Jnanpith Award – Highest Literary Honor of India

Jnanpith Award

• Jnanpith Award, also known as Gyanpeeth award, is the highest literary honor awarded in India.
• Jnanpith Award is conferred to the Indian authors who have made outstanding contributions to literature in any of the 22 languages mentioned in 8th schedule of Indian Constitution or English.
• This award is given by Bharatiya Jnanpith, one of the premier literary organizations of India.
• Some of the other literary awards conferred by Bharatiya Jnanpith are Jnangarima Award, Moortidevi Award, and Navlekhan Award.
• Following the Jnanpith award, the second-highest literary award in India is Sahitya Akademi Fellowship and the third highest literary award is Sahitya Akademi Award.
• G. Sankara Kurup (Malayalam Poet) was the first Indian author to receive the Jnanpith Award for his anthology Odakkuzhal and the first woman Jnanpith awardee was Ashapurna Devi, who was awarded for her novel Pratham Pratisruti.

About Highest Literary Honor of India

• As mentioned above, the Jnanpith Award is recognized as the highest literary award in India.
• This award is conferred to the Indian literary intellects of various languages who have contributed the best creations towards Indian literature.
• The Jnanpith Award is given by one of the premier literary organizations of the country, the Bharatiya Jnanpith.
• This award is felicitated only to the Indian authors (Indian nationals) and only for the literary works belonging to any of the 22 languages included under the eighth schedule of the Indian Constitution.
• From the 49th Jnanpith award onwards, literary works of the English language were also taken into consideration for the award.
• The award is given every year. One of the rules of the award is that once a language gets the award, for the next two years it is not eligible for the award.
• The recipient of the Jnanpith Award is presented with a citation, a bronze replica of Vagdevi (Goddess Saraswathi), and an amount of 11 lakh rupees.
• This award is not conferred posthumously.
• This award was instituted in the year 1961 and was first given to a Malayalam poet, G.Sankara Kurup in 1965 for this anthology of poems called Odakkuzhal.
• In 2019, Amitav Ghosh became the first English writer to receive the Jnanpith award.

Selection Process

• At first, proposals are submitted by various teachers, litterateurs, associations, organisations, universities, etc.
• There is a Language Advisory Committee for each language and it consists of three eminent literary scholars and critics. They either consider the works/writers suggested through proposals or any other writers or evaluate the literary creativity of an author based on the established criteria.
• The recommendations made by various Language Advisory Committees are placed before the Selection Board, which then makes a comparative evaluation of the recommendations and chooses the Jnanpith awardee for the year.

 

Important Firsts: First Jnanpith Awardee – G.Sankara Kurup (1965) First woman Jnanpith Awardee – Ashapurna Devi (1976) First English author to receive Jnanpith Award – Amitav Ghosh (2019)

 

Year wise List of Jnanpith Award Winner

• Here is a list of the Jnanpith awardees along with their language and year of award.

 

Language-wise First Winners

 

Some Interesting Facts about Gyanpeeth Award

• The well-known philanthropist and publishers of Times of India newspaper, Sahu Jain family (Sahushri Shantiprasad Jain and his wife Shanti Jain) established the Gyanpeeth trust in year 1961. This trust is the authority which confers this prestigious Gyanpeeth awards.
• This award is conferred to Indian citizens only.
• This award is presented for lifetime achievement works of authors and not on single writing.
• Out of the 23 eligible languages, literature works in Hindi have received the highest Jnanpith award. 11 times the Jnanpith Award had been conferred to the Hindi literary works. Following Hindi, Kannada works have received the second-highest number of Jnanpith awards.
• The first awardee G Shankar Kurup got this award in 1965 for his Malyalam poem collection named Odakkuzhal.
• The first Hindi author to get this author was Sumitranandan Pant in year 1968 for his work Chidambara.
• The first Bengali author to get this prestigious award was Tarasankar Bandhopadhyay in year 1966.
• K V Puttappa (nickname – Kuvempu) was the first person to get this award in Kannada Literature.
• The first author for Sanskrit language who got Gyanpeeth award is Satya Vrat Shastri in year 2006.
• The only author belonging to Punjabi literature to get this award was Amrita Pritam in 1981 for his work Kagaj ke Canvas.
• In 2018, Amitav Ghosh became the first English writer to receive the Jnanpith award.

 

So, this was all about the important Jnanpith Award – Highest Literary Awards of India. In the Next Post (Click Here), we will learn about the Nobel Prize.

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