Vinod Kumar Shukla’s Hindi poem ‘Apne Hisse Mein Log Aakash Dekhte Hain’ (People See the Sky in Their Own Share) begins with an almost childlike simplicity. Everyone sees the sky in their own share, yet they see the entire sky. Everyone sees the moon in their own share, yet they see the entire moon. These opening lines create a comforting illusion of universal equality—nature, it seems, belongs to all equally.
But this illusion does not last. By the time the poem reaches its final lines, even breath, bread and time have become unequal. The person reading the newspaper in his garden breathes differently from the one surviving inside a circle of stench and filth. The bread baking in the market’s tandoor is not for everyone. And what ticks in each watch is not the same time. Shukla achieves this dismantling without anger, without rhetoric, through the quietest of statements. His poem is a masterclass in how simplicity can carry the heaviest political and philosophical weight.
What makes Shukla’s poem remarkable is its structural deconstruction. The opening stanzas build a sense of wholeness—the shared sky, the shared moon—only to fracture it gradually. Air is the first to break. “Everyone’s share of the air is not the same air,” he writes, and suddenly the earlier unity is revealed as a facade. Then hunger and rice enter, and the fracture deepens. Finally, time itself becomes divided. This progressive dismantling is not accidental.
Shukla forces the reader to move from the abstract and universal (sky, moon) to the material and embodied (breath, hunger, time). The political insight is that inequality is not merely economic but existential. It lives in the most intimate spaces—the air entering your lungs, the waiting that fills your hours.
Read sociologically, the poem aligns with Karl Marx’s insistence on unequal material conditions and Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus and cultural capital. The two figures in the poem—the garden newspaper reader and the person surviving in filth—occupy different worlds not only economically but also in their ingrained dispositions, their bodily language, their sense of what is possible.
The poem also echoes Karl Polanyi’s idea of market “embeddedness” reversed: the bread is visible, yet detached from social need, governed instead by autonomous market forces. Michel Foucault’s “history of the present” finds a place here too, as the poem’s final phrase—“In this time”—insists that this inequality is not a relic but an active, ongoing structure that disciplines bodies and normalises deprivation.
Psychoanalytically, the poem reveals itself as a text about lack and the impossibility of desire. Jacques Lacan’s “objet petit a”—that unattainable object-cause of desire—appears in the bread that is seen but not possessed, in the time that ticks but never fully belongs. The initial vision of the entire sky and entire moon belongs to Lacan’s Imaginary order, where the self imagines completeness. But breath and hunger drag the reader into the Real, where that completeness shatters.
Carl Jung’s shadow also haunts the poem: the person living in filth is not merely an other but the suppressed part of the collective self, the inequality society refuses to acknowledge. Cathy Caruth’s trauma theory illuminates the final line—“In this time”—as a repetition of an unclaimed wound, a present that remains trapped in past violence.
Ecologically, the poem speaks to environmental justice. The person breathing “the sort of breath” inside a circle of stench and filth is not a random victim but a representative of how pollution and resource extraction are distributed along class lines. Ramachandra Guha and Joan Martinez-Alier have shown that environmental crises are fundamentally distributional conflicts.
Timothy Morton’s “hyperobjects”—phenomena so vast and pervasive they cannot be fully grasped—apply here too. Polluted air enters the body, erasing the boundary between environment and self. The shared sky remains visible, but the shared air is a lie. This is the bitter irony at the poem’s ecological heart: nature appears universal, but its material reality is carved up by power.
Postcolonially, the concept of “share” becomes a record of historical deprivation. Colonialism divided the world into those who received resources and visibility and those who received marginalisation and invisibility. Homi Bhabha’s “time-lag” captures the poem’s insight that time itself is not experienced uniformly—the watch ticks the same, but some are pushed behind in history’s timeline. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s subaltern speaks through silence here: the deprived figure never voices complaint, but that voicelessness is the poem’s most powerful statement.
Morally, the poem operates without preaching. It never says “this is unjust.” It simply places two lives side by side and lets the reader feel the unease. John Rawls’s theory of justice—that a just society benefits the most disadvantaged—stands as an invisible counterpoint to the poem’s reality. Amartya Sen’s capability approach is also relevant: the deprivation is not just a lack of rice but a violation of the very capacity to live a dignified life. The poem transforms the reader from spectator into moral agent, not through argument but through quiet revelation.
When placed alongside other poets, Shukla’s distinctiveness sharpens. Jayant Mahapatra’s “Hunger” confronts deprivation viscerally, with a fisherman offering his daughter for sex. That poem throbs with personal shame and bodily transaction. Shukla remains coolly observational, letting the market’s bread stand for systemic failure.
Wisława Szymborska’s “Map” similarly dismantles comfortable appearances—maps lie, she says, hiding mass graves behind neat borders—much as Shukla’s shared sky hides divided air. Philip Larkin’s “This Be The Verse” carries a comparable chill about inherited misery, though Larkin’s bitterness is more theatrical than Shukla’s restraint. Adrienne Rich’s “Power” insists, like Shukla, that the same source that grants visibility also inflicts damage.
But the most revealing contrast is with Pablo Neruda. Neruda’s poverty poetry burns with passionate indignation. In “Poverty,” he accuses the reader directly: “Ah you don’t want to, you’re scared of poverty.” In “The Great Tablecloth,” hunger is “cold fire” that calls for collective rebellion. Neruda’s hunger is a battle cry; Shukla’s is a quiet observation that not everyone receives their full share of rice.
Neruda wants to tear down the structures; Shukla shows how those structures have quietly infiltrated the air we breathe and the time we live, making inequality feel inevitable until we notice it “in this time.” One is an orator, the other a diagnostician. Both expose the lie of universality, but Shukla’s method is cooler, more deconstructive, and in its own way, more unsettling because it refuses the comfort of outrage.
Shukla’s poem ultimately offers no solution, no programme, no moral exhortation. It does something more difficult: it changes how we see. The sky remains the same sky, but after reading this poem, you cannot look at it without remembering that the air beneath it is not the same air.
The bread in the market remains the same bread, but you cannot watch it bake without wondering for whom it is intended. And the watch on your wrist ticks the same seconds, but you cannot hear them without asking whether your time is the same as another’s. That is the poem’s enduring power. It does not lead us to a conclusion. It leaves us in a place where questions become more important than answers. And it insists that this is not a philosophical exercise. All of this is happening “in this time.”
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Professor & former Head (Retd.), Department of Hindi, University of Hyderabad. This is the abridged version of the author's original paper
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