Jnanpith Award - The Award

The Award

The name of the award is taken from Sanskrit words jnāna and pīṭha (knowledge-seat). It carries a cheque for 7 lakh, a citation plaque and a bronze replica of Saraswati, the Indian goddess of knowledge, music, and the arts.

Prior to 1982, the awards were given for a single work by a writer; since then, the award has been given for a lifetime contribution to Indian literature. Nine individuals writing in Hindi have been honoured with the award, eight in Kannada, five in Bengali and Malayalam, four in Urdu and three in Gujarati, Oriya and Marathi and 2 each in Assamese, Tamil and Telugu.

Starting with the Bengali writer Ashapoorna Devi in 1976, six women writers have won the award so far. The other recipients include Amrita Pritam (1981, Punjabi), Mahadevi Varma (1982, Hindi), Qurratulain Hyder (1989, Urdu), Mahasweta Devi (1996, Bengali) and Indira Goswami (2000, Assamese).

The award announcements have lately been lagging behind the award-years. The awards for the years 2005 and 2006 were announced on 22 November 2008, and were awarded to the Hindi writer Kunwar Narayan for 2005 and jointly to Konkani writer Ravindra Kelekar and Sanskrit scholar Satya Vrat Shastri for 2006. Satya Vrat Shastri is the first Sanskrit poet to be conferred the award since its inception. The awards for the 45th and 46th Jnanpith for the years 2009 and 2010 respectively, were announced on 20 September 2011. The 45th award was jointly conferred on Hindi littérateurs Amar Kant and Sri Lal Sukla, and the 46th on the Kannada littérateur Chandrashekhara Kambara.