Nearly 40 awards returned during Award Wapsi, says govt. Actual list has 40 more

The Union government believes that nearly 40 writers returned their awards during the Award Wapsi campaign in 2015. However, this number pertains to only those who had been awarded by the Sahitya Akademi. The overall count is likely to be much higher.

Minister of Culture Mahesh Sharma has told the Lok Sabha that these writers returned their awards claiming "that there was an attack on their freedom of expression and the Akademi kept silent on the issue".

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Sharma said in the last three years, 39 writers returned their Sahitya Akademi awards. The Akademi conferred a total of 280 awards in this period.

Following Award Wapsi, the Akademi convened a special Executive Board meeting on 23 October in 2015 and another meeting on 17 December.

In these meetings, a resolution was passed to request the writers "to reconsider their decision". Only one writer, Nand Bhardwaj of Rajasthan, accepted the request and took back his decision of returning the award.

Here is the complete list of the 39 writers, as maintained by the Akademi, who returned their awards -

Hindi

1. Uday Prakash

2. Ashok Vajpeyi

3. Krishna Sobti

4. Mangalesh Dabral

5. Kashinath Singh

6. Rajesh Joshi

English

7. GN Devy

8. Nayantara Sahgal

9. Keki Daruwalla

Gujrati

10. Anil Joshi

Punjabi

11. Waryam Singh Sandhu

12. Surjit Patar

13. Jaswinder

14. Gurbachan Bhullar

15. Atamjit

16. Baldev Singh

17. Darshan Butter

18. Ajmer Singh Aulakh

19. Mohan Bhandari

Rajasthani

20. Nand Bhardwaj

21. Ambikadutt

Kannada

22. Kum Veerbhadrappa

23. Rahamat Tarikere

24. Devanuru Mahadeva

Kashmiri

25. Ghulam Nabi Khayal

26. Margoob Banihali

Urdu

27. Munawwar Rana

28. Khaleel Mamoon

Malayalam

29. Sara Joseph

Assamese

30. Homen Borgohain

31. Nirupama Borgohain

Telugu

32. Katyayani Vidmahe

TRANSLATION PRIZE

Hindi

33. Chaman Lal

Kannada

34. GN Ranganatha Rao

Marathi

35. Ibrahim Afghan

YUVA PURASKAR

English

36. Aman Sethi

Punjabi

37. Pargat Singh Satauj

BAL SAHITYA PURASKAR

Telugu

38. M. Bhoopal Reddy

GOLDEN JUBILEE AWARD

39. Mandakranta Sen

However, this list doesn't really capture the full punch of the campaign since those who returned their awards included many more than just awardees of the Akademi.

These included several filmmakers and artists as well. Some of these names were -

1. Arundhati Roy, who returned her National Award for Best Screenplay that she had won in 1989 for the film In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones.

2. Kundan Shah, who returned his National Award for the film Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron.

3. Saeed Mirza

4. Dibakar Banerjee

5. Anand Patwardhan

6. Dipankar Banerjee

7. Paresh Kamdar

8. Nishtha Jain

9. Kirti Nakhwa

10. Harshavardhan Kulkarni

11. Hari Nair

12. Rakesh Sharma

13. Indraneel Lahiri

14. Lipika Singh Darai

15. Vikrant Pawar

16. Rakesh Shukla

17. Prateek Vats

18. Cinematographer Virendra Saini

19. Ajay Raina

20. Cinematographer Ranjan Palit

21. Cinematographer Manoj Lobo

22. Filmmaker Tapan Bose

23. Filmmaker Sanjay Kak

24. Filmmaker Madhusree Dutta

25. Filmmaker Pradip Krishen

26. Vivek Sachidanand

27. PM Satheesh

28. Film editor Irene Dhar Malik

29. Cinematographer Satya Raj Nagpaul

30. Filmmaker Shriprakash

31. Cinematographer Sudhakar Reddy Yakkanti

32. Rafeeq Ellias

33. Filmmaker Amitabha Chakravarty

34. Maithil filmmaker Tarun Bharitiya

35. Documentary maker Anwar Jamal

36. Cinematographer Sudhir Palsane

37. Cinematographer Abhimanyu Dange

38. Filmmaker Manoj Nitharwal

Edited by Jhinuk Sen