Sahitya Akademi

The General Council of the Sahitya Akademi operates for a term of five years, following which it is reconstituted. It meets once a year and performs several important functions, including appointing the Akademi's president and vice-president, electing members of the executive board, framing rules and procedures for the Akademi, and electing fellows on the recommendation of the board.[13]

The General Council consists of the following members:[14]

• The president and the financial advisor. The current president of the Sahitya Akademi is Chandrashekhara Kambara.[15]
• Five persons nominated by the Government of India, including one each from the National Book Trust, the Department of Culture, and the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting
• One person from each state and union territory in India (these are to be nominated by the outgoing General Council, based on recommendations from the states and union territories)
• One person to represent each language supported by the Sahitya Akademi (nominated by the outgoing General Council)
• A representative each, from a maximum of 20 universities, with post-graduate departments in the humanities (selected by the outgoing Council)
• Eight other persons from the field of letters (nominated from by the outgoing General Council)
• Representatives from the Sangeet Natak Akademi, the Lalit Kala Akademi, the Indian Council for Cultural Relations, the Raja Rammohun Roy Library, and a representative from an Indian publisher based on recommendations from publishers' associations.

The executive board of the Sahitya Akademi exercises executive authority and is responsible for supervising and controlling the Akademi's work. It prepares the Akademi's annual budget, appoints the secretary, and prepares panels of nominees for the General Council to consider and select fellows.[16] It consists of the president, the vice-president, the financial advisor, two of the Government of India's nominees in the General Council (one of whom must represent the Ministry of Culture) and one person to represent each of the Akademi's supported languages, as nominated by the General Council.[16]

The finance committee's role is to prescribe the limit for total expenditure by the Sahitya Akademi in a financial year, and consider and recommend budget estimates to the executive board. The finance committee consists of a financial advisor, a nominee from the Government of India, a representative each from the General Council and Executive Board, and the vice-president of the Akademi.[17] The accounts of the Sahitya Akademi are audited by the Auditor General of India.[18]

The Sahitya Akademi publishes bibliographies, compilations, and critical editions in addition to publishing individual works and anthologies of literature and translation in the 24 languages that it supports. Amongst other things, it publishes the National Bibliography of Indian Literature (NBIL), an ongoing selective index of publications in 24 languages.[19] The first series of the NBIL consisted of four volumes, spanning literature published between 1901 and 1953.[20] The Sahitya Akademi has stated that the second series will cover literature published between 1954 and 2000. The second series will consist of 16 volumes, of which seven have been published.[21] In addition, the Sahitya Akademi has published the Collected Works of Maulana Azad in Urdu and Telugu, and critical editions of books by Kalidasa, Bankimchandra Chatterjee, and Rabindranath Tagore.[22]

The Sahitya Akademi maintains reference materials for Indian literature, including the National Register of Translators, the Who's Who of Indian Writers,[23] and the Who's Who of Sanskrit literature.[22] Two ongoing series of reference material are the Makers of Indian Literature, which consist of biographical monographs on Indian writers, and Histories of Indian Literature, 18 of which have been published thus far.[22] It publish two journal: Indian Literature (started in 1957) in English, and Samakaleen Bharatiya Sahitya (started in 1980) in Hindi.[24]

The Sahitya Akademi holds over 100 programmes related to Indian literature every year across India. It holds frequent seminars on Indian literature, as well as translation workshops.[25] In addition, it holds several regular and annual events, including a Festival of Letters and the Samvatsar Annual Lecture.

The Sahitya Akademi periodically holds International Seminars, sometimes in collaboration with the Indian Council for Cultural Relations. The first international seminar was held in 1961, in New Delhi, to mark 100 years since the birth of Rabindranath Tagore. About 25 writers from 16 countries, along with 39 writers from India met over four days to discuss and commemorate Tagore's works. Attendees included Aldous Huxley, Martin Wickremesinghe, Jean Guehenno, Zaki Naguib Mahmoud, Isaiah Berlin, and Louis Untermeyer[26] as well as Amrita Pritam, Ramdhari Sinha Dinkar, Rayaprolu Subba Rao, and Premendra Mitra. In 1991, the Akademi organised a second International Seminar on Tagore in collaboration with the Sangeet Natak Akademi, the Lalit Kala Akademi and the Indian Council for Cultural Relations.

The Akademi's second International Seminar in 1975 was also held in New Delhi and focused on the Ramayana tradition in Asia. Participants, including U Thein Han, Soewito Santoso, Harry M. Buck, C.E. Godakumbra, Kapila Vatsyayan, Camille Bulke and Umashankar Joshi, presented 44 papers on Ramayana traditions, which were published by the Akademi in a commemorative volume.[27] A second International seminar on the same theme was held in New Delhi in 1981.[27]

International Seminars have since been held to mark the birth centenary of Hindi-language writer Premchand, in 1981; to mark the birth centenary of Tamil-language poet Subramania Bharti in 1983; on the Mahabharata, in 1987; and on 'the Narrative' in 1990.[28]

The Sahitya Akademi's Annual Festival of Letters is held in February and is the occasion at which the Akademi presents its awards. The festival is accompanied by an exhibition that covers major literary events of the previous year, as well as a 'Writers' Meet' which is a literary seminar spanning three days.[25]

The Samvatsar Annual Lecture is organised by the Sahitya Akademi and is delivered during the Akademi's Annual Festival of Letters. The Sahitya Akademi notes that these lectures "should open up new vistas of thinking regarding a literary movement, a current literary trend, some original thinking about a great writer or a great classic or a new path in literary criticism or literary creation".[29] The Lectures have been delivered since 1986 by people including the Hindi writer Sachchidananda Vatsyayan (1986), Marathi poet and writer Vinda Karandikar (1991), Assamese novelist Nabakanta Barua (1994), and Malayalam author and director, M T Vasudevan Nair (1999).[30]

In 2014, the lecture was delivered by Girish Karnad, a Kannada playwright and author.[30] The most recent lecture was delivered by Dr. Chandrashekhar Shankar Dharmadhikari, an author, lawyer, and former judge in the Bombay High Court on 17 February 2016.[31]

The Sahitya Akademi organises regular public interactions with published Indian authors. These sessions, titled 'Meet the Author' consist of a 40-minute lecture by the invited author followed by an open session of questions and discussions.[32] 'Meet the Author' programmes have been conducted in Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, and Bengaluru. Over 180 authors have participated to date.[33]

To complement this, the Sahitya Akademi has held a parallel lecture series titled 'Men in Books' in which the Akademi invites persons distinguished for interdisciplinary studies to speak about literature. Notable speakers in the past have included film-maker Adoor Gopalakrishnan, journalist Dilip Padgaonkar, lawyer Laxmi Mall Singhvi, and former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee.[34]

The Kavi Anuvadak programmes, started in 2001, consist of a live performance of poetry in the original language and in translation. Nine Kavi Anuvadaks have been held to date, featuring, amongst others, K. Satchidanandan, Manglesh Dabral, and Ayyappa Paniker.[35]

Sahitya Akademi Award (Devnagari: साहित्य अकादमी पुरस्कार) is a literary honor in India which Sahitya Akademi annually confers on writers of the most outstanding books of literary merit published in any of the major Indian languages recognised by the Akademi.

Sahitya Akademi conferres annually the Yuva Puraskar to young writers (under 35 years) of outstanding works in one of the 24 major Indian languages. It was founded in 2011.[36]

Other programmes organised by the Sahitya Akademi include the Mulakat lectures, a special platform for lesser-known authors;[37] the Through My Window lectures, in which one author speaks on the works of another Indian author;[38] and the Loka programmes on Indian folklore and the Kavisandhi poetry readings.[39]

Many controversial appointments of unqualified candidates to key positions at the Sahitya Akademi, done during Gopi Chand Narang's time, continue unchallenged to this day. Khurshid Alam and Mrignayani Gupta, both dismissed in 2004 for presenting counterfeit degree certificates, have made a backdoor entry and have been subsequently promoted to higher positions.[49] There have been widespread allegations in the Hindi press that the certificates of the current secretary, K. Sreenivasa Rao, who completed his M.Phil. and PhD degrees while being employed as deputy secretary (administration) at the Sahitya Akademi without availing a single day's leave, are fake and fraudulent.[50] Appeals by the writers community to the Ministry of Culture to launch an inquiry have not yielded any result.

It has been alleged time and again that the procedure of nomination of litterateurs for the coveted Sahitya Akademi Awards is not transparent. The ground-list of books (from which the jury members make two short-lists and the final selection for the award) is supposed to be made by the General Council. But the books are provided to this council by the bureaucrats and employees of the Akademi who are allegedly unqualified to make any kind of literary selection.[51] Though the award regulations makes the recommendations of the Language Advisory Board mandatory, the recommendations of the board are often dismissed and ignored by the officials without citing any reason. This lack of transparency and rigour in the selection process has resulted in a lot of controversy. It has even resulted in writers being forced to return the award when it has been proven that the selection procedure was fraudulent, as was the case with the Sahitya Akademi award for a translation into Odia in 1999.[52][53]

Sahitya Akademi is also highly criticized by writers such as Khushwant Singh for ignoring eminent writers and awarding below-par writers[54] and sub-standard literary works.[55][56]