“One should oppose the present climate… one should stand up for freedom… but one should not dishonour the award”, he said.
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Those who have returned the Sahitya Akademi award are eminent English poet Keki N Daruwalla, well-known Jaipur-based Rajasthani and Hindi writer Nand Bhardwaj, Kannada writers- Veerabhadrappa, K Neela, RK Hudugi and Kashinath Ambalgi.
“The Akademi is not a government organisation but an autonomous body”. The awardees are selected by erudite scholars and writers.
Most were upset over the Sahitya Akademi’s failure to come out in defence of M.M. Kalburgi after he was murdered in Karnataka on August 30.
The group, nevertheless, does not assume that returning their awards is the suitable method ahead.
What many writers have done is nothing but a knee-jerk reaction. On one hand we are building “smart cities”, on the other, the nation is heading towards “Jungle raj”.
West Bengal Governor K.N. Tripathi, however, accused writers returning the awards of being politically motivated.
All those who have renounced their awards or resigned from the Sahitya Akademi have cited the institutional silence on the killings of writers and rationalists M.M. Kalburgi, Govind Pansare and Narendra Dabholkar, the lynching of a man in Uttar Pradesh and the suppression of dissent under the Modi regime.
“To categorical our concern in a single strong voice and to demand from Sahitya Akademi the official condemnation of the menace to our elementary rights is extra crucial at this juncture”, reads the discharge. “For writers, I think there is no need to confuse these two”, he said. There is no point is removing the armour that has been protecting you from your enemies.
“I received my Sahitya Akademi award 25 years ago, in 1990”.
Among the 94 personalities who have signed the letter are poets Sankha Ghosh, Nirendranath Chakraborty, economists Ashok Mitra and Amiya Bagchi, theatre and film actor Kaushik Sen, authors Nabaneeta Deb Sen, Bani Basu, Shirshendu Mukherjee, Samaresh Majumdar, theatre maestro Rudraprasad Sengupta and painter Wasim Kapoor.
People are giving up awards out of this sudden excitement.
On October 6, Nayantara Sahgal, an Indian author who had won the Sahitya Akademi award for her novel Rich Like Us in 1986, also returned the prize.
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“How it is that none of them were prompted to return the awards earlier and why now?” he asked.
