Re-Contextualizing Sahitya Akademi's Objective: A Critico-Epistemic Re-Evaluation of Akademi Award Winning Texts[dagger] (2013)

The objective of establishing national identity in the period soon after de-colonization at the time of setting up Sahitya Akademi has over the years turned outdated and irrelevant. At the time of emergence of India as an independent nation, there was need for asserting cultural homogeneity of the country and that objective was sought to be realized through the awards presented by the Akademi. But as times rolled by, the objective was rarely observed in practice as evident in the works selected for the awards instituted by it. The paper examines three novels selected by the Akademi for its awards: Nirmal Verma's The Last Wilderness (2002), ManikBandyopadhyaya's The Puppets ' Tale (2008) andT S Pillai's Chemmeen (2004). The criterion which determined the quality of the novels was not regional specificity, but their over-reaching literary merit in portraying the cultural ethos specific to their region and language, although they occasionally reach out pan-Indian cultural ambience. The novels exhibit global contemporaneity and transcendental creativity.Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future, / And time future contained in time past. / If all time is eternally present / All time is unredeemable.Eliot (1968)I salute you Bengal, my beautiful mother, / The soothing breeze on the banks of the Ganga comforts me. / The open fields-the forehead of the sky-kiss the dust of your feet / Little abodes of peace are your villages / Nestling in dark and intimate shadows.Tagore (2008, p. 153)It was in 1954 that Akademi was established in India. It was a time when the latter, the freshly de-colonized India, reflected a kind of postcoloniality, yet to prevail as a discursive utterance in the 'public sphere' (Johnson, 2012, p. 10), the literary salons that existed at that point of time, but sensed, with akind of Althusserian 'obviousness' (Buchanan, 2008) in 'historico-nationalist' terms. Or rather it stood as an 'affect' (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p. 393) seeking release through the 'desiring ontologies' (Buchanan, 2008) that the former had put in place then.1 Though postcoloniality is to a large extent identified with, if not rather spontaneously sensed, in a similar way by the 'hoi-polloi' nowadays, for what we may call the 'futural community in the making' stands far removed from what postcoloniality, as a term, attempts to bind them to and equally pursue them to reclaim, the nation's colonial past and the 'camivalesque moments' of de-colonization-moments that fashioned our nation's long cherished 'pluralistic homogeneity'. However, it must be said that this postcoloniality, spontaneously sensed in 1950s and effortlessly identified with nowadays by the people of India, stands sharply distinct from its critico-epistemic variant. This is what the 'third world' intellectuals had fashioned in the West, which rather flauntingly appropriated the Western epistemic models. It is of a kind whose current redundancy is lamented in the academic circles, and whose 'pitfalls '2 the academic community, in particular that of the developing nations, seek to therapeutically address so it can stand as the sole 'third-worldist pro-marxist resistant epistemic' alternative to the 'concentric immanent globed existence' that the 'global rhizomic flow' culminates in.3 So what was this 'spontaneously sensed postcoloniality' of 1950s all about? In fact, it 'opened up a space' where sovereignty was understood in terms of a 'clear break from the colonial past'. It was a time when policies, acts, charters stood dedicated to the process of consolidation of nationalist identity, which had perhaps begun when India chose to fight a 'collective battle ' against the official colonial rule. No wonder then, the aim that Akademi was both geared to, and driven by, during these times was to reaffirm what perhaps stood freshly consolidated-'leading a haloed existence', as one might say-then in the unified, yet 'contingently ironic national consciousness' of our divergent populace, the cultural unity of India. …