Literary awards are not just assessments of particular authors. Like books, awards too have a context of reception, telling us about larger cultural trends. The recent announcement that Kunwar Narain had won the Jnanpith Award was no surprise. These comparisons are often awkward, but there is little doubt that he is one of the great poets of world literature, in the same league as a Szymborska, Milosz, or Heaney. But the matter of fact way in which this award was covered should give pause. Contrast it, for instance, with the frenzied coverage that the announcement of the Booker Prize receives. In a way this indifference reveals some important disjunctures in Indian society.

At one level, it is not incumbent upon the English press to cover a significant event in Hindi literature in the same way that English writing is covered. This argument, however, is premised upon a startling fact about India’s elites, particularly in north India: these elites are no longer bilingual and have no capacity to navigate vernacular materials. The paradox of our times is that there is a sense in which Hindi readership is growing, because more people are becoming literate; English still continues to flourish and the demand for it is increasing. But what we had hoped to achieve in our language policy, the creation of genuinely bilingual modes of being, is now simply an illusion. Thirty years or so ago, our middle-class elite would have still related to vernacular literature, followed it; now it is incapable of doing so. Even in the seventies, both the Illustrated Weekly of India and Dharamyug were part of the same social universe in that middle-class homes would read both; the elite could have related to both English and vernacular literary worlds. Magazines with a space for the essay format have been totally decimated in both languages. But it is also less likely that Hindi and English publications will now share the same space.

... contd.