Contents · 4 sections · 2 min
Shukla in Three Ideas
the essentialsThe village as the nation
Shivpalganj is India in miniature — its school, cooperative, panchayat, courts and police all captured by one family’s power.
Satire without illusions
He showed how the institutions of the new democracy became instruments of the old power, in a comedy that refuses consolation.
The educated helpless
Rangnath, the city-educated observer, sees everything and does nothing — the impotence of the liberal intellectual.
Shrilal Shukla was a Hindi novelist and satirist whose Rāg Darbārī (1968) is the greatest satirical novel in Hindi and one of the most important books about independent India. A senior civil servant in Uttar Pradesh, he knew from the inside the workings of government, development schemes, village politics and the bureaucracy, and turned that knowledge into fiction of devastating comic precision, showing how the institutions of the new democracy were captured by the same old forces of caste, power and greed. He received the Sahitya Akademi Award (1969), the Padma Bhushan (2008) and the Jnanpith Award (2011).
Life
Shrilal Shukla was born on 31 December 1925 in Atraulia village near Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh, into a Brahmin family. He studied at Allahabad University and joined the UP Provincial Civil Service in 1949, later the Indian Administrative Service, serving as a district officer and in many government departments until his retirement in 1983. His intimate knowledge of district administration, development programmes, elections, courts and village politics fed his satire. His first novel was Sūnī Ghāṭī kā Sūraj (1957). He died in Lucknow on 28 October 2011.
Rāg Darbārī
Rāg Darbārī (1968) follows Rangnath, an educated young man from the city doing research in history, who comes to stay with his uncle, Vaidyaji, in the village of Shivpalganj to recover his health. Vaidyaji, an Ayurvedic doctor who sells tonics for virility, is the real ruler of the village: he controls the college, the cooperative society and, through his henchmen, the village council; his sons and followers — the wrestler Badri, the indolent Ruppan, the scheming college principal, the drunken clerk — manipulate every institution. Through Rangnath’s increasingly disillusioned eyes, the novel shows the comedy and tragedy of a society in which democracy, education, justice and development have become empty words.
Other works
Makān (1976), about a sitar player in a Calcutta office; Bisrāmpur kā Sant (1998), a novel about a Gandhian land-gift movement corrupted, which won the Vyas Samman; Aṅgad kā Pāṁv and Yahāṁ se Vahāṁ (satirical essays); and short stories. He also wrote criticism on the Hindi writer Bhagwati Charan Verma and translations.
In conversation
- Shivpalganj — any Indian place where every institution serves one boss.
- Vaidyaji — the soft-spoken patriarch who controls everything through others.
- A Rāg Darbārī — the court music of power, played by flatterers.
Curiosities
did you know?- He was an officer of the Uttar Pradesh Provincial Civil Service and later the IAS — he knew the bureaucracy from inside.
- Rāg Darbārī won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1969; he received the Jnanpith Award in 2011, shortly before his death.
- Doordarshan made a television series of Rāg Darbārī in 1986.
Questions to Argue About
debate club →- Can satire change a corrupt society — or only describe it?
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