Vinod Kumar Shukla’s ‘Treasurer of Piggy Banks’ is an archive of smallness

There is a world inside the parentheses. There is a small town where the universe lives. This place, a poetic somewhere, is our beloved Hindi writer Vinod Kumar Shukla’s address. When Shukla is writing a poem called ‘Writing A Poem’, a stranger knocks on his door and tells Shukla the address to Shukla’s house. Most of his poems are set in his home, or somewhere nearby, in the city, where nothing is happening, and yet a repeated strangeness arrives. It is an unheroic world made up of little things and their distinct effects — the interruption of a knock, the uses of a nail hammered into the wall, the weary beauty of clothes worn again, the loneliness of a tree, or Shukla’s desire to hide in a grocery bag.

‘Treasurer of Piggy Banks’, a collection of his poems translated by AK Mehrotra, is an archive of such smallness. Selected from seven of his books spanning 1971 to 2013 and some later poems, it records Shukla’s work expansively, with poems ranging from political mishaps to lazy, old love. It is part of the Literary Activism series, edited by Amit Chaudhuri, who is invested in bringing creativity and the literary back to the spotlight, at a time when discussions on books are turning to academic jargon or commercial success.

The sense of scale in Shukla’s poems is tiny, yet so strong that its presence lingers on. He is building a place that’s ‘the middle of nowhere’ and also ‘somewhere’, as pointed out by Mehrotra in the preface. These imaginaries of place grow and move with each poem, making up small town(s), and the feeling that the insignificant is the universal.

Shukla wrote ‘After Chhattisgarh Became a State’ in March 2001. It reads: ‘We go to Bhopal,/ we don’t go to a state./ And what will I do going to a state?/ And when I return to Raipur,/ I’ll return to Raipur’. A ‘state’ is a bureaucratic unit, an entity containing cities. On the other hand, cities invoke place. Smallness in his poems inverts how small regions can be imagined as places where everything happens. Later in this poem, the universe that lives inside his person is made up of a few cities.

This singularity of the small is invoked again in ‘When Everyone Thinks I’m Dead’: ‘Living with little,/ having seen little,/ friends with few people,/ in a little time is all time’. He has seen ‘little’ in life, but that does not translate to being incomplete, unseen, or dead. In fact, that is the only way life can be lived: ‘in a little time is all time’. Mehrotra’s translation of the next line is interesting: ‘there is nothing of me except what is here’. It can be surmised that the English ‘here’ in ‘there is nothing of me except what is here’ is translated from the Hindi ‘pados’, which means the neighbourhood.

At the recent book launch, Mehrotra was asked, ‘What do you translate when you are translating a poem?’ He said he translates the weight of the poem, that thing which determines how heavy or light a sentence/stanza feels. This movement from ‘pados’ to ‘here’ marks how the sense of location, so acute in Shukla’s work, has to be sharpened in English, where the same sense of immediacy isn’t invoked by neighbour(hood). With the Hindi poems and their translations printed side by side, reading both heightens and caresses these differences.

While Shukla’s focus stays on the small, it is directed at people, places, and things around. ‘Pados’ is his most frequent imagination of place and being. In ‘I Can’t Go Out Today’, he can never feel imprisoned in the mundanity of every day because of what lies around him: ‘Like a bird that flies to a nearby tree,/ I step out into the neighbourhood,/ then into the neighbourhood’s neighbourhood/ and soon, tasting freedom,/ I’m flying with the birds in the sky/ singing with them’.

In the translations, we meet a mix of people — Shukla is himself, and not himself in beautiful ways. As Mehrotra cheekily remarks in the acknowledgments, ‘Translation is about getting the original wrong’. Mehrotra takes the blame for the errors. However, in the spirit of Shukla’s literary wrongs, a translator’s error might be the very thing that turns one poem into another, across language. After translation, Shukla’s poetic punch remains.

This is a biography of smallness that stretches even the tautology, writing the everyday again, and again, until we are small enough to see the universe. We are, after all, always somewhere.

— The writer, a translator and poet, teaches at Ashoka University