MPSC 2021 Prelims Paper-I · Question 99 of 100

Correct — option (3), Bharatiya Jnanpith, a cultural organisation. The Jnanpith Award is not a government honour. It is conferred by Bharatiya Jnanpith, a literary and research trust founded on 18 February 1944 by the industrialist Sahu Shanti Prasad Jain of the Sahu Jain family together with his wife Rama Jain, and set up as a non-profit body for the study and publication of Indian literature and ancient texts. The award itself was instituted in 1961 and first presented in 1965, to G. Sankara Kurup for the Malayalam collection 'Odakkuzhal'. Its terms are worth knowing, because the Commission asks about them as readily as about the recipients. It is bestowed only on Indian writers writing in the Indian languages included in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution and in English; the writer must be living at the time of selection, since there is no posthumous conferral; and it consists of a citation plaque, a cash prize and a bronze replica of Saraswati, the goddess of knowledge, with the cash component revised to eleven lakh rupees. Bharatiya Jnanpith also confers the Moortidevi Award, which is a separate honour of the same trust and a common distractor in its own right. For a candidate in Maharashtra the list of Marathi recipients is essential: Vishnu Sakharam Khandekar in 1974 for 'Yayati', Vishnu Vaman Shirwadkar, better known by his pen name Kusumagraj, in 1987, Vinda Karandikar in 2003, and Bhalchandra Nemade in 2014. The stem calls the Jnanpith 'the highest literary award in India', which is the way it is habitually described, and the point the question tests is who stands behind it — a private cultural trust rather than the Union or a State government. The paper prints 'Jnanpith award' with a lower-case a, and its four options one to a line in a single column; both are reproduced as printed.

• (1)Government of India — This is the most attractive wrong option, because the Government of India does confer literary honours and because an award described as India's highest is naturally assumed to be a national one. But the Government's literary award is the Sahitya Akademi Award, given by the Sahitya Akademi — the country's national academy of letters, established in 1954 as an autonomous body funded by the Government — in each of the languages it recognises, along with its own translation, Bal Sahitya and Yuva Puraskar awards and its highest honour, the Sahitya Akademi Fellowship. The Jnanpith is a different thing entirely: a privately endowed prize given by a trust, with its own selection board, its own eligibility rules and its own cash component of eleven lakh rupees. Keeping the two apart is the whole content of this question, and it also answers the reverse form, which asks which award the Sahitya Akademi confers.
• (2)Government of Maharashtra — State governments in India confer their own literary honours, and Maharashtra is no exception, but the Jnanpith is not among them; it is national in reach and private in origin. The option is placed to catch a candidate who connects the award with Maharashtra because Marathi writers have won it — and they have, four times: V. S. Khandekar in 1974 for 'Yayati', Kusumagraj in 1987, Vinda Karandikar in 2003 and Bhalchandra Nemade in 2014. Those four names are far more likely to be examined than the sponsoring body, and they should be learnt with their years. But a State's writers winning an award does not make the State the awarding authority, and the confusion between a recipient's home and an award's sponsor is one the Commission exploits regularly.
• (4)Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan — Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan is a real and well-known Indian educational and cultural trust, founded in 1938 by K. M. Munshi — the lawyer, writer and member of the Constituent Assembly — and it runs schools, colleges and publishing programmes across the country. It does not confer the Jnanpith Award. The option works on the similarity of the two names, both beginning with 'Bharatiya' and both belonging to private cultural trusts of roughly the same era, and it is a good example of a distractor built on the shape of a name rather than on any substantive confusion. The correct pairing is that Bharatiya Jnanpith gives the Jnanpith Award and the Moortidevi Award, while Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan is an educational and cultural institution with no connection to either.

India's principal literary honours come from three different kinds of body and the difference is exactly what this question tests. The Jnanpith Award is private: it is conferred by Bharatiya Jnanpith, a trust founded in 1944 by Sahu Shanti Prasad Jain and Rama Jain, instituted in 1961 and first presented in 1965 to G. Sankara Kurup for the Malayalam work 'Odakkuzhal'. It goes only to Indian writers working in the languages of the Eighth Schedule and in English, only to living writers, and it consists of a citation, a bronze Saraswati and a cash prize revised to eleven lakh rupees; the same trust gives the Moortidevi Award. The Sahitya Akademi Award is public but at arm's length: the Sahitya Akademi, established in 1954, is India's national academy of letters, an autonomous body funded by the Government of India, and it makes annual awards in each of the languages it recognises as well as conferring its Fellowship. State governments form the third tier, conferring their own literary honours on writers in the State language. Alongside these sit privately endowed prizes such as the Saraswati Samman. For MPSC the Marathi thread through all of this matters most: four Marathi writers have taken the Jnanpith — V. S. Khandekar in 1974, Kusumagraj in 1987, Vinda Karandikar in 2003 and Bhalchandra Nemade in 2014 — and their names, works and years are the sort of detail the Commission asks about directly.

Awards questions in MPSC papers are usually about the recipient, and questions about the sponsoring body are the second-order version that catches candidates who have prepared only the winners. The construction here is deliberate: the option set does not offer three wrong recipients, it offers three wrong sponsors, two of them governments and one a similarly named cultural trust. That tests whether a candidate understands the institutional map of Indian letters rather than merely a list of names. The wider lesson is worth generalising to every award in the syllabus. For each one, a candidate should be able to say who confers it, when it was instituted, what it consists of, who is eligible and who won it recently; those five facts make every form of the question answerable. In this paper the point is reinforced by the neighbourhood — the Booker Prize, the Academy Awards and the Nobel Peace Prize all appear within a dozen questions of this one, and each of them has a distinct sponsoring body, a distinct eligibility rule and a distinct decision procedure. A candidate who has organised his notes by award rather than by year will find that block of questions almost free.

• The Jnanpith Award is conferred by Bharatiya Jnanpith, a private non-profit literary and research trust founded on 18 February 1944 by the industrialist Sahu Shanti Prasad Jain and his wife Rama Jain. It is not a government award.
• The award was instituted in 1961 and first presented in 1965 to G. Sankara Kurup for the Malayalam work 'Odakkuzhal'.
• It is bestowed only on Indian writers writing in the Indian languages included in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution and in English, and only on living writers — there is no posthumous conferral.
• It consists of a citation plaque, a bronze replica of Saraswati and a cash prize, the cash component having been revised to eleven lakh rupees; Bharatiya Jnanpith also confers the Moortidevi Award.
• Four Marathi writers have received the Jnanpith — Vishnu Sakharam Khandekar in 1974 for 'Yayati', Vishnu Vaman Shirwadkar 'Kusumagraj' in 1987, Vinda Karandikar in 2003 and Bhalchandra Nemade in 2014.

• Assuming that an award described as India's highest must be conferred by the Government. The Jnanpith comes from a private trust; the Government's literary honour is the Sahitya Akademi Award
• Confusing Bharatiya Jnanpith with Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan. The names are similar, both are private cultural trusts, and only the first confers the Jnanpith
• Concluding from the number of Marathi laureates that a State government is involved. The home of the recipients says nothing about the sponsor of an award
• Overlooking the eligibility rules. The Jnanpith goes only to writers in the Eighth Schedule languages and English, and only to living writers

Literary awards recur in MPSC papers every year, and the Commission moves between three levels of question. The first asks who won a named award in a named year, which is pure current affairs. The second, as here, asks who confers the award, which tests the institutional map rather than the news. The third asks a rule or a component — the eligibility, the cash prize, the emblem, whether posthumous conferral is possible — and it is the level most candidates skip. The Marathi dimension is the one certainty in this topic: the Commission will ask about Marathi writers and their honours in some form, so the four Jnanpith laureates in Marathi, their years and their major works are compulsory learning for this examination. Prepare each award as a small block — sponsor, year instituted, eligibility, components, recent and Marathi recipients — and every level of question is covered by the same notes.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which of the following Marathi writers was the first to receive the Jnanpith Award ?

  • (a)Vishnu Vaman Shirwadkar 'Kusumagraj'
  • (b)Vishnu Sakharam Khandekar
  • (c)Vinda Karandikar
  • (d)Bhalchandra Nemade

  Answer(b) Vishnu Sakharam Khandekar. He received the Jnanpith in 1974 for his novel 'Yayati' and was the first Marathi writer to be honoured with it. Kusumagraj followed in 1987, Vinda Karandikar in 2003 and Bhalchandra Nemade in 2014, making four Marathi laureates in all. The award is conferred by Bharatiya Jnanpith, a private trust, on living Indian writers working in the languages of the Eighth Schedule and in English.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which of the following statements about the Jnanpith Award is correct ?

  • (a)It is conferred annually by the Sahitya Akademi
  • (b)It may be conferred posthumously on any Indian writer
  • (c)It is conferred by Bharatiya Jnanpith on living Indian writers working in the Eighth Schedule languages and English
  • (d)It is restricted to writers in Hindi and Sanskrit

  Answer(c) It is conferred by Bharatiya Jnanpith on living Indian writers working in the Eighth Schedule languages and English. Bharatiya Jnanpith is a private literary and research trust founded in 1944; the award was instituted in 1961 and first given in 1965 to G. Sankara Kurup for the Malayalam work 'Odakkuzhal', and it consists of a citation, a bronze Saraswati and a cash prize revised to eleven lakh rupees. There is no posthumous conferral, and the Sahitya Akademi Award is a separate honour given by a different body.