India’s highest literary honour, the Jnanpith Award, has gone to towering litterateurs as well as mediocre authors in equal measure, says writer K. Satchidanandan, who was on the Jnanpith selection board.
The bilingual poet-translator of note doesn’t consider the selection process as rigorous as the one followed by the Sahitya Akademi where each jury member is required to read the works.
“For Jnanpith, the initial recommendation comes from a three-member committee for each language, and there have been occasions when a good writer has been bypassed to make way for a common favourite.
The apex selection board of not less than seven members which reviews the recommendations goes largely by random sampling and hearsay. Seldom do they have first-hand understanding of an author. Certain languages are prioritised based on their literary clout and recurrence at Jnanpith. Thanks to all this, the honour has been bestowed on exceptional writers as also pedestrian ones,” he says.
Awards, Prof. Satchidanandan maintains, do not mirror the actual merit of a work nor do they guarantee an author immortality.
“They are mostly about the currency of a work at a given point in time. They only help put a writer in the canon, just a perfunctory role,” he remarks.
On the golden jubilee of the award, first won by Malayalam poet G. Sankara Kurup in 1965, Prof. Satchidanandan recalls how it catapulted Malayalam into an exalted position in Indian literature. “Malayalam, with five Jnanpith laureates, ranks perhaps second after Kannada which boasts seven awardees. While it granted Malayalam a pan-India status, it has done precious little to enrich the language.”
As for Sankara Kurup, he was important at the time the honour was conferred on him. “I would rate him higher as a translator, think of his Tagore translations, than an original poet.
Of course, a few of his poems stand out, but we had far better poets like Vyloppilli Sreedhara Menon and Edassery Govindan Nair,” says Prof. Satchidanandan.
Jnanpith awardee writer M.T. Vasudevan Nair remembers being part of a felicitation meet held at Kozhikode to commend Sankara Kurup on the award.
“It announced Malayalam’s arrival on the national scene. And, Sankara Kurup’s nomination to the Rajya Sabha was thanks to the award,” says MT and believes that the poet has currency among literary researchers and enthusiasts.
Novelist Perumbadavam Sreedharan, heading Kerala Sahitya Akademi, echoes a similar feeling, maintaining that the honour painted Malayalam in bright hues.
“However, it is our collective regret that some of our best writers like Vaikom Muhammad Basheer, Uroob and Madhavikkutty never got it, but that has in no way taken the sheen off those who won the award,” he avers.
