Estimated reading time: 7 minutes
Jnanpith, Sahitya Akademi, and Pen Nabokov Vinod Kumar Shukla passed away on 23 December 2025, in Raipur, just days before he would have turned eighty-nine. The symmetry of that timing feels deliberate, as though he paused before the threshold of a new year, surveyed the world one last time, and quietly stepped away.
Writing had been his lifelong companion, as essential to him as breath itself. Even in the hospital, when the former Chief Minister of Chhattisgarh came to ensure he was being cared for, Shukla asked not for comfort or assurances, but for paper and pen. That single gesture tells you everything you need to know about him.
His career as a writer spanned more than fifty-five years, even though he was a professor at the Agriculture College. Literature was not how he earned his living; it was how he lived.
Recognition came steadily and eventually abundantly—the Sahitya Akademi Award, the Jnanpith, the PEN Nabokov Award—but none of these altered his way of being. When Prime Minister Narendra Modi called him in the hospital to enquire about his health, it felt less like a moment of national recognition and more like the world bending slightly toward a man who had always remained quietly within himself.
Batti maine pehle bujhai
Phir tumne bujhai
Phir dono ne mil kar bhujai
First I turned the light off
Then you turned it off
Finally we both together turned it off.
Vinod Kumar Shukl – 6th December 2025
Shukla was born and raised in Rajnandgaon, a town that never left his imagination. He lost his father when he was very young and grew up under the care of his mother and an extended family that shared a single roof. That early closeness—to people, to routines, to shared silences—never left him. Rajnandgaon did not merely appear in his work; it shaped his way of seeing. The local cinema theatre, ordinary lanes, small gestures of daily life—all became part of his inner archive.
A defining influence in those early years was the writer and thinker Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh, who recognized Shukla’s talent and helped bring his first work into print. It is telling that, across decades of writing, Shukla rarely spoke publicly about other contemporaries. Muktibodh remained the singular figure he acknowledged as a mentor. Perhaps that loyalty reflected his nature: once he recognized a truth, he did not feel the need to multiply it.
Unlike many writers who choose a single literary form and perfect it, Shukla moved freely across genres—poetry, novels, short stories, children’s literature, and essays. He once said, at the Jaipur Literature Festival, that he had never consulted a dictionary nor worried excessively about grammar. His concern was expression. He worked with the words he already knew, returning to them again and again, trusting repetition to reveal depth rather than dullness. He believed that a writer can only ever write one real thing in life, but must learn to approach it from many angles. His work bears that philosophy out. There is a remarkable consistency across his writing, not because it is repetitive, but because it is honest.
He described himself as a Gandhian, yet he did not directly engage with the political urgencies of his time. Critics often faulted him for this, arguing that literature must respond more overtly to social and political crises. Shukla never defended himself. He believed that defending one’s work was an act of ego. Instead, he kept writing—patiently, obsessively, obedient to his inner voice. The awards came not because he chased relevance, but because he stayed true to that voice.
What draws me most to his work is his fluency in silence. His words do not dominate; they create space. He embeds silence between lines, between images, until prose begins to breathe like poetry. As a reader, I am invited into those silences, asked not to consume meaning but to participate in it. Each reading feels slightly different because I arrive as a different person each time. His final poem, written in his own hand, was once described to him as sad. He gently disagreed, saying that we turn the light off only when it is no longer dark. That response captures his temperament perfectly—empathetic, quietly optimistic, attentive to reversals of perspective.
His compassion was not abstract. It lived in memory. He once wrote of his mother’s hands burning on the hot girdle as she made rotis during his childhood. There is no embellishment in that image, only attention. He resisted revising published work because he believed that once something is shared, it belongs to the reader. Ownership, like ego, was something he let go of easily.
Shukla wanted everyone to write. He urged people to write their own histories, believing this to be the most authentic form of resistance. His readers are loyal because his work offers belonging. It has traveled across languages through devoted translators, and across media through filmmakers like Mani Kaul and Manav Kaul. Yet, despite this reach, he remained deeply local. He lived his entire life within a few kilometers of his home. That hyper-locality sharpened his gaze. By observing one place deeply, he revealed truths that resonate everywhere.
Nature was not a backdrop in his writing; it was kin. As an agriculture professor, he understood plants formally, but his poems reveal a more intimate knowledge. Humans, for him, were not separate from rivers, trees, birds, or mountains. They were part of the same breathing world. He passed this sensibility to his son during long walks, naming plants, paying attention. In a documentary, he once said that he saw all the women of the world in his wife, before reciting a poem about how they could still address each other as ladka and ladki. It was not sentimentality, but a disciplined return to love, again and again, after conflict. Spiritual teachers advise us to live in the present. Shukla did so naturally, with the steadiness of a monk walking the householder’s path.
I met him last year at his home, along with his wife and son. They tend to his work with reverence, even preserving scraps of paper he has discarded. The visit moved me deeply, and arrangements were made for me to return. During that time, I was able to pass one of his books to the Chief Minister of Chhattisgarh, Vishnu Deo. It feels fitting now to see that he was among the pallbearers when Shukla’s final rites were conducted with full state honors.
I woke up in California on the morning of 23 December to the news of his passing. At first, I refused to believe it. I told myself that it was not yet five o’clock here; he was still alive in my time. Where might he be, then? In nature, of course. I went for a walk under a grey, grieving sky. Leaves in yellow, gold, and maroon lay fallen, trees standing bare. I looked at the redwoods and thought that if Shukla were a tree, he would be one of them—evergreen, rooted, towering quietly. The fallen leaves felt like confetti, celebrating a life fully lived.
In an increasingly polarized world, his writing feels urgently necessary. It is free of performance, free of cleverness. Instead, it offers recognition. His children’s stories include friendly ghosts, disarming fear at the outset. Perhaps because we all carry our own silent ghosts—stories waiting to be told. Vinod Kumar Shukla’s life and work invite us to notice our own lives more carefully, to trust ordinary words, and to write our truth as simply, and as honestly, as we can.