The Literary Legacy Of Vinod Kumar Shukla, The 2025 Jnanpith Award Winner

"There is evil in the world because some things cannot be hidden; there is good in the world because some things are hidden."

— Vinod Kumar Shukla

On March 23, 2025, veteran Hindi poet and author Vinod Kumar Shukla was announced as this year's Jnanpith Award winner. Mr Shukla is the 59th winner of the Jnanpith Award, as well as the 12th Hindi author and the first author from Chhattisgarh to win the Award widely considered India's highest literary honour. According to a statement from the Bharatiya Jnanpith committee, the governing body of the Jnanpith Award, Shukla won the award for his “simplicity” and “sensitivity”. With this, he joins some of the greatest authors and poets ever produced by India, such as Tarasankar Bandyopadhyay, Firaq Gorakhpuri, Ashapoorna Devi, Amrita Pritam, and many others.

Over the years, the reclusive 88-year-old has cultivated a cult following in Hindi literary circles for his distinctive matter-of-fact magic-realist writing that cuts through the chaos and complexities of contemporary life. English translations of his works, 'Blue is Like Blue', a collection of short stories, and 'Treasurer of Piggy Banks', a collection of poems, recently published by HarperCollins India and Westland Books respectively, have also found critical and commercial success among younger readers.

The central concerns of Shukla's novels such as Naukar ki Kameez, which follows the life of a clerk forced to comply to India's rigid professional hierarchies, and Khilega Toh Dekhenge, about the idiosyncrasies of life in tribal India, are often quotidian in nature. Shukla's work is deeply rooted in the indigenous ways of life in Chhattisgarh, his home state, and informed by his keen observations about people and their ordinary lives and lived experiences. He was influenced by the Bengali literature his mother read aloud at home when he was a child and the social realist writings of Hindi poets and authors like Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh. However, unlike his predecessors, Shukla's literary concerns went beyond the social and political mores of Indian society. A consummate literary stylist, Shukla transformed the diction, or the stylised use of words and phases in modern Hindi literature and took the language itself to the level of art.

Though his novels are still largely untranslated, his poems have been widely translated into English and other Indian languages. He was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1999 and the PEN/Nabokov Award for achievement in international literature in 2023.

Chaar Phool Hain Aur Duniya Hai, a cinematic portrait of Vinod Kumar Shukla by Achal Mishra (Gamak Ghar, Dhuin), is currently streaming on MUBI.

Watch the film here.

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