The Wire Staff 
New Delhi: Tamil poet Sukirtharani has refused to accept the Devi Award presented to hear after learning that the main sponsor of the award ceremony is the Adani group. Being a part of the programme, she told The Telegraph, would have been “antithetical to my principles, my body of writings and my philosophy for which I have stood so far”.
She announced her decision not to accept the award on her Facebook page on February 4. “The New Indian Express group presents the ‘Devi Awards’ to 12 women personalities who are selected from across the nation for their contribution in their respective fields of work. The award is to be presented to me for my contributions to Dalit literature. I thank the New Indian Express,” she wrote in the Tamil post, according to The News Minute.
“I learned that the main sponsor of the event is Adani only yesterday. I don’t feel happy to receive an award from an organisation or at an event that is financially supported by the Adani Group, for the politics I speak about and the ideologies I believe in. So, I refuse to accept the Devi Awards,” she continued.
The award ceremony was held on February 8 at the ITC Grand Chola Hotel in Chennai. Twelve women from across fields – including scientist Gagandeep Kang, Bharatnatyam dancer Priyadarsini Govind, philanthropist Radhika Santhanakrishna and squash player Joshna Chinappa – were chosen for the awards this year.
Sukirtharani’s literary work delves into the lives and trials of Dalit women in India, particularly in Tamil Nadu. “For me, caste identity and the female body are closely intertwined. I personally think that problems of Dalit women are different from the women of other castes. Not all my writings are my own experiences; they are every other woman’s or Dalit woman’s experiences. We are all in the shackles of caste. Dalit women’s bodies are especially subjected to routine violence. Compared to the pain upper caste women undergo, in my opinion, Dalit women go through worse. We have to face internal conflicts with the men of our own class, who want to assert power over women. The men belonging to the upper caste are the next challenge, because they feel they have the right to assert their power even more. The state of women in any house is no different from the society,” she told The Wire in an interview in 2017.
She is also a teacher in Lalapet, Ranipet district. She has six collections of poetry to her credit: Kaipattri Yen Kanavu Kel, Iravu Mirugam, Kaamatthipoo, Theendapadaatha Muttham, Avalai Mozhipeyarthal and Ippadikku Yeval. Many of her poems are taught in colleges across Tamil Nadu and have been translated into English, Malayalam, Kannada, Hindi and German. In 2021, when Delhi University removed her writing from its syllabus, the decision was met with widespread criticism.
“It is how a woman’s body is either wilfully ignored and destroyed by ‘powers.’ I am definitely not surprised that these poems were dropped. We now have a Union government that believes in Sanatana. But clearly, they are troubled by what I write. I am not surprised because erasure of powerful Dalit voices has always happened. When they cannot face the truths in our works – mine, Bama’s or Mahasweta Devi’s – they try to stop us. But our works speak for themselves,” she told The Wire then.
The Adani group has been embroiled in a large-scale controversy over the last few weeks, after the US-based short-seller Hindenburg Research accused the company of indulging in manipulative and fraudulent market practices.