Kolkata: Ratna Rashid Bandopadhyay, a Bengal-based writer and researcher, returned a prestigious award to the Paschimbanga Bangla Academy on Tuesday protesting against the cultural institution’s decision to honour chief minister Mamata Banerjee with a new award on the occasion of the 161st birth anniversary of Rabindranath Tagore on Monday.
In a similar move, Anadiranjan Biswas, a member of the general council of the Sahitya Akademi (eastern region), resigned from the national institution’s Bengali advisory board.
The award the chief minister received will be given away once in three years to people from the non-literary world who have made significant contribution to literature, education minister Bratya Basu announced at Monday’s event. He said a panel of senior writers selected the chief minister as the first recipient for Kobita Bitan, a collection of her poems.
The incident has triggered a controversy with social media witnessing protests.
In her letter to the Paschimbanga Bangla Academy, which gave her the Annada Shankar Ray Memorial Award in 2019, Ratna Rashid Bandopadhyay said she will send the award and the memento to the Academy’s office.
“I came to know from media reports that the Paschimbanga Bangla Academy has announced a new award and honoured chief minister Mamata Banerjee with it as recognition of her tireless pursuit for literature. This is distortion of the truth. By honouring the chief minister, the Academy has not only set a condemnable example but has also insulted all people who are dedicated to Bengali literature,” Ratna Rashid Bandopadhyay wrote in Bengali.
{{/usCountry}}“I came to know from media reports that the Paschimbanga Bangla Academy has announced a new award and honoured chief minister Mamata Banerjee with it as recognition of her tireless pursuit for literature. This is distortion of the truth. By honouring the chief minister, the Academy has not only set a condemnable example but has also insulted all people who are dedicated to Bengali literature,” Ratna Rashid Bandopadhyay wrote in Bengali.
{{/usCountry}}Anadiranjan Biswas did not mention the chief minister but dropped clear hints in his letter.
“On May 9, 2022, which was the 161th birth anniversary of Gurudev, sheer insult has been caused to Bengali poetry in Kolkata. Earlier also, it has been observed by me that whims, caprices, nepotism and ‘pick and choose’ theory are ruling the contemporary Bengali literature in Kolkata. Hence, my conscience and the morality which I believe in goaded me to take this ultimate action,” Biswas wrote in English and sought immediate exclusion of his name from the approved projects of the Sahitya Akademi’s Kolkata office.
“I do not want to take any name but you can draw the inference. It is obvious,” Biswas told HT on Tuesday evening.
The chief minister handed the Rabindra Purashkar (an old award named after Tagore) to a host of eminent writers and poets at the government event on Monday. She was named the first recipient of the new award by education minister Bratya Basu, who is also president of the Paschimbanga Bangla Academy.
The chief minister did not personally take the award although she was present on the dais. Basu accepted it on her behalf from deputy cultural affairs minister Indranil Sen. Incidentally, the chief minister heads the cultural affairs department.
More than 110 books, carrying stories and poems penned by Banerjee have been published so far. These are displayed every year at the stall Jago Bangla, the Trinamool Congress (TMC) mouthpiece, puts up at the Kolkata International Book Fair.
Bratya Basu did not comment on the controversy.
TMC Rajya Sabha member Santanu Sen alleged that the protests were engineered by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the state’s principal opposition force.
“What more can you expect from a party whose leaders said Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee received the Nobel Prize for economics in 2019 because his wife is a foreigner,” Sen said, referring to a controversial statement former Bengal BJP president Rahul Sinha made three years ago.
Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee jointly received the Nobel Prize with his wife Esther Duflo, a French-American economist and American professor Michael Kremer. Duflo is Banerjee’s second wife.