In a poem from March 2001, Hindi writer Vinod Kumar Shukla writes:
After Chhattisgarh became a state,
when I went to Bhopal
it didn’t seem like I was going to Madhya Pradesh,
abbreviated to M.P.,
or to put it in parenthesis, even to (M.P.).
We go to Bhopal,
we don’t go to a state.
And what will I do by going to a state?
And when I return to Raipur,
I’ll return to Raipur.
Translated into English from the original Hindi by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, this poem uncompromisingly captures two essential features of Shukla’s oeuvre – a deceptive simplicity of articulation and a quietly rebellious political engagement.
The poem, like most others by Shukla, has no title and seems to begin quite suddenly, like the snippet of a conversation, providing an apparent banal description of the narrator going from Raipur, the capital of Chhattisgarh, to Bhopal, the capital of Madhya Pradesh, a distance of about 620 km.
But even in its description of an unremarkable journey is a gauntlet thrown to the politics of statehood and the garish trappings of power. “And what will I do by going to a state?” asks the narrator. This rhetorical question can be answered by one word: “Nothing!”
In an increasingly apathetic and frequently violent state, an individual citizen really has nothing to do with it. This is not merely a reference to Chhattisgarh or Madhya Pradesh or even India – it refers to the military-industrial complex and the deep state multinational corporate entities that seem to govern much of lives in a neo-liberal world. Though written nearly a quarter century ago, this poem perhaps rings truer today.
In many cases, it is often the most disenfranchised who bear the brunt of this violence. For instance, adivasis. In two poems included in this collection (Treasurer of Piggy Banks, Vinod Kumar Shukla, translated by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, Westland, 2024), Shukla poignantly represents the condition of divasis. These two poems are also untitled. In the first one, Shukla writes about the commodification of adivasi culture for the consumption of an urban audience:
You don’t see adivasis dancing
You see them being made to dance
Their houses are not
the houses they live in
Their houses are there to be displayed
In the 2019 essay, “Eating heritage: caste, colonialism, and the contestation of adivasi creativity”, social justice and education scholar Dia Da Costa argues that “optimistic global creative economy discourses actually rely upon caste and colonial histories to entrench caste-based definitions of heritage within international and national development regimes.”
The global cultural economy, with its development agenda and its rituals of funding and patronage, enforces definitions of adivasi or tribal culture that reaffirm caste hierarchies.
At the so-called adivasi or tribal fairs and exhibitions in different cities of India, the adivasis are expected to perform their traditional dances, while their food, clothes, and other cultural artefacts are on display. By subsuming these within the entertainment industry, their subversive potential is eschewed. In Shukla’s words,
For those who cannot see
they’ve put up an exhibition
of the forest in the city
This process of marginalisation is not limited to the exotic displays of Adivasi culture – it often results in real hardship and displacement. Sociologist Amita Baviskar in her 2019 essay, “Nation’s body, river’s pulse: Narratives of anti-dam politics in India”, shows that between 1947 and 1997, 50 million people were displaced in India because of development projects; of these, 8 million were adivasis.
It is a process that continues unabated. In an essay published earlier this year, scholars Roshan Varughese and Soumen Mukherjee argue: “The alienation of land in the neo-liberal or post-globalisation era similar to the colonial and post-independent period finds legitimacy under the pretext of development and the reign of power continues even now.”
For Shukla, who was born in Rajnandgaon, a small town in Chhattisgarh, and who has lived in Raipur for much of his life, Adivasi displacement is not a distant phenomenon to be read in news articles and academic papers. It is something occurring in his backyard, and it bursts through in his poem with quiet anger:
Take the adivasi
away from the forest
and he looks like
everyone else
He goes hungry
like everyone else
only the hungry
are better off
This short poem – 17 lines in the original Hindi, 19 in the English translation – ends with a devastating image of the permanent loss of Adivasi identity through displacement:
Take the adivasi
away from the forest
and he’s not an adivasi
for even a tree
In the translator’s note at the beginning of this book, Mehrotra writes how Shukla’s concern with the conditions of the Adivasi and the destruction of forests is completely unaligned with the fashionable trend of works inspired by climate change in global literature. It is something far more local, organic.
“The decimation of what is euphemistically called ‘first peoples’ is no surprise when read about in the news or in history books,” writes Mehrotra. “To come across it unexpectedly, in a different context, is to make what had been forgotten or pushed to the back of our minds, resurface once again.”
As a translator, Mehrotra has successfully transmitted this sensation to a far wider audience. His translations, as perhaps evident from the few examples in this article, are not only an exercise in the aesthetic sphere – which is undoubtedly very important – but also in the political.
To do so, in our times, is a brave choice.
Uttaran Das Gupta is a writer and a journalist.
