A Sahitya Akademi Awardee Explains Why it was Necessary for Him to Return the Award

On 11 October 2015, GN Devy, a renowned literary critic and activist joined the rising chorus of authors returning their Sahitya Akademi awards. Devy, a 2014 Padma Shri recipient for his work on dying languages and nomadic tribes, returned the Sahitya Akademi award he had received in 1993 for his book After Amnesia. He is the founder of the Bhasha Research and Publication Center in Vadodara and the Adivasi Academy in Tejgarh, which works with tribal education. In 2010, Devy led the People’s Linguistic Survey of India, for which he researched and documented 780 living Indian languages. Last year, he spoke at Central University of Kerala on “aphasia” and the human acquisition of memory through evolution. Last week, Surabhi Vaya, an independent journalist, met Devy at his residence in Vadodara. Vaya spoke to Devy about his decision to return the award and asked him about “the moment of reckoning” he had referred to in his letter to the Akademi. Reproduced below, is an edited excerpt from their conversation.

Earlier this year, when the renowned Tamil language scholar Perumal Murugan announced he would stop writing I felt as though someone had driven a nail through my heart. It was like physical pain. Various groups had threatened Murugan, a brilliant man, after his book Madhorubhagan (One Part Woman) was translated and released in English.

When an author says he is “dead as a writer,” it is a painful moment. It makes you think about the genesis of such intolerance. I had felt the same pain when Babri was demolished, when Sudheerna Kulkarni’s face was blackened recently and when the Syrian child washed up on the shores of Europe, running from an intolerant society. After all, I am a human being, not a bundle of logical premises or sentences. We feel the stab whenever there is a human tragedy because we are driven with just as much emotion as intellect.

Murugan’s response to stop writing and withdraw his entire body of work is part of what I term “aphasia”: the inability to speak. The build-up has been slow: one prime minister or regime can’t be held responsible for it. After all, what is the difference between the economics of Manmohan Singh and Narendra Modi? They are the same: the increase in consumerism; greed; erosion of humanitarian values; alienation from nature; and most of all, an absence of respect for life. It is a symptom of a world transitioning into a “post-human” existence of sorts.

In this phase, society starts permitting artificial memory to perform its mighty functions. Structures such as governments and nations push to reduce diversity. Just look at the rapid death of human languages in the last 30 years. It is a window into what the future will be. Aphasia is becoming a necessary ingredient in economic and political structures. It looks to kill imagination and replace it with selective memory. We have already started imposing aphasia in various forms, in schools and universities, by legislating language as medium of instruction, by telling writers to stop discussing anything different from the norm.

There has been a steady erosion of tolerance in our society. To face this, we will have to make our statements. I recently made mine, when I returned the Sahitya Akademi award. It had been a month since Kannada scholar and rationalist MM Kalburgi was brutally gunned down in his home. What was especially striking was the cruelty and violence involved. I wanted to support other writers taking a stand against an increasingly intolerant society, driving towards speechlessness.

I had seen Kalburgi three weeks before he was killed. I was in Dharwad—his hometown—to deliver the first memorial VK Gokak lecture, named after the former Sahitya Akademi president. A day after he was killed, I was on stage again, this time at an Akademi organised seminar in Nagpur. Presiding over the inaugural session, I noticed that no speaker before me as much as mentioned Kalburgi.

So when my turn came to speak, I asked the audience’s permission to observe two minutes of silence in Kalburgi’s memory. I had made it clear that there was no compulsion to join me. Yet, almost instantly, everybody stood up. Considering this was Nagpur surely the audience was composed of people different political parties—it is a place associated with RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh). But even there, people felt bad about Kalburgi's assassination.

In October, a month after this seminar, things became clearer to me. I noticed writers were giving back their awards in protest, citing the murders of Kalburgi and other thinkers: Govind Pansare and Narendra Dhabolkar. I wanted to give the normal law machinery a chance to function before taking a stance. But I noticed that there had been no progress in all three cases. These are thinkers, who seem to have been targeted for their contributions to society. How could Sahitya Akademi remain silent? Not thinking of these deaths as a tragedy is a serious lapse and negligence of one’s conscience. It is an implicit allegiance to the creeping aphasia. So I decided to stand in solidarity with others who had spoken up and sent back my award: a cheque and the lovely plaque, which had stayed with me for over 20 years.

I am reminded of the ‘90s when there was great concern about the Babri Masjid demolition and what had happened to the Sikhs in the ‘80s. I was a young scholar in those days, thinking about those issues. I devoted two years of my life to studying the phenomenon of increased violence and concluded that constructive work is the best counter. There has been that concern all through. All my life’s work has been aimed at conserving diversity by preserving tribal culture and disappearing languages. It made returning the award a mode of protest.

I have not heard from the Akademi at all. I intimated them about my decision on Sunday but they haven’t responded to it. I sent my letter to the president and vice-president, but it has not even been acknowledged. The only responses have been in the public domain, first from our culture minister, Mahesh Sharma, and later finance minister, Arun Jaitley. But I didn’t expect them to respond because I didn’t even write to them. They think this is a political strategy but it’s actually a cultural phenomenon. This is the faintest beginning of a new phase in our literary history where writers take on social causes in a serious manner, not as propaganda. Tomorrow, these political parties may go, but this change in literary sensibility will remain for a few centuries. It is a spontaneous response to aphasia, to intolerance, to violence.

This is a watershed moment in Indian literary history. Is this too tall a claim? Anyone would say it is, at least today. Going by my understanding of literary, social and cultural history, this is the beginning of a shift. After all, we didn’t accept the idea of globalisation after holding a referendum. It's not like majority voted for some idea: it came through economic thought.

Two days after I declared my decision to return the award, an Intelligence Bureau official came to see me. She was a young woman; polite and unaware of how writers, literature and the Akademi work. She wanted to understand what I felt returning the award would accomplish and whether this was an organised effort by writers to “spread disaffection in society.”

See, that’s the beauty of it: there has not been any consultation among the writers who have returned their awards. We are responding to increased instances of intolerance that jeopardise our diversity. We are not a gang, mobilising ourselves. This will have its political expression, but that alone is not this movement. We don’t want to meet the prime minister to discuss the situation with him. None of us have created a list of demands. We made a statement by returning the award. It’s like writing a poem. When a poet writes, his job is done. It is not his work to assess impact. We're not writers part of a movement; this is a literary moment, a reminder that literature is perennial.

The reducing tolerance and increased violence is detrimental to our democracy. The great idea of India is to let everybody exist. It’s as simple as that. We like our constitution; it has lofty principles of diversity, democracy and tolerance. We are only drawing attention to those principles. We're not even against the Sahitya Akademi or any one person or any institution. We have protested, spoken up against the reducing tolerance for thought and expression. We are whistleblowers. Call us whistleblowers.

Across the world, most democratic states are turning dictatorial. India is no exception. But in some nations, the process is calibrated; it is slow and the effort is not to harm humans. In other states it is accelerated. We are in the accelerated category: our aphasia is consistent with it. That's why the space for free expression is shrinking.

The response of the state and politicians, who allege this is a conspiracy, especially since the Bihar elections are going on, is understandable. Whenever a new literary movement comes up, there is resistance. It needs to settle down to produce something meaningful and attract the attention of readers. Each one of us will translate this anxiety in a creative manner in the years to come.

Also, no one connected to literature today, in any capacity, can remain untouched by what is happening. Like me, they may take positions: returning or not returning awards. But they cannot remain indifferent to the beating down of diversity that is burgeoning. I couldn’t have remained silent at such a moment.

As told to Surabhi Vaya.