Jnanpith Award
The Jnanpith Award (also spelled as Gyanpeeth Award) is a literary award in India. Along with the Sahitya Akademi Fellowship, it is one of the two most prestigious literary honours in the country. The award was instituted in 1961. Eligibility is restricted to any Indian citizen who writes in one of the 22 languages listed in Schedule Eight of the Indian constitution. It is presented by the Bharatiya Jnanpith, a trust founded by the Sahu Jain family, the publishers of the newspaper The Times of India.
The Award
The name of the award is taken from Sanskrit words jnāna and pīṭha (knowledge-seat). It carries a cheque for ₹11 lakh, a citation plaque and a bronze replica of Saraswati, the Indian goddess of knowledge, music, and the arts.
Prior to 1982, the awards were given for a single work by a writer; since then, the award has been given for a lifetime contribution to Indian literature. As of 2014 most Jananpith award winners, ten have been writing in Hindi followed by eight in Kannada, five each in Bengali and Malayalam, four each in Oriya, Urdu and Marathi and three each in Gujarati and Telugu and two each in Assamese and Tamil.
