His Hollow Men

Shrilal Shukla passed away last week. But his books bear witness to man’s fundamental yearning for a moral life

The history of literature is an unfolding scroll on which the names of those who have spoken the truth are written in gold. On 28 October 2011, one more name was added to this scroll. Shrilal Shukla passed away, leaving behind, as our collective inheritance, a body of work that cuts a tunnel into the mound of falsehoods and corruption on which the nationhood of independent India is built, and excavates the hollowness that lies within.

Shukla’s writing circles around one basic question: is moral action possible in a deeply corrupt world? The frustration engendered by this question transmutes into coruscating anger, an anger that enters Shukla’s skilful pen and pours out onto the page as a torrent of some of the funniest prose that Hindi, or any other language, has ever seen. But it is tragic that Shukla is best known for his satire, because in his oeuvre, he has managed to conquer the hopelessness that satire expresses, and discover that larger world of moral possibility whose existence can only be known to those whose spiritual or artistic endurance is equal to the task.

The journey begins in Sooni Ghati ka Sooraj (first published in 1957), a story of predestined failure. Its protagonist is heroic, prodigiously talented, very determined and scrupulously honest—the kind of young man Vivekanand would have approved of. He is, in that sense, Shukla’s weakest character. His eventual destiny is poignant and its poignance is an attack on a system that destroys people like him. There isn’t much more to it than that.

But the early work needs to be written so that it can be surpassed. And surpass it Shukla eventually did, in Makaan (1976)—after writing Raag Darbari, another novel with an innocent protagonist overwhelmed by the rottenness of society, which is nonetheless an immortal work of literature. Makaan is the story of a craven clerk, Narayan Banerji, who also happens to be an immensely talented sitar player. Like most of Shukla’s best conceived male characters, Banerji’s masculinity is a circumscribed one. He lusts after his female students, who worship his musicianship while simultaneously emasculating him by ridiculing his half-baked attempts at seduction. Made miserable by his unsuccessful attempts to secure a house for his family and confused by an adulterous affair he has somehow managed to start with a new student, Banerji seeks solace in his art. Here we find some of the most evocative writings on music that literature has ever seen. Shukla has performed a truly astounding feat in the writing of Makaan: he has changed the course of the emotional stream that feeds music; he has made it flow through written prose. The consequence of this feat is that, without being told, the reader realises that Banerji’s connection to the sacred art he practises is what redeems him, what implicitly makes him a moral being despite his worldly failings. In the scheme of this book, art is the only possible locus of morality, and while this affirms the existence of the moral, it puts it out of the reach of most people, even that of the clerk Narayan Banerji when he is without his sitar.

The fear of another defeatist narrative looms when we begin to read Pehla Padav (1987), one of Shukla’s own favourites, a novel he planned as the first part of a never-completed diptych that would give utterance to the sympathy he had for some of India’s most wretched—migrant Bilaspuri construction labour. The protagonist, Santosh Kumar aka Satte, a layabout law student, has taken a job as an overseer on the construction site of a new house being built by an important person from his village. Satte spends his time on the site idly lusting after Jasoda, an uncommonly beautiful construction worker. When Jasoda’s husband gets killed, Satte finds himself trying, in his own worldly and cunning way, to discover who has killed him and why. We begin to realise it is his earlier lasciviousness that has now, by some strange but heartening alchemy, turned into sympathy for these downtrodden people who he has been involved in exploiting. The mystery remains unsolved, but Satte’s conscience emerges, and with it emerges a new sense of hope in Shukla’s work. Shukla has said in an interview that Satte was one of those characters who took on a life of his own, who refused to be confined within the initial conception of him. I like to think that perhaps Satte confounded his creator by refusing to accept that a moral life was impossible.

The appearance of Kunwar Jayanti Prasad, a truly loathsome protagonist in Bishrampur ka Sant (2000), is an even steeper jump for the author’s sensibility. We meet him for the first time when he is 80, coming to the end of a long career in public service built on opportunism. Failure to get a coveted ambassadorship coupled with the death of Sundari, a woman he had lusted after some decades ago, takes him back to his village, where he begins to work with the remnants of the Bhoodan movement. It is fitting to mention here that on 23 May 1952, that well-intentioned but poorly conceived movement led by a saintly figure who drew his aura from Mahatma Gandhi took a significant turn when a ‘whole village’ was donated to it. This village, Mangroth in Hamirpur district, came under the jurisdiction of a sub-divisional magistrate called Shrilal Shukla who happened to be present when the charismatic Vinoba Bhave swept into the village and declared its land donated. I can see the young author melding into the background with other junior government officials, the dramatis personae of the event not imagining that almost 50 years later, he would write a weighty novel that would unravel the self-righteousness of all those movements that attempt to usurp the moral high ground with half-baked populism. But even more important than the attack on the Bhoodan movement is the development of conscience in the easily demonised Prasad. Here Shukla makes an empathetic leap across a seemingly unfordable crevasse. By making Prasad capable of a final redemptive action, Shukla shows us, once and for all, that the moral impulse lives within each one of us, and that it is never too late to discover it.

There is another important lesson that Shukla leaves behind in an interview given on his 75th birthday. When asked what inspires him to continue writing, he said: “The same thing that was there earlier, a convoluted set of experiences… It considers what has already been written to be insufficient, it engenders the pain of incompleteness, it continuously incites me to write something new.” Shukla’s writing career is an exemplar of how a writer must always strive against incompleteness and insufficiency, knowing, perhaps, that this struggle is ceaseless, that one day the individual’s struggle will end, as it did for this colossus of letters on 28 October. But the books are still here, available to bear witness, the way great literature does, to man’s fundamental yearning for a moral life.

Shrilal Shukla