‘Pleas by caste organisations dangerous to arts’

CHENNAI: PILs filed by

caste organisations

against creative freedom should not be entertained by courts as they would waste the courts’ valuable time, scholar

Geetha Hariharan

told the Madras high court on Wednesday.

Hariharan, who was on the jury for

Sahitya Akademi

Translation Prize 2016, opposed a PIL filed by Kongu Kalvi Valarchi Arakattalai against Sahitya Akademi award for the English translation of Perumal Murugan’s novel ‘

Madhorubagan

’. “Writ petitions such as these do not advance the public interest and pose a danger to the practice of the arts, as well as diversity of opinion and critical thinking guaranteed by our Constitution and upheld a number of times by our courts,” she said.

The PIL is seized of by a division bench of Justice M Sathyanarayanan and Justice M Sundar, which had restrained the Akademi from conferring the award.

In her counter-affidavit, Hariharan referred to the high court’s landmark judgment at the height of the caste outrage against Madhorubagan. “Raking up the same issue is an attempt to impede the free practice of imaginative endeavour that sustains our culture with multiple narratives and viewpoints,” the scholar said.

Explaining the impartial manner in which the list of writers shortlisted and an awardee chosen, she said granting of the award by the Akademi was not amenable to any judicial review. “It is not open to any court of law to scrutinise such recommendation, as such matters come purely within the purview of litterateurs. It was rather mischievous on the part of the petitioner/caste association to make the individuals who constituted the panel also respondents in the case,” Hariharan said.

The jury, which awarded the prize to Aniruddhan Vasudevan, comprised Hariharan, K Satchidanandan and A R

Venkatachalapathy

.

Reiterating that no award norms had been breached by any of the jury members, who were writers, critics, scholars, cultural commentators or translators, Hariharan said the translation was an unabridged one and the quality of both the translation and the novel had been acknowledged by critics, scholars, reviewers and award juries.