How much merit do literary prizes really hold for South Asian authors?

These honours not only provide mileage to writers but also help give a platform to lesser-known voices

Literary awards not only provide unprecedented visibility to authors and translators but also help recognise little-known voices. A major win changes fortune overnight. For example, ever since Tanzanian-British novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah won the prestigious Nobel Prize for Literature in 2021, “several of his out-of-print novels are suddenly on the shelves again”. Post his Booker Prize win, the translation rights of author Shehan Karunatilaka’s The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida were sold in 24 languages. Both in India and the United States, 70,000 copies were printed each. Karunatilaka’s publisher in the United Kingdom reprinted 70,000 hardcovers and 30,000 paperbacks, along with 30,000 copies for the Australian market.

Tilted Axis, the publisher of Daisy Rockwell’s International Booker Prize-winning English translation of Geetanjali Shree’s Ret Samadhi (Tomb of Sand), reprinted 15,000 copies right after the prize announcement. In India, Amazon witnessed both Hindi and English editions selling over “35,000 copies in one week alone”. This makes one wonder whether these recognitions should be treated as an anomaly or if there’s a genuine, newfound interest in literature from the global south. 

Beyond Anglophone writing

The chair of the jury of last year’s International Booker Prize, Frank Wynne, notes that as a juror he was looking for something to excite him as a reader: “To be seduced, come across a distinctive voice, and find a writer and book that will challenge or perhaps change me.”

“Literature can do this in many ways—through humour, tragedy, breaking, and reinventing formal structures,” he continues. “Great literature is so multifarious [that] it’s  impossible to define, but instantly recognisable when you read and reread it.” For him, the increasing representation of South Asian literature is linked to the tireless efforts of independent publishers like Tilted Axis, Honford Star, and Seagull Press, and the “translators who champion South Asian authors.” 

Rockwell notes that while “there’re more international publishers interested in South Asian translations,” they “want projects to conform to their own ideas about what world literature should be.” Concurring Rockwell’s observation, Wynne says that South Asian literatures “are all too often overlooked. English-language publishers seem to feel that because a small percentage of South Asian authors choose to write in English, they’ve no need to look further. In fact, the dazzling books being produced in Bengali, Tamil, Hindi, Urdu, and the vast array of languages are often unlike anything being written in English […] The Anglophone world has a lot to do to open its ears and eyes to the literature and cultures of the world, but it feels more open, exciting now.”  

While a Hindi novel won last year, Aniruddhan Vasudevan’s translation of Perumal Murugan’s novel Pyre was longlisted for the 2023 International Booker Prize, signalling a welcome shift in world literature. Karthika VK, publisher, Westland Books, a division of Pratilipi, says that this “big shift has been in the visibility of translated literature and the [increasing] number of prizes and grants that support writing in translation from South Asian languages. There’s greater awareness too, of the need to keep diversity as a focus of publishing.” 

Diverse narratives

The publisher of the 2008 Booker Prize-winning title The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga underlines how the Booker Prize somehow “holds sway over the Indian imagination. It’s the one prize that guarantees a massive increase in sales and almost perennial interest in the winning title if it’s by an Indian or South Asian writer.” More such prizes mean more representation, particularly of marginalised authors and narratives. Fatimah Asghar, a nonbinary writer of Indian-Pakistani origin, winning the inaugural Carol Shields Prize for Fiction, and Maulik Pancholy receiving a Lammy for Middle-Grade Literature this year will inspire more queer writers to pen their stories. Further, literary recognition also helps spotlight narratives of resilience, like that of Phoolan Devi, whose real life inspires characters in Parini Shroff’s Women’s Prize for Fiction-longlisted debut novel The Bandit Queens. 

Shroff, who writes “to educate and entertain,” says that being on the longlist “was a huge boon,” as “with the book being available in several countries and now being translated into other languages” she’s “optimistic and grateful that these characters’ voices, humour, and courage will bring joy to more readers.” She believes that “awards shine [a] light on works that might otherwise not be purchased, selected, [or] read. They do the heroic work of drawing regard to marginalised voices. Diversity in all avenues—including literature—is instrumental because it reflects the reality of the world we live in as well as the gamut of the human experience.”

Diversity, however, is ignorantly considered antithetical to literary merit. The exclusion of Barbara Kingsolver, Zadie Smith, and Salman Rushdie from this year’s Booker longlist is a case in point. While some rejoiced in the exceptional list of writers recognised by the Booker jury, others argued whether these literary giants’ works weren’t “fiction at its finest”. 

Inclusions and omissions 

Translator Arunava Sinha, who was on the jury of the Dublin Literary Award and the Armory Prize for South Asian Literature in Translation, clears the air, noting that “most juries are [only] looking at literary excellence,” and that there’s no “other external consideration in addition to that.” He further adds that diversity is an automatic outcome. “While no two juries think along identical lines, I think submissions themselves ensure variety. So, it’s not that the jury has to look for diversity. If your intent is to choose works that appeal to literary sensibilities, it’ll inevitably reflect diversity,” he says. 

Writer, translator, and Director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Georgia, Aruni Kashyap, says that “a diverse pool of jurors” helps ensure both literary merit and diversity. What award committees must do, according to him, is “find important, subversive, intellectually adventurous literary artists.” Kashyap, who finds “conversations about literary awards very boring,” feels “award lists should be unpredictable, and about underrepresented authors and traditions,” failing which literary awards risk becoming “Star Parivar Awards”.

In India, we have  “robust literature in different languages,” says Sinha. “So, you don’t operate in a narrow spectrum. You have works from Tamil, Nepali, Kashmiri, Assamese in translation, and the works that are written in English come from various locations.” On the hullabaloo regarding omissions of big names, Sinha says that it’s bound to happen because “you’re talking about five people making their choices. They cannot match the choices of a larger group or of an individual, so there’ll always be people whose favourites won’t feature on any longlist and that’s nothing to be troubled by.”

Karthika notes that “every jury works with a clear mandate and has certain criteria that govern their selection. Is it humanly possible to be absolutely bias-free? I’m unsure. But I do think that working as a group means biases become apparent and can be worked around, and that’s why the system works.”

This leads to the second important question: How does the system work? The Secretary of the Sahitya Akademi, Dr. K. Sreenivasarao, shares a rather complex process. Several teams of literary “referees” appointed by the language advisory boards in all the 24 Indian languages recognised by the Akademi select a final list from a wide-ranging “ground list” to ensure diversity. 

Founder and CEO of literary consultancy Siyahi and the literary director of the JCB Prize for Literature, Mita Kapur, shares a similar, rigorous commitment towards the selection of the jury each year. Further, she notes that the JCB Literature Foundation employs a third-party auditor so that their processes meet “the highest standards of integrity and accountability by all stakeholders.” In its sixth year running, Kapur takes pride in how the “committed efforts [of the prize] impact sales for the books” and “create new readership” for the authors and translators alike.

“Indian literature is slowly getting its due” notes journalist Chitra Ahanthem, but she feels that this can’t be correlated to representation. “While [in India] we’ve had more debut authors writing in English, they’re well-connected in terms of their access to the publishing circuit (through social or class networks). You still don’t hear of writers emerging from small towns simply because there’s no interface. Then, out of the 22 Indian languages in the Eighth schedule of the Constitution, you’ve only a few dominant languages which get picked for translation: Tamil, Malayalam, Bengali, followed by Marathi and Assamese.”

Ahanthem argues that “with regard to the ‘market’ factor, considering how much literary voices are underrepresented, the ‘diversity’ tag is a gimmick.” A rudimentary analysis of Jnanpith Awardees lays bare the disparity Ahanthem hints at. Out of 62 recipients so far, eight Jnanpith laureates were women. Language-wise, Hindi has the most wins (11), followed by Kannada (8), Bangla (6), and Malayalam (6). Marathi, Urdu, and Odia writers have been honoured four times each, followed by Gujarati (3) and Telugu (3), while Tamil, Punjabi, Assamese, and Konkani have been recognised twice each and only one writer each in Kashmiri, Assamia, English, and Sanskrit have won the award.

While the diversity argument is spot on and must be paid heed to, often harsh criticism is levelled against literary prizes because they receive funding from big corporations. In response, Sinha says that in a world run by large firms, where else would the money come from? Karthika feels that “it’s not just about prize money or organisations, it’s to do with the way our world is ordered, who commands capital and who’s empowered to make decisions about ethicality and impact.” 

Taking “the internecine and interconnected nature of our world” argument forward, Kashyap points to something crucial. He says, “The problem with contemporary criticism, often fuelled by social media, is that it’s shallow and creates clear heroes and villains. It replicates the plot of masala films. We can’t rely on such critique. Also, social media critics often perform the cruelty they seek to challenge. I’m not interested in a culture of criticism that’s without compassion.”

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