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| Facsimile
of Nobel laureaute Rabindranath Tagore's handwriting in Bengali.
He wrote both in Bengali and in English. |
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| Sahitya Akademi, the National Academy
of letters, is one of the biggest and most unique publishers
of books and journals in India. We are also the largest agency
for literary translations in India through which we build bridges
across languages, communities and nations. |
The Akademi has so far organised more than six
thousand literary programmes of local, state, regional, national
and international levels all over the country including seminars,
workshops, symposia, colloquiums, single author programmes, poetry
festivals, book releases, lectures, readings, film festivals
and discussions. These programmes have helped heighten literary
awareness among urban as well as rural populations, retrieve
lost traditions, analyse current trends, encourage innovations,
support the literary avant-garde, re-evaluate existing canons,
and interrogate existing norms, besides bringing writers, critics
and readers from various cultural and linguistic traditions on
a common platform.
Sahitya Akademi has kept aloft the flag of writers'
freedom by always pleading for the autonomy of the literary realm
and creating a secular, non-ideological space for literary dialogue
and interaction in a world being fast compartmentalised on the
basis of class, religion, race, caste and ideology.
The Akademi has resisted the bulldozing standardisation
of Indian cultures and literatures while also fighting trends
of balkanisation by projecting the dialectical relationship between
unity and difference and creating a culture of mutual respect
and collaboration among the various languages and literatures
of India. Our ideal is an imagined community where the voice
of every segment will be listened to with love and understanding.
Through its programmes
and publications Sahitya Akademi has brought the 5000-year old
Indian literary tradition nearer to the people who are fast being
subjected to civilisational amnesia and loss of identity by the
forces of cultural aggression.
The Akademi's Cultural Exchange Programmes have
brought the literary cultures of the world closer to one another.
Our translations of world  classics
into Indian languages have helped develop admiration for the
creative aspect of other cultures among our people, broadening
the horizons of their literary appreciation without losing their
sense of indigenous traditions and identity. Hundreds of Indian
writers have visited other countries and  several writers from around the globe have visited India
under this Programme, thus strengthening cultural ties among
nations and promoting imaginative interaction. Sahitya Akademi
has constantly promoted translations, primarily among Indian
languages including English. More than 2000 translations it has
published so far in 24 languages cover the best of fiction, poetry
and drama written in the languages of India.
We have been the pioneers in the field of inter-language translations
of India, seldom attempted by commercial publishers who consider
it a profitless venture.Sahitya Akademi's monograph series, Makers
of Indian literature has laid |
the sure foundations
of a composite Indian literature created over fifty centuries
by thousands of visionaries. 
The Akademi has made possible comparative literature
as a major discipline in India by publishing translations, literary
histories of individual languages, a comprehensive Encyclopedia
of Indian Literature and equally comprehensive Who's Who of Indian
Writers, bibliographies of translations, literary indices, a
History of Indian Literature in ten volumes (two of which have
already been published) and an
excellent multilingual library of Indian literature. The library
of the Sahitya Akademi completed a project for the field testing
of Trishna and created 2000 Indian language records in collaboration
with NISSAT.
Sahitya Akademi has honoured more than a thousand
significant Indian writers and translators through its awards
and fellowships and encouraged young writers to meet writers
in other parts of the country by providing them with travel grants.
The Akademi's journals in English and Hindi have been almost
the only journals in the country consistently projecting the
emerging trends in Indian literatures through translations, surveys,
textual studies and critical evaluations.
Sahitya Akademi's Archives under construction
is fast growing into a major centre of visual and auditory documentation
with manuscripts, films, CD-ROMs, audio cassettes, photographs
and objects related to Indian writers and writing.
The Akademi has been doing yeoman service to
the fast vanishing folk traditions of India by trying to collect
and preserve Tribal and Oral tales, epics and poems chiefly through
its Tribal Oral Literature Project.
Sahitya Akademi is the only centre of Indian
writing involving literally thousands of Indian writers from
all over India in its various governing councils, advisory boards
and day-to-day programmes and activities.
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A Delhi Red Fort
portrait
of Mirza Ghalib (1797-1869) the great Urdu & Persian poet |
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