When any institution has functioned for a considerable length of time of 30 years, it calls for an examination of its successes and failures. From that point of view, Prof. Umashankar Joshi, the former President of the Sahitya Akademi, was perfectly justified when he stressed on the assessment of 25 years of its existence the need to have ‘a close, even a hard, look’ at the working of the Akademi.
D.S. Rao, who has been with the Akademi for as many years and is currently its Deputy Secretary, has waded through a sea of facts and figures and annual reports to do a searching job. The result is the book under review which, in the words of V.K. Gokak, (the Akademi’s present Chairman) is ‘an interesting survey of the achievements of the Akademi and the prospects opening before it.’
The Sahitya Akademi, along with the Lalit Kala Akademi and the Sangeet Natak Akademi, is the child of Indian Independence, though the idea of having a ‘National Cultural Trust’ was originally mooted by the Royal Asiatic Society of Calcutta and was accepted by the British Government way back in 1944.