Study Guide · Chapter 5
Nobel Laureates and Major Literary Awards
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- Rabindranath Tagore: Won the Nobel Prize in Literature (1913) for Gitanjali ("Song Offerings") — the first non-European and first Asian to win a Nobel Prize in any category.
- Other Indian Nobel laureates (for broader context, though not all in literature): C.V. Raman (Physics, 1930), Har Gobind Khorana (Medicine, 1968, though as a naturalised American citizen by then), Mother Teresa (Peace, 1979), Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (Physics, 1983, as a US citizen of Indian origin), Amartya Sen (Economics, 1998), Venkatraman Ramakrishnan (Chemistry, 2009, as a US-based scientist of Indian origin), Kailash Satyarthi (Peace, 2014), Abhijit Banerjee (Economics, 2019, jointly).
- Jnanpith Award: India's highest literary honour, awarded since 1965 by the Bharatiya Jnanpith organisation, for a lifetime's contribution to Indian literature (in any recognised Indian language); the first recipient was G. Sankara Kurup (Malayalam, 1965). Notable subsequent recipients include Ashapoorna Devi (Bengali, first woman recipient, 1976), Amrita Pritam (Punjabi), Mahasweta Devi (Bengali), and V.K. Gokak, among many others across languages.
- Sahitya Akademi Award: A major national literary honour, awarded annually across recognised Indian languages by the Sahitya Akademi (India's National Academy of Letters, established 1954).
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