The first idea
Although fully funded by the Ministry of Culture, the Sahitya Akademi is nevertheless an autonomous organisation, meant to be run by writers and not bureaucrats. In formal terms, the Government of India decided to establish a National Academy of Letters, which would be called the Sahitya Akademi, through its Resolution No. F. 6-4/51-G. 2. (A) dated December 15, 1952. And the government promised no interference.
The first General Council of the Akademi was constituted with a formidable line-up of men – though not many women – of letters: S Radhakrishnan, Abul Kalam Azad, C Rajagopalachari, KM Panikkar, KM Munshi, VN Menon, Zakir Husain, Humayun Kabir, Suniti Kumar Chatterjee, Umashankar Joshi, Jainendra Kumar, Nilmani Phukan, Hazari Prasad Dwivedi, Masti Venkatesa Iyengar, V Raghavan, Mahadevi Varma, Rajsekhar Bose, D.V. Gundappa, Ram Dhari “Dinkar” and Banarsidas Chaturvedi, among others.
The first day
The Sahitya Akademi was formally inaugurated on March 12, 1954, in the Central Hall of the Parliament, and the welcome address was delivered by Maulana Abul Kalam Azad. He commented on the use of the word “Akademi”.
“We are all aware that this term was first used for the school that Plato established. The garden in which the school was set up was named after an ancient hero Akademus, and it was after him that the school came to be known as the Academy. Whatever the origin of the name, it has, in course of time, acquired a connotation of its own, which, as far as we are aware, cannot be expressed by any single word. What do we mean by an Academy? Is it a school? The answer is ‘no’. Is it a research institute? Again the answer is ‘no’. Is it then an association of writers and authors? Still the answer is in the negative. If, however, it be asked whether it possesses the attributes of all of them, the answer must be an emphatic ‘yes’.”
The first meeting
On the same day – March 12, 1954 – the first meeting of the General Council was held under the chairmanship of Jawaharlal Nehru, and the first Executive Board was constituted. Dr S Radhakrishnan, philosopher-statesman and then the Vice President of India, was unanimously elected as the Vice-Chairman of the Akademi. (Later on, the Chairman and Vice-chairman of the Akademi were redesignated President and Vice-President.) Dr Radhakrishnan had earlier in the day delivered the inaugural address.
“The phrase Sahitya Akademi combines two words. “Sahitya” is Sanskrit and ‘Academy’ is Greek. This name suggests our universal outlook and aspiration. Sahitya is a literary composition; Academy is an assembly of men who are interested in the subject. So Sahitya Akademi will be an assembly of all those who are interested in creative and critical literature. It is the purpose of this Akademi to recognise men of achievement in letters, to encourage men of promise in letters, to educate public taste, and to improve standards of literature and literary criticism… You remember the remark once made by Napoleon: ‘I hear there are no poets in France today. What is the Minister of Interior doing about it?’ The Minister of the Interior can subsidise versifiers but he cannot create poets. Poets cannot be made to order.”
The first action
On March 13, 1954, the day after the formal inauguration of the Sahitya Akademi, Jawaharlal Nehru wrote a letter to Krishna Kripalani, the first Secretary of the Akademi:
“My dear Krishna,
I wonder if you know the case of Nirala, a Hindi poet of Allahabad. He has done good work in the past and even now sometimes writes well in his lucid moments… His old books are popular and some, I believe, are textbooks. But, in his folly or extremity, he has sold all those books for a song to various publishers getting just 25 or 30 or 50 rupees for a book. The whole copyright was supposed to be sold. Publishers have made large sums of money and continue to make it and he gets nothing for it and practically starves. This is a scandalous case of a publisher exploiting a writer shamelessly. Personally I think that, even in strict law, this kind of arrangement might be capable of being challenged.
Anyhow, this leads me to say that our Akademi should immediately think about an amendment of the copyright law…
Meanwhile, Nirala deserves some financial help. It is no good giving the help to him directly because he gives it away to others immediately. In fact, he gives away his clothes, his last shirt and everything. Mahadevi Varma and some others in Allahabad of a Literary Association there try to look after him and give him some money too. I think we should arrange to pay Rs 100 a month for him and this money should be sent to Mahadevi Verma.
This might well be out of the fund which the Education Ministry has for such purposes. Will you please mention this case to Maulana Saheb and, if he agrees, his Ministry can process it.”
The first resistance
The Sahitya Akademi was registered as a society on January 7, 1956, under the Societies Registration Act, 1860. There were at least three committees appointed by the government of India – the Bhabha Committee in 1964, the Khosla Committee in 1970 and the Haksar Committee in 1988 – to review the workings of the Akademi. Wherever the recommendations of the Committees tended to interfere, the writers at the helm opposed it tooth and nail.
In 1976, the Government of India had introduced a Bill “to provide for the incorporation, regulation and winding up of central societies”. The President Suniti Kumar Chatterjee, the Vice President Srinivasa Iyengar and the Secretary RS Kelkar addressed the Parliamentary Committee and advocated the autonomy of the Akademi, urging against the passing of this bill. Eventually, the Bill was allowed to lapse.
The first multilingual play
Today, the Sahitya Akademi organises a programme promoting literature in all the bhashas every 19 hours, and publishes a book in the Indian languages every 16 hours.
The first artist
The logo of the Sahitya Akademi was designed by Satyajit Ray.
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).
