Jnanpith and Sahitya Akademi: Awards and Winners

The correct answer is D, Akkitham Achuthan Namboothiri. The Malayalam poet, known simply as Akkitham, received the 55th Jnanpith Award, given for the year 2019. He was the sixth Malayalam writer to be honoured, the language whose G. Sankara Kurup had won the very first Jnanpith for 1965.

Option A, Amitav Ghosh, won the 54th Jnanpith, for 2018, and was the first writer in English to receive it, English having become an eligible language only in 2013. Option B, Raghuveer Chaudhari, is a Gujarati novelist and poet who won the 51st award, for 2015. Option C, Chandrashekhara Kambara, is the Kannada playwright and poet who won the 53rd award, for 2017. All four are genuine Jnanpith laureates from consecutive years, which is what makes the question testing, and the safe way to answer it is to anchor one pair in memory, such as Amitav Ghosh with 2018, and count forward or back from there.

The correct answer is C, 1961. The Jnanpith Award was instituted in 1961 by Bharatiya Jnanpith, and it is regarded as the highest literary honour given in India. It goes to an Indian citizen writing in one of the languages of the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution, and a writer may receive it only once.

Option A, 1944, is the year Bharatiya Jnanpith itself was founded as a literary and research trust by Sahu Shanti Prasad Jain and Rama Jain, seventeen years before the award was created. Option B, 1954, is the year the Government of India set up the Sahitya Akademi, which is a different institution altogether and gives its own annual awards. Option D, 1965, is the year for which the first Jnanpith was actually given, to G. Sankara Kurup, four years after the award was instituted. Keeping all four dates separate, 1944 the trust, 1954 the Akademi, 1961 the award and 1965 the first winner, disposes of a whole family of questions.

The correct answer is A, G. Sankara Kurup. The Malayalam poet received the first Jnanpith Award, for the year 1965, for his collection of poems Odakkuzhal, meaning the reed flute. In those early years the award was given for one outstanding work rather than for a lifetime of writing, a practice that changed in 1982.

Option B, Sumitranandan Pant, received the Jnanpith for 1968 for Chidambara and was the first Hindi writer to be honoured, not the first of all. Option C, Tarashankar Bandopadhyay, won for 1966 for the Bengali novel Ganadevata, making him the second recipient and the first in Bengali. Option D, Kuvempu, the pen name of K. V. Puttappa, won for 1967 for the Kannada epic Sri Ramayana Darshanam and was the first Kannada writer honoured. The four are the first four laureates in order, so learning the sequence Kurup, Bandopadhyay, Kuvempu, Pant covers several possible questions at once.

The correct answer is B, Ashapurna Devi. The Bengali novelist received the Jnanpith for the year 1976 for Pratham Pratishruti, the first book of a trilogy about three generations of women in a Bengali household, and she was the first woman to be honoured with the award.

Option A, Mahadevi Verma, the Hindi poet of the Chhayavaad movement, won the Jnanpith for 1982 for Yama and was the first Hindi woman writer honoured, but she came six years after Ashapurna Devi. Option C, Amrita Pritam, won for 1981 and was the first Punjabi writer honoured with the Jnanpith; she was also the first woman to win a Sahitya Akademi Award, back in 1956, and that earlier first is what tempts candidates towards her here. Option D, Mahashweta Devi, the Bengali writer and activist, won for 1996. All four are women laureates, so the question turns purely on the order of years.

The correct answer is A, Vagdevi, the goddess Saraswati. Along with a citation and a cash prize, every Jnanpith laureate receives a bronze replica of Vagdevi, Saraswati as the goddess of speech and learning, which is a fitting emblem for a literary honour and a detail asked directly in objective papers.

Option B, Nataraja, the dancing form of Shiva, is associated with the Sangeet Natak Akademi and with Indian classical dance, not with the Jnanpith. Option C, the goddess Lakshmi, stands for wealth and prosperity and appears on no major literary award. Option D, Gautama Buddha, appears on various peace and scholarship honours but not on this one, though the Jain family that founded Bharatiya Jnanpith gives the trust its strong link with Indian philosophy. Contrast the statue with the Sahitya Akademi Award, whose winner receives an engraved copper plaque and a shawl rather than any statue.

The correct answer is C, Amitav Ghosh. English was not an eligible language for the Jnanpith until 2013, when it was added to the languages of the Eighth Schedule for the purpose of this award. Ghosh, the novelist of The Shadow Lines and the Ibis trilogy, received the 54th Jnanpith, for the year 2018, and was the first writer in English to be honoured.

Option A, Arundhati Roy, won the Booker Prize in 1997 for The God of Small Things but has not received the Jnanpith. Option B, R. K. Narayan, the creator of Malgudi, wrote before English became eligible and received the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1958 for The Guide instead. Option D, Vikram Seth, the author of A Suitable Boy, has also not received it. The neat way to remember the sequence is that eligibility changed in 2013 and the first English laureate followed five years later, in 2018.

The correct answer is B, 1954. The Government of India set up the Sahitya Akademi on 12 March 1954 as the national academy for literature, and it works today as an autonomous body under the Ministry of Culture with its headquarters at Rabindra Bhavan in New Delhi. Its first President was Jawaharlal Nehru.

Option A, 1947, is the year of Independence and not of the Akademi, though the three national academies for letters, for the performing arts and for the fine arts were all creations of the first decade after it. Option C, 1961, is the year the Jnanpith Award was instituted by a private trust and has nothing to do with the Akademi. Option D, 1972, is too late by nearly two decades. A useful memory hook is that the Sahitya Akademi and the Lalit Kala Akademi both belong to 1954, while the Sangeet Natak Akademi came a year earlier, in 1953.

The correct answer is C, Jawaharlal Nehru. The Prime Minister was the first President of the Sahitya Akademi, elected when the academy was set up in 1954, and he held the office until his death in 1964. Dr. S. Radhakrishnan was its first Vice President and succeeded him as President.

Option A, Dr. Rajendra Prasad, was the first President of India and inaugurated several national institutions of the period, but he did not head the Akademi. Option B, Dr. S. Radhakrishnan, the philosopher who later became President of India, was the Akademi's first Vice President and its second President, which makes him the strongest distractor in the set. Option D, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, was the first Education Minister of India and the moving spirit behind the three national academies, and he was the first Chairman of the Sangeet Natak Akademi, so his name belongs to the same story but to a different chair.

The correct answer is C, 24. The Sahitya Akademi recognises twenty-four languages and gives one award in each of them every year for the most outstanding book of literary merit, so roughly two dozen names are announced together. The twenty-four are the twenty-two languages of the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution together with English and Rajasthani.

Option A, 18, was the number of languages in the Eighth Schedule before the 92nd Constitutional Amendment of 2003 added Bodo, Dogri, Maithili and Santhali, and it survives in older books. Option B, 22, is the present number of Eighth Schedule languages and so is the most tempting wrong answer; the Akademi's list is wider because it adds English and Rajasthani to it. Option D, 28, matches no list of languages in this context. For work in languages outside the twenty-four, the Akademi gives the Bhasha Samman, instituted in 1996.

The correct answer is B, 21. The Fellowship, not the annual award, is the highest honour the Sahitya Akademi confers, and its rules restrict it to twenty-one living writers at any one time. Because a new Fellow can therefore be elected only when a place falls vacant, Fellows are often described as the immortals of Indian literature.

Option A, 11, is not the figure for either honour. Option C, 24, is the number of languages in which the Akademi gives its annual awards, and mixing the two numbers is exactly the error the question is set to catch. Option D, 31, matches nothing in the Akademi's rules. The distinction to carry into the hall is that the Sahitya Akademi Award is given every year to about two dozen books, one in each recognised language, while the Fellowship is a standing honour for a person and is capped at twenty-one holders.

The correct answer is A, Amrita Pritam. She received the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1956 for her Punjabi poetry collection Sunehe, meaning messages, and was the first woman to be honoured by the Akademi. She later became the first Punjabi writer to win the Jnanpith, for the year 1981, so both her firsts are worth remembering as a pair.

Option B, Mahadevi Verma, the Hindi poet, won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1942, which is impossible since the Akademi did not exist then; she was honoured by it much later and won the Jnanpith for 1982. Option C, Ashapurna Devi, was the first woman to win the Jnanpith, for 1976, and that neighbouring first is the trap in this question. Option D, Kamala Das, who also wrote as Madhavikutty, won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1985 for her Malayalam short stories. Only Amrita Pritam holds the 1956 first.

The correct answer is B, Rabindra Bhavan, New Delhi. The building on Feroze Shah Road, named after Rabindranath Tagore, houses all three of India's national academies, the Sahitya Akademi for letters, the Lalit Kala Akademi for the fine arts and the Sangeet Natak Akademi for the performing arts. The Sahitya Akademi also runs regional offices in Kolkata, Mumbai, Bengaluru and Chennai.

Option A, Vigyan Bhavan, is the conference centre used for large government and international meetings. Option C, Shastri Bhavan, houses several Union ministries and their departments. Option D, Nirman Bhavan, houses the health and urban development ministries. All three are well known Delhi government buildings, which is what makes them serviceable distractors, but the literary address is Rabindra Bhavan, and its name itself is the clue.