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Hindi satirist Gyan Chaturvedi conferred with Vyas Samman
The Vyas Samman is one of the three literary awards instituted by the foundation. The others are the Bihari Puraskar and the Saraswati Samman
Hindi satirist and recipient of 2015 Padma Shri award, Dr Gyan Chaturvedi, was conferred with the 32nd Vyas Samman for his satirical novel, Pagalkhana (mental asylum), on Monday.
Instituted by the KK Birla Foundation in 1991, the Vyas Samman is given to an outstanding literary work in Hindi authored by an Indian citizen published during the last 10 years. It carries a cash prize of ₹4 lakh, a citation and a plaque.
The Vyas Samman is one of the three literary awards instituted by the foundation. The others are the Bihari Puraskar and the Saraswati Samman.
In March 2022, Dr Chaturvedi’s 2018 novel, Pagalkhana, was selected for the 32nd Vyas Samman, 2022. After considering the works published during 2012-2021, a selection committee, headed by eminent litterateur Prof Ramji Tiwari, picked Dr Chaturvedi’s novel for the prestigious award. The announcement, however, was made last year.
On Monday, Dr Chaturvedi was honoured during a function that was attended by eminent writers such as Ashok Chakradhar, Suresh Rituparna, and Aruna Gupta.
During his speech, Chaturvedi stressed “the emptiness of a life driven solely by consumerism,” and advocated for a life beyond materialism.
“The market has understood our language better than us, read our instincts, understood the structure of our society and our human weaknesses, our love, hate, anger, and arrogance; understood our sexual anxieties, our desires for domination; understood our mind that trembles with the thought of torture, and murder, and therefore, it’s not surprising that it now wants to govern us,” he said.
He thanked the KK Birla foundation for bestowing him with the prestigious award.
The 2018 satirical novel tells a poignant story of innocent common people in a heart-touching manner. In this novel, Dr Chaturvedi narrates the story of a booming market’s dare, a society prostrating before it, and a few rare people who muster courage to challenge it, a press release by the KK Birla Foundation said in 2022.
At the function, Gupta, who was a part of the selection committee, said it was for the first time that a satirical novel was picked for the award. “Pagalkhana is about the citizens who, regardless of their social strata, are deeply and negatively affected by consumerism,” Gupta said.
Chakradhar said: “There might be a day when the people will be ruled by deep fakes and AI (artificial intelligence) and the book is a foresight of that future… Capitalism is such that an individual feels he is the master and is under control but he seldom knows that capitalism thinks his worth isn’t even that of an insect.”
Having started his writing career in the 1970s, Dr Chaturvedi received India’s fourth highest civilian award Padma Shri in 2015. He has also won the Madhya Pradesh government’s Sharad Joshi Samman for outstanding achievement in the field of satire and essay, besides the Delhi Academy Award and the Indu Sharma International Katha Samman.
