The Sahitya Akademi Insurgency: Melodrama, Orchestrated Protest?

25 Akademi-recognised literary scholars have returned their awards and citations and/or have resigned.

The stagey and melodramatic Sahitya Akademi insurgency, sprung up like a sudden jack-in the-box, shows no immediate signs of abating. It spews righteous indignation, at ‘the unmaking of India’.

A score of eminent, mostly ‘vernacular’ writers are in the media for protesting, quitting the Akademi, or returning their awards - a dancer from the Sangeet Natak Akademi included.

The Akademi governing body has 24 members, one for each ‘recognised’ Indian language. In panic, it has called an emergency meeting to decide what to do. Meanwhile, Booker of Bookers writer Salman Rushdie has signalled his support for the andolan from afar.

Those who dare mock the motives of these authors, like highly successful pulp fiction/film-script writer Chetan Bhagat, are soon covered in high-brow literary scorn.

With 25 of the Akademi-recognised literary scholars and counting returning their awards and citations and/or resigning outright, the outrage is palpable, and nothing to be sniffed at.

The Writers’ Protest

• 25 of the Akademi recognised literary scholars have returned their awards and citations and/or have resigned.
• But the timing of the protest is suspect, given the ongoing Bihar assembly polls.
• The list of grievances is getting longer with each new returnee/resignee.
• Those who dare mock the motives of these authors are soon covered in high-brow literary scorn.
• The flabbergasted government-funded Akademi has never known such ill-deserved infamy.

Timing a Suspect?

The three who resigned from the Akademi’s bureaucracy- novelist Shashi Deshpande, K Sachchidanandan and PK Parakkadavu, might have stayed long enough to make some condemnatory noises in their official capacities, since nobody was actually gagging them.

But, nevertheless, the flabbergasted and relatively obscure government-funded Akademi, has never known such ill-deserved infamy. After all, the Akademi, like the papacy, has never reacted to the doings of the government of the day - through pogrom, pestilence and riot. It honestly believed it was meant to be apolitical!

Its office-bearers have held, since 1954, that their sole job was to assess and award literary merit and achievement in all of India’s 24 official languages, using juries of peers. They probably don’t know what to do with this call to arms.

The returnees and resignees are directing part of their ire at the Akademi’s overseer, Culture Minister Mahesh Sharma, aka the ‘insensitive’ member of parliament from Dadri. But they are demanding broader brush statements of condemnation of the attacks on ‘civil liberties’ and the ‘culture of intolerance’. The upset, such as it is, refers to the Bisada beef murder, and that of Kannada writer MM Kalburgi, specifically, but also those of rationalists Narendra Dabholkar and Gobind Pansare from Maharashtra.

But the list of grievances is getting longer with each new returnee/resignation. ‘Law and order’, for example, was added by someone recently. It is perhaps only a matter of time before the festering FTII issue is conjoined, then the censor board, and who knows, Smriti Irani’s HRD Ministry, and its goings on too!

While the outrage and anguish is understandable, the timing is considered suspect. It appears to be orchestrated, almost like a subversive public relations offensive. That it happens to have come shortly before and during the politically crucial Bihar Assembly elections is indeed curious.

Sharma, caught in the headlights for calling the beef murder ‘unfortunate’, and nothing stronger, is brazening it out with all the obtuseness and political arrogance at his command. He is quite content, he says, if those who disagree ideologically with the Akademi, go ahead and return their awards or even disassociate themselves entirely. And he does so, taking pains to point out that the Ministry of Culture is not directly involved.

Disgruntled Line-up

The entire brouhaha was kicked off a week ago by 88-year-old Nayantara Sahgal. Sahgal, author of 11 novels, several works of non-fiction, a memoir, and many political columns, went to town with her views.

Sahgal, Jawaharlal Nehru’s niece, was far from being Indira Gandhi’s favourite cousin. She criticised Gandhi as prime minister regularly, and with increasing stridency, in her political columns of the 1970s and 1980s. But of course, she had no Sahitya Akademi award to return during Gandhi’s lifetime, or during the infamous Emergency with its massive abrogation of civil liberties and the jailing of ‘dissidents’. Sahgal only received hers in 1986, when her nephew, Rajiv Gandhi, was prime minister.

Others in the disgruntled line-up include Hindi poet Ashok Vajpayee, Malayalam writer Sara Joseph, Urdu novelist Rahman Abbas, a clutch of Punjabi and Kashmiri authors, and outside solidarity from the poets society of Jammu and Kashmir.

Some, however, like iconoclast and Booker Prize winner Arundhati Roy never did accept the award from the Sahitya Akademi, when it was offered in 2006. This, even though the Akademi even-handedly cited her collection of hypercritical essays, The Algebra of Infinite Justice, written between 1998 and 2001, every word of which is against Indian government policy on big dams, nuclear weapons, increased militarisation, and economic liberalisation.

When it comes to attacks of conscience, conviction and even integrity can sometimes, evidently not always, be sacrificed to politics and the expedient.

(Gautam Mukherjee is a plugged-in commentator and instant analyser.)