A staged literary revolt: Returning Sahitya Akademi awards only a trifle less churlish than Sena’s attack on Kulkarni

Murder of anybody, be he an accomplished academic or any other, is reprehensible. But that doesn’t mean a miniscule section of the intelligentsia should start tilting at the windmills, which is what the returning of Sahitya Akademi awards by some of the past winners amounts to.

The atmosphere of growing intolerance engendered and fostered by the BJP government at the Center is the reason proffered by them for this extraordinary and orchestrated move. It is not only the murder of a writer that has angered these intellectuals but also the reprehensible murder of a Muslim on the mere suspicion of slaughtering a cow and consuming beef.

Would those advocating the return of awards egg the family of the former Indian Prime Minister Morarji Desai to return the Nishan-e-Pakistan , Order of Pakistan, award on the equally plausible grounds that state-sponsored Pakistani terrorists and its army routinely kill innocent Indians?

Will they egg Bollywood thespian Dilip Kumar to return the Nishan-e-Imtiaz , Order of Excellence, which the Pakistan government conferred on him in 1997? Many other Indian film stars have been feted by Pakistanis in the past. Should all of them return their awards because Pakistan routinely bans Indian movies?

It helps to remember that these same intellectuals fulminate against the ban on Pakistani cricketers playing with Indians on the grounds that culture and sports must be kept away from politics and international relations, including neighbourly ones.

Had the Sahitya Akademi winners been feted by the one-and-a-half-year-old Modi government, there could have atleast been a veneer of justification but most of these awards were conferred by earlier ‘secular’ regimes which are being dusted up from cupboards just to slight the popularly elected Modi government.

In the process, they are not only insulting the nation but also the independent selection committee some of whom, to be sure, may have had political affiliations. Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, goes a cliché. It may perhaps be apt to coin another adage—don’t accept an award by all means but never return it after having accepted it. Returning an award is as churlish as tilting at the windmills. It smacks of pettiness. It is like a son reimbursing his father the higher education expenditure when the latter starts questioning his wayward ways. The analogy may not be on all fours because it is the returners of awards who are protesting the alleged wayward ways of the incumbent government but the truculence on display is the same.

A seemingly petty and uncharitable question that is being asked of the returners is—would you have returned the award had there been a hefty cash component? Parenthetically, the Sahitya Akademi award carries a piddly cash prize of Rs 1 lakh in addition to a citation. Parenthetically, it may be pointed out that when sportspersons are showered with cash as they should be, writers should not be fobbed off with a pittance especially given the Indian publishing industry’s niggardliness in compensating authors and fobbing off the gullible among them by underreporting sales with a view to limiting their royalty entitlements.

The larger point is, the pen is mightier than the sword, and writers, of all people, should not resort to cheap gimmickry bordering on a publicity stunt when all that they have to do is put their anger on paper, so to speak. What do litterateurs do? Write, right? Go ahead and write all you can. Do you protest constriction of freedom of expression by writing more or shutting up?

This is one hell of a churlish protest. Only a shade less churlish than blackening the face of Sudheendra Kulkarni by Shiv Sena goons.