Estimated reading time: 7 minutes
Jnanpith, Sahitya Akademi, and Pen Nabokov awardee Vinod Kumar Shukla passed away on 23 December 2025, in Raipur, just days before he would have turned eighty-nine. He would have turned 89 on January 1st, 2026. He had been hospitalized for a few weeks prior, in Raipur, India, where he spent most of his life.
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 with his solitary pursuit of writing.
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. Traces of that early life in Rajnandgaon, its local theater, family life, the curiosity and gaze of a childlike wonder, shaped his way of thinking, as hinted at in his authentic yet surprising use of grammar and simple words to convey profound ideas, as few authors have done.
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 reflected his nature, of being satisfied and knowing that one good friend and/or mentor is enough. Commitment is a virtue, and there is only so much time and energy to do that honestly.
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. He believed that a writer can only ever write one real thing in life, and does so over and over again in different ways. His work, despite the many forms, has a remarkable consistency. It is honest to his lived experience, without being repetitive, capturing the uniqueness of each moment, with perceptive clarity and attention. In the spaces between lyrical words, he acknowledges silently, the paths not taken, the multiple latent possibilities that remain in memory or imagination, at each given moment.
He confessed to being a Gandhian, but his political stance was not overtly expressed. His protests and resistance were in quiet assertions of everyday choices to maintain a dignified way of life and all that he wrote about. 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 finding it or making my own meaning, thus making each reading feel slightly different. I return to his poems as meeting old friends. 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 deep compassion is evident in the recounting of his childhood memory of seeing his mother’s hands burning on the hot girdle as she made rotis. 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 is the central anchor in his writing. As an agriculture professor, he understood plants formally, but his relationship with nature is one of kinship and effortless belonging. 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 skilled and disciplined return to love, again and again, after all the inevitable conflicts that are part of the human experience. 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. His wife Sudha and his son Shaswat tend to his work with reverence, preserving scraps of paper he has written and doodled on while on a phone call, and discarded in the bin. During that visit, I gifted one of his books to the Chief Minister of Chhattisgarh, Vishnu Deo Sai. It feels fitting now to see Shukla’s final rites conducted with full state honors and the Chief Minister serving as a pallbearer.
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 under a few bare trees with evergreen redwoods behind them. I looked at the redwoods and thought that if Shukla were a tree, he would be a Redwood, rooted, standing tall, evergreen, quietly towering. 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.