Sahitya Akademi, Academies and Institutional Canon Formation

Detailed chapter description

Literary institutions do more than honour books after they have been written. They create recurring procedures through which manuscripts become editions, editions become eligible books, books become award candidates, authors become representatives of a language, and selected works enter libraries, syllabi, translation circuits and public memory. In that sense an academy is not merely a building or a committee. It is a mechanism for allocating attention. The effect can be constructive: preservation, publication, translation, grants, seminars and recognition can sustain a language whose commercial book market is limited. But the same mechanism is necessarily selective. Every list of awardees, prescribed texts, invited speakers or funded publications also leaves other writers, genres, regions and forms outside the frame. For Mithila, Vajji, Anga and Madhesh, canon formation therefore has to be studied institutionally rather than treated as a self-evident ranking of literary merit. Sahitya Akademi, the Bihar Maithili Academy, universities, examining bodies, Nepal Academy, literary associations, journals, publishers and digital archives operate at different scales and under different rules. Their decisions overlap but are not identical. Maithili is especially revealing because Sahitya Akademi began giving its annual award in the language in 1966, long before Maithili entered the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution of India in 2004. Literary recognition, constitutional recognition and administrative support thus followed different chronologies. This chapter reconstructs those chronologies while asking a larger question: how does institutional recognition turn a changing literary field into a teachable, prizeable and apparently stable canon?