HS Shivaprakash is an acclaimed poet, playwright and translator from Karnataka. He has several literary works to his credit, including seven anthologies of poetry and 12 plays. His translations and adaptations of Shakespeare's plays have been hugely popular. He won the Sahitya Akademi award in 2013 for Mabbina Haage Kabniveyassi, a book of poetry.
He explains why he's keeping his national awards.
We are here to talk about a very serious matter. Several eminent writers – whose ranks keep swelling – working in different languages have relinquished the awards conferred upon them by the Sahitya Akademi and two writers have already resigned from their posts in the General Council, as well as from their posts in the Advisory Board for English, protesting against the murder of Dr MM Kalburgi, a Sahitya Akademi awardee, and, in the words of Nayantara Sahgal, against a “vicious assault” on “India’s culture of diversity and debate”. Now, you are a winner of both a Sangeet Natak Akademi award and a Sahitya Akademi award and you are keeping them. Is that right?
That’s right.
I want to back up a little bit and talk about the past. You have been no stranger to outrage. You have gone through very difficult times in your life when your work was under attack. I refer, of course, to the vitriolic attacks against your play Mahachaitra based on the life of the Bhakti saint and reformer, Basava, in the mid-1990s, when the book was peremptorily withdrawn from university syllabi and you received threats of violent attack against your home and person. Do you want to talk about that time?
There is a very detailed description of that episode in a book called The Book On Trial: Fundamentalism and Censorship in India by Girja Kumar, the former librarian of JNU, who had done a lot of archival research in Karnataka. The book is available on the Internet, so I don’t want to go into too many details here. Suffice it to say that the protests against my play were very intense. They went on for two years, dividing the Karnataka Legislative Assembly – the ruling and opposition parties were divided on the book. Society was polarised on caste lines, some thirteen government buses were burnt by protesters, life in two districts of Karnataka came under to a near stand-still because of raastaa roko movements. I had to live incongnito for a while.
Very few writers came out in my support. Two Jnanpith Award winners of Karnataka who had a lot of clout in Delhi never spoke of it. No Akademi came to my support. It was only a handful of progressive writers and Dalit organisations that defended me. But for their support I’d have faced the same fate as Kalburgi’s. Because the protesters were out to eliminate me.
I was not supported by the literary intellectuals who bask in the limelight, but mostly by people’s organisations. Support also came from unexpected quarters. One BJP MP, Dr Jeevaraj Alva, said, “Whatever position my party might take, I will support Shivaprakash.” The speaker of the Karnataka Assembly issued a statement in my favour, and later faced a lot of trouble for it. One Congress leader said he was sorry that a fatwa could not be issued against me!
Some liberals among the mathaadhipatis, religious leaders, came out in support. So in these matters, I don’t think along party lines. Support can come from unexpected quarters.
But throughout the attack I never defended my book on the basis of “freedom of the writer”. Sitaram Yechury, the CPI(M) leader had come to Bangalore then and we shared a platform on one occasion. He spoke about my book and said that it was unfortunate the writer’s freedom was threatened.
I responded, saying, “The writer’s freedom is bound to be threatened in a world where the Dalit’s freedom is threatened, a woman’s freedom is threatened, an orphan’s freedom is threatened. We writers have not descended from seventh heaven with some special powers. Freedom to a writer is not given on a platter. We have to fight for it.”
I remember saying on that occasion that if people wish to support me, they are free to support me; if they wish to eliminate me, they are free to eliminate me. I have written what I deeply felt to be the truth. I am willing to bear the consequences of that, with the courage of my convictions. I believe in the responsibility of the writer. I have utmost responsibility to the past, present and future of my language community, and I stand by what I have written.
You moved to Delhi afterwards and for about five years you remained the editor of Indian Literature, the Sahitya Akademi’s bimonthly journal. So you have been part of the inner workings of the Akademi for a short while.
I always saw myself as an outsider to any establishment. For me to come into the Sahitya Akademi was an unusual thing. My approach to institutional organisations is: protest is one part of me; literature is one part of me. But if we keep out of institutions and don’t try to be a part of the meaningful work done by them, we will be left out, and the institution might even go into wrong hands. It is the best place to test our commitments.
In my time, I tried to do what had not been done till then. I brought out special issues on the marginalised languages of India, which were robustly developing into independent literatures, such as Garhwali, Kumaoni, Bodo and several other small languages. After this special issue, the Garhwali Sahitya Parishad was formed and it gave greater fillip to their burgeoning literature.
As an author, I would speak of the underdog. During my tenure as editor, I continued to do the same.
The Akademi offered a great deal of freedom. UR Ananthamurthy, who was then the President, and the Secretary, K Satchidanandan, never tried to curtail my freedom. However, when Ramakanta Rath, the Odia writer, became President, he tried to do just that, and I left soon after.
You’ve said just now that the writer is not a special creature descended from heaven. If the common man on the street is at risk, his freedom of speech is at risk, so also for the writer. So in a sense you are constructing a nuanced argument against the appropriating of a moral high ground on the part of writers – that we are writers, so we deserve a special status. But so many writers protesting and giving up their awards in the space of a week is something to be taken note of. How do we interpret this?
Two things. One, the fabric of democracy the world over has been very thin. It’s been ruptured so many times. In our country, it happened most notably during the Emergency. But countless other times too. And the literary community has stood against it.
To my mind, my job is to respond to such a situation as a creative writer. Not by issuing public statements and so forth. The state of anomie created by the Emergency wounded me so much that I poured all that into my writings, especially Mahachaitra. That is what gave it the energy.
I strongly feel that writers must respond with their art. A piece of literature must affect more strongly than a media report, or the Letters to the Editor column. These are important. A good piece of literature must touch people to the quick, and bring about a deeper change in consciousness.
Second, my point is if we return the award we also insinuate that the Sahitya Akademi awards are politically motivated. That is not the case at all. None of the awardees ever applied for the award. They have a very democratic process of selection and it involves many writers over many stages.
I believe the website of the Sahitya Akademi outlines the process. But let us return to the controversy. It is the role of the Sahitya Akademi that has been questioned. All these writers have shown their dissent by relinquishing the award the Sahitya Akademi gave them – one of the highest literary awards in the country. It is a strong statement. They got it at different points of time. Krishna Sobti received it in 1980, Nayantara Sahgal in 1986, and DN Ranganatha Rao got it in 2014 for translation. Several of these were books that had questioned the establishment, and were in fact awarded for being so. Do you think that in all this, we are somehow losing sight of the role the Sahitya Akademi may have played all these years in recognising the most notable books in all the Indian languages, in promoting those languages which did not have strong advocacy of its own, and in facilitating translation when no other publishers were interested in publishing translations?
I understand the anguish of these writers at a situation which is growing more and more irrational. But what they have ended up doing is that they have responded to an irrational situation in not a very rational way. I am just glad that many eminent writers, such as Paul Zacharia, MT Vasudevan Nair, KS ShankaraPillai and Sugatha Kumari –who is not just a poet but a firebrand social activist – have decided not to relinquish the award.
Tagore returned the Knighthood to the British Government because it was the British Government that was directly responsible for the Jallianwalla Bagh massacre. He didn’t return the Nobel! Now, if you look at the Sahitya Akademi, warts and all, compared to other academies and so on, it has the most democratic culture. The President and Vice-President are elected by writer-members and are, themselves,…
…all writers?
Writers who are not nominated but elected. Elected by a general council which also comprises writers. So that institution needs to be protected even more if democracy is under threat.
Now if all of us return the awards and everybody resigns, this will lead to some another kind of takeover of the institution. This has been resisted in the past. During one election, I was told that one particular bureaucrat from the Ministry of Culture had sent out instructions to the members, the sub-text of which was, “if you don’t elect so-and-so, we are going to take over the Academy.”
When was this?
I don’t want to mention specific names. But it was during a previous Congress regime. But beyond that, the government has never interfered in the Akademi. As the editor of Indian Literature, I have often rejected requests by bureaucrats of the culture ministry to publish their stuff. It is completely autonomous. If mistakes have taken place, it is because of the individual weaknesses of writers and officers. Not because of government interference.
Now I am myself very unhappy that the President of the Sahitya Akademi did not issue a powerful statement after the murder. He should have. But it’s not that the Sahitya Akademi has done nothing.
The Vice President, Chandrasekhar Kambar, organised a condolence meeting in Bangalore. And Satchidanandan, who is a member of the Executive Council, issued a statement, in his individual capacity of course. He knows the procedures – he was a very efficient Secretary of the Sahitya Akademi. He should have advised the President to call an Emergency Meeting. I don’t know why he resigned. He has not returned the award, I think?
No, he’s not yet returned the award.
It’s very sensible of him.
So, ultimately, we writers should ask what we have done rather than what the Sahitya Akademi has done. Ultimately, there has to be an element of humility. When people have heaped insults on my art, I have accepted it. When people have burnt my effigies, I have accepted it. When people have burnt hundreds of copies of my books, I have accepted it. When, for a change, somebody wants to give me an award, why should I not accept that too?
But there is another angle. The death of Dr Kalburgi was perhaps not getting the importance in the national media that it deserved. Maybe this helps in bringing some attention to the matter? We’ve seen before, whether in the Jessica Lall case or Priyadarshini Mattoo case, unless there is some pressure from society at large justice can seem far away. Maybe this is going to at least make policymakers as well as the general public more vigilant?
The circumstances around Prof Kalburgi’s murder remain conjectural. It happened in the wake of two other murders. The fact is that the Karnataka government is going slow over investigations. But there is another distinction I would like to make here.
Kalburgi was not a non-believer. He used to do shivalinga puja everyday, he used to recite the Prabhu Linga Leelai everyday. So it was not a black-and-white rationalism-versus-religion case as many people perceive it to be. Kalburgi was making a critique. It was a conflict between two differing interpretations of religion.
Of course we should recognise the danger we are in. When Raza Academy is attacking AR Rahman, who is a pious Muslim, a five-time namaazi, then of course we are in a situation where fundamentalism has become even more complex.
What difference will the actions of these writers make? You can say the Sahitya Akademi should have done more – though the Sahitya Akademi has not done nothing. But the investigation has to be carried out by the police department of Karnataka or by the CBI, and the culprits have to be punished.
What frightens me is that there is an all-round rise of the forces of intolerance – which cannot and must not be identified with only one group of people. Of course, we can criticise others. But haven’t we also contributed to this scenario? In the past when such incidents happened, didn’t we shut our eyes to them?
We also have to ask, why is it that the voices of intolerance are having a greater sway on people than the saner voices, we believe, of writers, or artists? Where have we failed? Have we depended too much on non-creative means of protest? Have we been protecting ourselves in a safe hothouse atmosphere in our own gardens? Taking ourselves far too seriously?
To me the murder of Kalburgi is as tragic as the case of the person who was lynched in Dadri. It is more important for writers to find ways using their special powers of creativity to heal the situation. Politicians have their roles; social reformers have their roles; we have ours. This is my feeling.
Do you think the writer has a role in dialogue?
Not just the writer, all of us. We can’t live in this constant state of…
…polarisation?
Polarisation. War. Ours has always been a culture of dialogue, samvada. We must bring it back. The writer has to take a lead. Let me tell you a story.
Once all the devatas were raising an army to fight the asuras. They had each brought his or her own weapon. But they soon discovered that an important goddess was missing. It was Sarasvati. They all went to her and urged her to join them in this fight against asuras. She refused.
“How many times have you been defeated by the asuras? How many times have they been defeated by you? Now you are defeated. Now they are defeated. The same bloodshed continues. It is meaningless. Call them for a dialogue.”
“We can’t!” said the devas. “I will preside,” she answered.
The asuras, when they hear Sarasvati refused to fight against them, agreed to participate in the dialogue. So Sarasvati mediated between the suras and asuras, through vaga-vada. That was when Sarasvati got the name, Vagavadini.
This story is very instructive. I think as writers we need to go beyond the dualistic language of politics – us versus them – and try to heal these terrible wounds.
Devapriya Roy’s first novel The Vague Woman’s Handbook (2011) was set in the eccentric world of the Indian Academy of Letters on Galileo Marg, a thinly veiled version of the SahityaAkademi which sits on Copernicus Road. They did not sue. Her other books include The Weight Loss Club (2013) and, with Saurav Jha, The Heat and Dust Project: the Broke Couple’s Guide to Bharat (2015).
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He explains why he's keeping his national awards.
We are here to talk about a very serious matter. Several eminent writers – whose ranks keep swelling – working in different languages have relinquished the awards conferred upon them by the Sahitya Akademi and two writers have already resigned from their posts in the General Council, as well as from their posts in the Advisory Board for English, protesting against the murder of Dr MM Kalburgi, a Sahitya Akademi awardee, and, in the words of Nayantara Sahgal, against a “vicious assault” on “India’s culture of diversity and debate”. Now, you are a winner of both a Sangeet Natak Akademi award and a Sahitya Akademi award and you are keeping them. Is that right?
That’s right.
I want to back up a little bit and talk about the past. You have been no stranger to outrage. You have gone through very difficult times in your life when your work was under attack. I refer, of course, to the vitriolic attacks against your play Mahachaitra based on the life of the Bhakti saint and reformer, Basava, in the mid-1990s, when the book was peremptorily withdrawn from university syllabi and you received threats of violent attack against your home and person. Do you want to talk about that time?
There is a very detailed description of that episode in a book called The Book On Trial: Fundamentalism and Censorship in India by Girja Kumar, the former librarian of JNU, who had done a lot of archival research in Karnataka. The book is available on the Internet, so I don’t want to go into too many details here. Suffice it to say that the protests against my play were very intense. They went on for two years, dividing the Karnataka Legislative Assembly – the ruling and opposition parties were divided on the book. Society was polarised on caste lines, some thirteen government buses were burnt by protesters, life in two districts of Karnataka came under to a near stand-still because of raastaa roko movements. I had to live incongnito for a while.
Very few writers came out in my support. Two Jnanpith Award winners of Karnataka who had a lot of clout in Delhi never spoke of it. No Akademi came to my support. It was only a handful of progressive writers and Dalit organisations that defended me. But for their support I’d have faced the same fate as Kalburgi’s. Because the protesters were out to eliminate me.
I was not supported by the literary intellectuals who bask in the limelight, but mostly by people’s organisations. Support also came from unexpected quarters. One BJP MP, Dr Jeevaraj Alva, said, “Whatever position my party might take, I will support Shivaprakash.” The speaker of the Karnataka Assembly issued a statement in my favour, and later faced a lot of trouble for it. One Congress leader said he was sorry that a fatwa could not be issued against me!
Some liberals among the mathaadhipatis, religious leaders, came out in support. So in these matters, I don’t think along party lines. Support can come from unexpected quarters.
But throughout the attack I never defended my book on the basis of “freedom of the writer”. Sitaram Yechury, the CPI(M) leader had come to Bangalore then and we shared a platform on one occasion. He spoke about my book and said that it was unfortunate the writer’s freedom was threatened.
I responded, saying, “The writer’s freedom is bound to be threatened in a world where the Dalit’s freedom is threatened, a woman’s freedom is threatened, an orphan’s freedom is threatened. We writers have not descended from seventh heaven with some special powers. Freedom to a writer is not given on a platter. We have to fight for it.”
I remember saying on that occasion that if people wish to support me, they are free to support me; if they wish to eliminate me, they are free to eliminate me. I have written what I deeply felt to be the truth. I am willing to bear the consequences of that, with the courage of my convictions. I believe in the responsibility of the writer. I have utmost responsibility to the past, present and future of my language community, and I stand by what I have written.
You moved to Delhi afterwards and for about five years you remained the editor of Indian Literature, the Sahitya Akademi’s bimonthly journal. So you have been part of the inner workings of the Akademi for a short while.
I always saw myself as an outsider to any establishment. For me to come into the Sahitya Akademi was an unusual thing. My approach to institutional organisations is: protest is one part of me; literature is one part of me. But if we keep out of institutions and don’t try to be a part of the meaningful work done by them, we will be left out, and the institution might even go into wrong hands. It is the best place to test our commitments.
In my time, I tried to do what had not been done till then. I brought out special issues on the marginalised languages of India, which were robustly developing into independent literatures, such as Garhwali, Kumaoni, Bodo and several other small languages. After this special issue, the Garhwali Sahitya Parishad was formed and it gave greater fillip to their burgeoning literature.
As an author, I would speak of the underdog. During my tenure as editor, I continued to do the same.
The Akademi offered a great deal of freedom. UR Ananthamurthy, who was then the President, and the Secretary, K Satchidanandan, never tried to curtail my freedom. However, when Ramakanta Rath, the Odia writer, became President, he tried to do just that, and I left soon after.
You’ve said just now that the writer is not a special creature descended from heaven. If the common man on the street is at risk, his freedom of speech is at risk, so also for the writer. So in a sense you are constructing a nuanced argument against the appropriating of a moral high ground on the part of writers – that we are writers, so we deserve a special status. But so many writers protesting and giving up their awards in the space of a week is something to be taken note of. How do we interpret this?
Two things. One, the fabric of democracy the world over has been very thin. It’s been ruptured so many times. In our country, it happened most notably during the Emergency. But countless other times too. And the literary community has stood against it.
To my mind, my job is to respond to such a situation as a creative writer. Not by issuing public statements and so forth. The state of anomie created by the Emergency wounded me so much that I poured all that into my writings, especially Mahachaitra. That is what gave it the energy.
I strongly feel that writers must respond with their art. A piece of literature must affect more strongly than a media report, or the Letters to the Editor column. These are important. A good piece of literature must touch people to the quick, and bring about a deeper change in consciousness.
Second, my point is if we return the award we also insinuate that the Sahitya Akademi awards are politically motivated. That is not the case at all. None of the awardees ever applied for the award. They have a very democratic process of selection and it involves many writers over many stages.
I believe the website of the Sahitya Akademi outlines the process. But let us return to the controversy. It is the role of the Sahitya Akademi that has been questioned. All these writers have shown their dissent by relinquishing the award the Sahitya Akademi gave them – one of the highest literary awards in the country. It is a strong statement. They got it at different points of time. Krishna Sobti received it in 1980, Nayantara Sahgal in 1986, and DN Ranganatha Rao got it in 2014 for translation. Several of these were books that had questioned the establishment, and were in fact awarded for being so. Do you think that in all this, we are somehow losing sight of the role the Sahitya Akademi may have played all these years in recognising the most notable books in all the Indian languages, in promoting those languages which did not have strong advocacy of its own, and in facilitating translation when no other publishers were interested in publishing translations?
I understand the anguish of these writers at a situation which is growing more and more irrational. But what they have ended up doing is that they have responded to an irrational situation in not a very rational way. I am just glad that many eminent writers, such as Paul Zacharia, MT Vasudevan Nair, KS ShankaraPillai and Sugatha Kumari –who is not just a poet but a firebrand social activist – have decided not to relinquish the award.
Tagore returned the Knighthood to the British Government because it was the British Government that was directly responsible for the Jallianwalla Bagh massacre. He didn’t return the Nobel! Now, if you look at the Sahitya Akademi, warts and all, compared to other academies and so on, it has the most democratic culture. The President and Vice-President are elected by writer-members and are, themselves,…
…all writers?
Writers who are not nominated but elected. Elected by a general council which also comprises writers. So that institution needs to be protected even more if democracy is under threat.
Now if all of us return the awards and everybody resigns, this will lead to some another kind of takeover of the institution. This has been resisted in the past. During one election, I was told that one particular bureaucrat from the Ministry of Culture had sent out instructions to the members, the sub-text of which was, “if you don’t elect so-and-so, we are going to take over the Academy.”
When was this?
I don’t want to mention specific names. But it was during a previous Congress regime. But beyond that, the government has never interfered in the Akademi. As the editor of Indian Literature, I have often rejected requests by bureaucrats of the culture ministry to publish their stuff. It is completely autonomous. If mistakes have taken place, it is because of the individual weaknesses of writers and officers. Not because of government interference.
Now I am myself very unhappy that the President of the Sahitya Akademi did not issue a powerful statement after the murder. He should have. But it’s not that the Sahitya Akademi has done nothing.
The Vice President, Chandrasekhar Kambar, organised a condolence meeting in Bangalore. And Satchidanandan, who is a member of the Executive Council, issued a statement, in his individual capacity of course. He knows the procedures – he was a very efficient Secretary of the Sahitya Akademi. He should have advised the President to call an Emergency Meeting. I don’t know why he resigned. He has not returned the award, I think?
No, he’s not yet returned the award.
It’s very sensible of him.
So, ultimately, we writers should ask what we have done rather than what the Sahitya Akademi has done. Ultimately, there has to be an element of humility. When people have heaped insults on my art, I have accepted it. When people have burnt my effigies, I have accepted it. When people have burnt hundreds of copies of my books, I have accepted it. When, for a change, somebody wants to give me an award, why should I not accept that too?
But there is another angle. The death of Dr Kalburgi was perhaps not getting the importance in the national media that it deserved. Maybe this helps in bringing some attention to the matter? We’ve seen before, whether in the Jessica Lall case or Priyadarshini Mattoo case, unless there is some pressure from society at large justice can seem far away. Maybe this is going to at least make policymakers as well as the general public more vigilant?
The circumstances around Prof Kalburgi’s murder remain conjectural. It happened in the wake of two other murders. The fact is that the Karnataka government is going slow over investigations. But there is another distinction I would like to make here.
Kalburgi was not a non-believer. He used to do shivalinga puja everyday, he used to recite the Prabhu Linga Leelai everyday. So it was not a black-and-white rationalism-versus-religion case as many people perceive it to be. Kalburgi was making a critique. It was a conflict between two differing interpretations of religion.
Of course we should recognise the danger we are in. When Raza Academy is attacking AR Rahman, who is a pious Muslim, a five-time namaazi, then of course we are in a situation where fundamentalism has become even more complex.
What difference will the actions of these writers make? You can say the Sahitya Akademi should have done more – though the Sahitya Akademi has not done nothing. But the investigation has to be carried out by the police department of Karnataka or by the CBI, and the culprits have to be punished.
What frightens me is that there is an all-round rise of the forces of intolerance – which cannot and must not be identified with only one group of people. Of course, we can criticise others. But haven’t we also contributed to this scenario? In the past when such incidents happened, didn’t we shut our eyes to them?
We also have to ask, why is it that the voices of intolerance are having a greater sway on people than the saner voices, we believe, of writers, or artists? Where have we failed? Have we depended too much on non-creative means of protest? Have we been protecting ourselves in a safe hothouse atmosphere in our own gardens? Taking ourselves far too seriously?
To me the murder of Kalburgi is as tragic as the case of the person who was lynched in Dadri. It is more important for writers to find ways using their special powers of creativity to heal the situation. Politicians have their roles; social reformers have their roles; we have ours. This is my feeling.
Do you think the writer has a role in dialogue?
Not just the writer, all of us. We can’t live in this constant state of…
…polarisation?
Polarisation. War. Ours has always been a culture of dialogue, samvada. We must bring it back. The writer has to take a lead. Let me tell you a story.
Once all the devatas were raising an army to fight the asuras. They had each brought his or her own weapon. But they soon discovered that an important goddess was missing. It was Sarasvati. They all went to her and urged her to join them in this fight against asuras. She refused.
“How many times have you been defeated by the asuras? How many times have they been defeated by you? Now you are defeated. Now they are defeated. The same bloodshed continues. It is meaningless. Call them for a dialogue.”
“We can’t!” said the devas. “I will preside,” she answered.
The asuras, when they hear Sarasvati refused to fight against them, agreed to participate in the dialogue. So Sarasvati mediated between the suras and asuras, through vaga-vada. That was when Sarasvati got the name, Vagavadini.
This story is very instructive. I think as writers we need to go beyond the dualistic language of politics – us versus them – and try to heal these terrible wounds.
Devapriya Roy’s first novel The Vague Woman’s Handbook (2011) was set in the eccentric world of the Indian Academy of Letters on Galileo Marg, a thinly veiled version of the SahityaAkademi which sits on Copernicus Road. They did not sue. Her other books include The Weight Loss Club (2013) and, with Saurav Jha, The Heat and Dust Project: the Broke Couple’s Guide to Bharat (2015).