Sahitya Akademi awards conferred on 24 artistes

NEW DELHI: Twenty-four writers in as many Indian languages were honoured with the Sahitya Akademi awards for 2005 at the Kamani Auditorium here on Tuesday. The awardees included only two women writers.

Addressing the gathering as the chief guest, Rajya Sabha member and noted scholar, Karan Singh, said that though the value system was being eroded the country was forging ahead as a nation.

President of the Sahitya Akademi, Gopi Chand Narang, called upon the writers to bring the disturbed social, political and religious values back on track. He warned that there was a threat to cultural ethosin the current milieu of politicisation and mindless consumerism.

While the youngest writer to receive the award for his work in Santhali language was 42-year-old Jadumani Besra, the oldest recipient was 76-year-old Nepalese writer Krishna Singh Moktan.

G. Thilakavati and Abburi Chaya Devi were the only women to get the award for their works in Tamil and Telugu respectively. Vice-president of the Akademi, Sunil Bandopadhyaya, expressed concern over the dwindling number of women writers in the past few years.

Marathi writer Arun Kolatkar was given the award posthumously. Other recipients included Manohar Shyam Joshi for Hindi, Jabir Hussain (Urdu), Suresh Dalal (Gujarati), Yeshe Dorjee Thongchi (Assamese), Raghvendra Patil (Kannada), Chetan Swami (Rajasthan), Dholan Rahi (Sindhi), G.V. Kakkanandan (Malayalam), N. Shivdas (Konkani), Gurbachan Singh Bhullar (Punjabi), Krishna Sharma (Dogri), Vivekananda Thakur (Maithili), Ramchandra Behera (Oriya), M. Nabakishore Singh (Manipuri) and Hamidi Kashmir for Kashmiri.