Shrilal Shukla used humour as a scythe to cut through India's pastoral complexities. At a time when most authors approached rural life either from the standpoint of its exaggerated bucolic charms or hardscrabble poverty, Shukla chose to view it through humour, irony and satire. Having been born in a village himself-Atrauli in Uttar Pradesh-with a writer's acuity it was perhaps natural for him.
In creating his masterful novel 'Raag Darbari' Shukla took care to see that while it had the biting sharpness of a black comedy it was not an assortment of "comedians" mouthing well-orchestrated lines. It is one of those rare works of literature about rural India that approaches the subject matter completely devoid of condescension. While he wrote over 20 novels and other collections, Raag Darbari has become emblematic of his distinguished career.
By the time of his death in October 2011 at age 85, Shukla had become one of the grandees of not just Hindi literature but Indian literature because of Raag Darbari's crossover success due in large measure to its excellent English translation by Gillian Wright.
For Yoshita Singh, a student of literature in Lucknow, not too far from Shukla's native Atrauli, it seemed like a logical choice to write her dissertation on him and Raag Darbari. In this slim but valuable volume Yoshita, now a fellow journalist in the thick of reporting global politics at the United Nations in New York for India's Press Trust of India (PTI), brings a remarkably insightful look at the literary masterpiece and what it took Shukla to create it.
What lends the book particular weight is that Yoshita got to conduct one of the author's last comprehensive interviews, giving her a rare glimpse of the craft of a great litterateur. Shukla's one reply to Yoshita about his craft sets up for the reader about how a great writer's mind works. "It's very difficult for me to say anything about the craft for the simple reason that the craft by itself is not an independent entity. Craft is always related to the subject matter and the sensibility that a particular writing is going to represent. So it is so much intertwined with the subject matter itself, the way you want a certain thing to be communicated to your reader, that the craft, I think, evolves automatically," he told Yoshita.
This book is substantive contribution towards understanding great minds of Indian literature who shaped the country's cultural landscape with subtlety and nuance. For a lesser writer the sobriquet of him being "an inheritor" of the great writer Premchand might have been tempting label to accept but not Shrilal Shukla. "There is no question of my being an inheritor of Premchand's tradition because when I wrote or even today when I write fiction, which is not necessarily about village life or whenever I write anything concerning village life in the form of fiction, Premchand is never my role model," he told Yoshita.
Shrilal Shukla is a giant among Indian writers whose grasp of the essence of rural India was natural and yet legendary. In offering this book Yoshita fills an important gap in literary scholarship.
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