Literary Awards of India: Full List for Exams

India's literary awards fall into three neat groups, and once a candidate can place an award in its group the question answers itself. The first group is given by a private literary trust, and the Jnanpith and the Moortidevi Award belong to it. The second is given by a government funded academy, and that is the Sahitya Akademi with its award, its Fellowship and its several smaller prizes. The third is given by private foundations and publishers, and it holds the Saraswati Samman, the Vyas Samman, the Bihari Puraskar and the newer English language book prizes. Alongside them sit the international prizes that Indian writers have won, which papers ask about just as often.

The three highest honours

The Jnanpith is regarded as the highest literary award in India. It carries a bronze statue of Vagdevi, the goddess Saraswati, with a citation and a cash prize, and a writer may receive it only once. The Sahitya Akademi Award is the widest in reach, since about two dozen writers are honoured together every year, one for each recognised language, and its winner receives an engraved copper plaque and a shawl. The Saraswati Samman carries the largest cash prize of any Indian literary award and its first recipient, in 1991, was the Hindi poet Harivansh Rai Bachchan for his autobiography in four volumes.

The K. K. Birla Foundation awards

The foundation set up three literary awards in the same year, 1991, and telling them apart is a standard exam task.

• Saraswati Samman, for an outstanding literary work in any of the languages of the Eighth Schedule, so it is open to writers across the country.
• Vyas Samman, for an outstanding literary work in Hindi published in the previous ten years. Its first recipient was Ram Vilas Sharma.
• Bihari Puraskar, for a writer from Rajasthan writing in Hindi or Rajasthani, named after the poet Bihari of the Riti period.

The foundation also gives the Shankar Puraskar for a Hindi work on Indian philosophy, art or culture, and separate awards in science, agriculture and journalism, which is why a question may name the foundation without naming literature at all.

The Sahitya Akademi's family of honours

Besides its annual award the Akademi confers the Sahitya Akademi Fellowship, its own highest honour, limited to twenty-one living writers at a time. Around these it gives the Bhasha Samman, instituted in 1996, for work in languages the Akademi does not formally recognise and for classical and medieval literature; the Translation Prize, instituted in 1989; the Bal Sahitya Puraskar of 2010 for writing for children; the Yuva Puraskar of 2011 for writers aged thirty-five or below; and the Premchand Fellowship of 2005 for writers and scholars from the SAARC countries.

Other Indian literary awards worth knowing

International prizes won by Indian writers

Rabindranath Tagore won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913, largely for Gitanjali, and remains the only Indian to have won it; he was also the first Asian to win a Nobel Prize in any field. Four writers of Indian origin have won the Booker Prize: Salman Rushdie in 1981 for Midnight's Children, Arundhati Roy in 1997 for The God of Small Things, Kiran Desai in 2006 for The Inheritance of Loss and Aravind Adiga in 2008 for The White Tiger. Arundhati Roy is the only one of them writing from India at the time of the award, which is why her name appears most often in papers.

The International Booker Prize, which honours a book translated into English, went in 2022 to Geetanjali Shree for Ret Samadhi, published in English as Tomb of Sand in Daisy Rockwell's translation, making it the first book in Hindi and the first in any Indian language to win that prize. Jhumpa Lahiri won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2000 for her collection Interpreter of Maladies. V. S. Naipaul, born in Trinidad to a family of Indian descent, won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001, and a question that names him is testing whether a candidate remembers that Tagore is India's only literature Nobel.

How to keep them straight

Fix the awarding body first, because that is what most questions turn on: Bharatiya Jnanpith gives the Jnanpith and the Moortidevi, the Sahitya Akademi gives its award, its Fellowship and the Bhasha Samman, and the K. K. Birla Foundation gives the Saraswati Samman, the Vyas Samman and the Bihari Puraskar. Then fix the year: 1954 for the Akademi, 1961 for the Jnanpith and 1991 for all three Birla awards. Last, fix the reach: the Vyas Samman is only for Hindi, the Bihari Puraskar only for Rajasthan, and the Saraswati Samman for every Eighth Schedule language. None of these is a government civilian honour, so none belongs to the Padma series or to the Bharat Ratna.