Just Like That | The ignoble western bias in Nobel Prizes
We in India give too much importance to western recognition. It is time we institute our own global prizes, and objectively judge those who judge us
The Nobel Prizes, except perhaps in the field of science, are riddled with extraneous considerations, rarely impartial, and highly Europe-centric. The world — including Indians — gives great importance to them, but it is time to set the record straight.
The Prizes were instituted in 1901 through the will of Alfred Nobel (1833-96), a Swedish scientist and inventor of dynamite, who donated his entire fortune for awards that annually recognise those who “conferred the greatest benefit to humankind”. Nobel’s intent was noble, but those subsequently tasked to implement it have repeatedly displayed a regrettably narrow view of “humankind”. Between 1901 and 2024, 976 individuals and 28 organisations have been conferred these prizes. Of these, Indian citizens have only five, and those of Indian origin have seven. That means Indian citizens account for only an unbelievable 0.51% of those who have “conferred any benefit to mankind”!
Take for instance the Nobel Prize in Literature. Out of 121 people so far awarded, only one Indian, Rabindranath Tagore, in 1913, figures in the list when India has 22 officially recognised languages and one of the richest linguistic heritages in the world. Even more revealingly, out of these 121, 95 are from Europe, the United Kingdom (UK), and the United States (US): the UK has 13, France 16, the US 13, Spain 6, Germany nine, Sweden eight, Norway four, Denmark three, Austria, Switzerland, and Greece have two each, and Finland and Iceland have one each. That means that some 80% of global literary talent is incestuously concentrated in these languages.
Some great writers have been selected outside this charmed circle, including Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Colombia, 1982), Wole Soyinka (Nigeria, 1986), Octavio Paz (Mexico, 1990), and Orhan Pamuk (Turkey, 2006). This year’s prize has gone to South Korean writer Han Kang. She is undoubtedly talented, having won the International Booker Prize for fiction in 2016 for The Vegetarian. But, at 53, her literary oeuvre is still small, six novels, some poetry, and a collection of essays. Granting that quantity is not the only criterion, I wonder why Mahasweta Devi (1926-2016), who wrote 100 path-breaking novels, and 20 collections of brilliant short stories, never made the grade.
Or, for that matter, why didn’t RK Narayan, Mulk Raj Anand, UR Ananthamurthy, Ruskin Bond, Amitav Ghosh, and Gulzar, to name just a few? Gulzar, now 90, has one of the largest collections of dazzling poetry, plays, screenplays, and children’s books globally. Perhaps, we lack good translators and need to urgently overcome this deficiency. Han Kang was lucky to have a brilliant English translator, Deborah Smith. So was Gitanjali Shree, whose novel, Ret Samadhi, translated into English by Daisy Rockwell, won the International Booker Prize in 2022. But even so, the sheer insularity of the award is shocking.
The selection for the Nobel Peace Prize is as egregious. True, Mother Teresa in 1979 deserved it. To some extent, so did Kailash Satyarthi in 2014. However, Mahatma Gandhi, among the greatest messiahs for ahimsa the world has seen, was nominated five times — every year from 1937 to 39, in 1947, and just a few months before his assassination in 1948. He never got it. The Swedish Academy, which in 2006 accepted that “it was the biggest omission in our 106-year history”, can hardly atone now for what was blatantly a pro-British bias then. On the other hand, Henry Kissinger, who ruthlessly used napalm bombs in Vietnam, received it.
The truth is that the Nobel Peace Prize is highly politicised. Dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn got the prize in 1970 because he was a useful pawn in the West’s campaign against the erstwhile Soviet Union. But later, when he became critical of certain aspects of western civilisation, his admirers dried up, and his death in 2008 hardly created a ripple. VS Naipaul, Indian by descent, British by choice, who made a career of being critical of India, and, after 9/11, endeared himself to the West by being even more critical of the Islamic world, was an obvious choice too. It is not that these were not highly talented writers. But so were many others. However, in their case, there were factors other than purely literary merit that also played a role.
We in India give too much importance to western recognition. It is time we institute our own global prizes, invest in world-class institutions for translations, and objectively judge those who judge us.
Pavan K Varma is author, diplomat, and former Member of Parliament (Rajya Sabha). The views expressed are personal
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