CHENNAI: Amid congratulatory messages from top political leaders and film personalities, lyric writer and poet Vairamuthu being chosen for the Jnanpith Award received a lot of backlash on Saturday from several writers and artistes, who pointed to serious allegations of sexual harassment levelled against him by multiple women. The allegations came out in a big way during the MeToo movement in 2018.
Expressing strong disappointment, singer Chinmayi Sripaada, who was among the first one to accuse him of harassment, said a man who was named by multiple women of different age groups as their “molester” has been chosen for the country’s highest literary honour. She pointed out that the daughter of late writer Jayakanthan, the last Tamil writer to win the award in 2002, had called out Vairamuthu earlier for allegedly forging a letter of appreciation that her father in fact never wrote.
Criticising the choice of Vairamuthu for the award, writer Meena Kandasamy reshared her post on X from 2023, in which she spoke against top politicians hobnobbing with Vairamuthu.
In the earlier statement written in the backdrop of Chief Minister M. K. Stalin congratulating Vairamuthu, she had said, “If there's one thing I learned from Periyar E. V. Ramasamy, it is to never lose Self Respect. Associating with a molester is denigrating to your public image. It's denigrating to the women in your parties. Please think this through”.
Writer and translator Suchithra said the decision was entirely unwelcome and called Vairamuthu a “bombastic poetaster”. She said that while largely the most significant writers have only been honoured with the award in other Indian languages, that has not been the case in Tamil. “Perhaps they are influenced by lobbying..There is much more to Tamil literature than Vairamuthu,” she said.
“There is no dearth of fine literature in Tamil, but of the three Tamil writers who have won this prize, only Jayakanthan is a true litterateur,” she argued. Akilan was the first Tamil writer to receive the Jnanpith in 1975.