'Jnanpith award', the highest literary award in India, is sponsored by _________.

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

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.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) 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.  (b) 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.  (d) 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.

Concept: 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.

State PCS 2021 Q99 — Art & Culture PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2021 Q99 — Art & Culture PYQ with Answer