the non-event or dis-event, which includes ordinary and unheroic moments of everyday life. The focus should be on what is ordinary, what is common, what is unheroic,” he added.
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Focus on the ordinary
The two books are not correlated in any way, but they have one thing in common — the art of storytelling. It makes one visualise Shukla’s words, which seem to speak directly to the reader.
Shukla’s poetry exemplifies his approach of focusing on the mundane and everyday aspects of life rather than dramatic narratives. He writes about regular conversations between a couple talking about locking the doors or closing the windows while going out.
Before the event concluded, Mehrotra read out another poem of Shukla, which had no title and was among his uncollected poems. It spoke about a lonely old couple in a small house.
Emphasising the simplicity of the poet’s work, Mehrotra added: “Shukla writes himself in his work, and Shukla can be found in every man.”
(Edited by Humra Laeeq)