मुक्तिनाथ शर्मा 'शोषित'

Muktinath Sharma 'Shoshit' is a powerful voice of Darjeeling's hill life — rooted in the red earth of Suntale, Bijanbari, his writing holds both the stillness of mountains and the tenderness of memory. The pen name 'Shoshit' (the exploited) is itself a manifesto: across five collections spanning nearly two decades, he has been an unflinching witness to lives lived at the margins — the mother who taught the alphabet on a slate, the village slowly emptied by Gulf migration, the bee trapped by a cunning gardener.

His poetry travels between the intimate and the political with rare grace. From the memory of a mother to a critique of social exploitation, from a tender love lyric to a searching verse on caste — he holds both in the same breath. His language is deliberately accessible — Nepali as spoken in the Darjeeling hills, without affectation — yet within this simplicity lies a deep emotional precision born of decades of observation and lived experience.

Nature is his constant companion: the hills, the seasons, the garden, the river — all carry meaning across his work, deepening from book to book. His two 2025 collections — Shoshitka Shabdaharu and Ujyalo Khojdai — represent his most mature literary expression; in the muktak form especially, his gift for compression finds its fullest flowering: saying in four lines what others need pages to approach.