Sahitya Akademi expresses solidarity with writers
NEW DELHI/THIRUVANANTHAPURAM/ PANAJI: In a major development that has averted a possible return of the 2015 awardwapsi protest, the Sahitya Akademi has vociferously expressed solidarity with writers after at least 26 heavyweight authors urged India’s National Academy of Letters to condemn repeated ongoing threats to Goa’s award winning writer Damodar Mauzo and Malayalam novelist S Hareesh.
“I must make it clear that the Akademi condemns all attacks against writers and I am saddened by the news of Mauzo and Hareesh. I condemn these threats in strongest of words,” Sahitya Akademi President Chandrashekhar Kambar said over telephone from Bangalore.
The 81-year-old said that he will be writing to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and draw his attention to the “pressures and attacks” writers like Hareesh are facing. I am also trying to speak to the concerned minister (Culture Minister Mahesh Sharma) but he is not available,” he said.
“The Akademi is meant to uphold free speech and I will not hesitate. I will talk,” Kambar asserted.
On being reminded that the same body took as many as 54 days to publicly condemn the killings of rational thinkers and writers M M Kalburgi, Govind Pansare and Narendra Dabholkar that had triggered massive protests by writers bringing the Akademi to a standstill in 2015, Kambar said that the past should be left behind as the Akademi was on the cusp of revival.
In an official statement released on Thursday afternoon, the Akademi reiterated that it “condemns all attacks on writers, thinkers and poets, not only in India but all over the world”. It said that the Akademi received “the news of threat” to writers with “great pain”.
“Sahitya Akademi strongly condemns these attacks and stand behind the writers’ community of India,” read the one-paragraph press statement from the Sahitya Akademi, signed by Kambar.
A collegium of heavyweight and multiple award winning writers such as Nayantara Sahgal, Keki Daruwalla, K Satchidanandan, Ritu Menon, Jerry Pinto and Meena Alexander, among several others, had written to the Akademi under the banner of Indian Writers’ Forum, urging it to condemn such instances.
The writers’ forum pointed out that the Akademi had failed to take a “bold, public stand” in 2015. “We hope this would not happen in your dispensation and that this big literary institution will take a brave stand now,” the letter read.