One hundred years of writer Shrilal Shukla: Amitabha Bagchi on how Shukla’s ideas shaped his work

It’s been a while now, but there was a period, maybe two decades of my life, when I thought of Shrilal Shukla all the time. In the late ’90s, I was in my early twenties and had never read anything at novel length in Hindi. That was when, for reasons I don’t recall now, I picked up Raag Darbari. It was slow going, working through the Devanagari script, but within the first few pages, it became clear that I would have to finish this work even if it took me a year of reading one page a day.

The dry humour and coruscating one-liners were of such high quality that even someone like me, who hadn’t read much more than school texts in the language, could tell that they were not just demolishing the Hindi-film idealisation of village life, they were expanding the reach of Hindi itself. The book drew me in, and by the time Shukla passed away in late 2011, I had read my way through all his novels and many of his interviews and columns.

I wrote a tribute to him at the time, in which I wrote about some of his books that were closest to me. Now, on his birth centenary, I want to write not about his books, but about how his writing shaped my own writing, in the hope that I can communicate a simple idea: that writing springs from other writing, that literature is a conversation with generations gone by. As Muneer Niazi said,

tamaam ilm ziist ka guzishtgaan se mila
amal guzishta daur ka misaal mein mila mujhe

all I learned from life I learned from those who’ve passed away
the life of a bygone time lives in the ideals of today

Those who have read Shukla know that behind his humour, behind the idea that humour makes a difficult life liveable, lies an all-consuming anger at those who have betrayed the promise of a new India that the anti-colonial struggle espoused. The previous sentence might appear to imply that there was one single promise of upliftment for the poor, emancipation for the oppressed, etc, but such a claim cannot stand up to the scrutiny of history, and so perhaps we should clarify that Shrilal Shukla, born on the last day of 1925, would have been 16 when the Quit India Movement began, and 21 when Independence and Partition took place.

My father was five years younger than him and the things he said about the early years of the republic were not dissimilar to Shukla’s stringent criticism of the processes by which the powerful manipulated politics and the state to devise new forms of oppression to replace the old ones. They were both civil servants, hence well placed to observe the pas de deux of sanctimoniousness and corruption that have marked, and continue to mark, public life in India. Neither of them forgave the world for betraying the promise it had made them in their early years. Or at least this is how I read it.

Scrutiny of history

Later, when I read Amritlal Nagar – whom Shukla wrote about at length and greatly admired – and Phanishwar Nath Renu, both of whom were older than Shukla (Renu only by a few years), I realised that not everyone took the idealism of those early days as seriously as Shukla had. They recognised that the idealism of the few was being submerged by the opportunism of the many, even as the Union Jack was coming down the flagpole for the last time. And they were able to make terms with it. Shukla, in my reading of him, never did, and by the time I had read all his novels, I was beginning to feel that while his anger was justified, it was so strong, so undiluted, that it was burning away something essential, something human, within the writer himself.

But, of course, I had no way of knowing how he himself felt, so I am guessing it was just my own inability to accept a world completely bereft of hope that made me begin to talk back to Shrilal Shukla, not so much to contradict him as to point out a few things that I felt he had missed. This talking back took the form of a novel called The Householder, whose protagonist was Naresh Kumar, the kind of corrupt underling in a government office who would have felt the full wrath of Shukla’s pen. In The Householder, I tried to go into Naresh Kumar’s life, tried to see what worried him, what made him feel vulnerable. To find out how tenuous his control over the world was that he had sold his soul for. In brief, I wanted to point out to Shukla that people like Naresh were human too.

Around the time I was writing The Householder, the India Against Corruption movement erupted in Delhi. Today, the sanctimoniousness of that movement has been greatly exposed as a kind of power grab that helped inaugurate the second republic in 2014, but in those days, it sounded as if a decisive battle was being staged to win back independent India’s pure soul. People like Naresh Kumar were undoubtedly the enemy of Anna Hazare and his acolytes, and this naturally made me suspect that there was something fake in the whole Ramlila Maidan drama. Shrilal Shukla affirmed this view for me.

Around this time, I happened to read his Bishrampur ka Sant, where he uncovers the hypocrisy of the Bhoodan movement. It reassured me and it also told me that although Shukla and I might disagree on the basic question of the humanity of the low-level bureaucrat, we agreed on the fact that populist hellraising with a high moral tone was, at its best, likely to be manipulated by those looking to grab power and, at its worst, likely to be no more than a front for a power grab. While I waited for The Householder to be published, I daydreamed that I might find a way to contact Shukla and give him a copy to read. He died in October 2011. The Householder was published in April 2012.

A life of anger

Between October 2011 and April 2012, another significant event took place that was to push me to take my dialogue with Shrilal Shukla further: my father died. It isn’t relevant here to dwell on how the grieving process drove me to formulate a writing project centred around a pair of brothers whose relationship to each other would not mirror that of the brothers in the Ramayana (and even the Ramayana had at least two significant brother pairs whose relationships were different: Ram-Lakshman and Ram-Bharat), but would find echos and contrasts in them. But the Shukla connection here was that Shukla had taken me to Amritlal Nagar and Amritlal Nagar had taken me to Tulsidas (via his Manas ka Hans).

Daunted by the idea of being an English-speaking (and hence inauthentic) Indian and yet claiming authority on a text like Tulsi’s Ramcharitmanas, I stole an idea from Nagar’s Amrit aur Vish and came up with the character of Vishwanath, a Hindi novelist. The story of the brothers would be a story within a story, ostensibly written by this Vishwanath. I can’t remember now when and how it happened, but very early on in the game it became clear to me that Vishwanath would be a famous satirist who, late in life, is regretting the fact that all the books he has written have been fuelled by, and are full of, anger, who is feeling that something has been lost as a result of having lived his writing life in that way.

What is lost by living your life in anger? Even if it is a righteous and justified anger directed at the unworthy, the corrupt, the cruel. It’s hard to answer such a question in general, but in reaching the end of that book, Half the Night Is Gone, I found a few things that, even if they weren’t answers to that question, I would have liked to say to Shrilal Shukla.

Again, this is not really the place to go into exactly what I found out in the process of writing Half the Night Is Gone, but perhaps I can tell one story of what happened soon after that book was published. There was a book event, and one of the attendees was the journalist Radhika Bordia, who had met and interviewed Shrilal Shukla a couple of years before he died. He was very bitter at the end, she told me, full of anger. I remember where I was standing when she said this, and I remember blinking back my tears and thinking of those lines of Muneer Niazi that I had quoted in that book

kisi ko maut se pehle kisi gham se bachana ho
haqiqat aur thi kuchh usko ja kar ye batana ho
hamesha der kar deta hoon main

If I have to save someone from some sorrow before they die
to tell them that what they believed was actually a lie
I am never on time

The article was first published on Amitabha Bagchi’s Substack.