I will say this plainly: giving the 60th Jnanpith Award to Vairamuthu is, in my view, a disgrace to Tamil literature and an insult to every woman who risked her career to call him a molester in public.
I Refuse to Pretend This Is Normal
I am not going to dress this up in polite, “balanced” language.
A man whose name surfaced again and again during India’s #MeToo movement, a man specifically described as a “serial predator” by a prominent singer and as a “molester” by multiple women, has just been crowned as the national face of Tamil letters. A committee of supposedly learned people looked at that record, looked at those testimonies, and still decided that this was the most fitting representative of our language.
I find that morally rotten.
I find it intellectually bankrupt.
And I refuse to normalise it with the usual fake reference that surrounds awards.
I Know the Difference Between Film Hype and Literature
Let me make something absolutely clear: I am not impressed by the decades of cinematic noise around Vairamuthu. I know what a film lyricist does, and I know what a serious literary architect does; they are not the same.
A film lyricist writes to a tune, to a producer’s mood, to a hero’s ego, to a market calculus. He is bound by beats, censorship, and box-office superstition. His job is to decorate an already functioning machine. That can be a genuine craft, but it is not the same as building a philosophical universe that stands on its own.
A serious novelist or thinker, on the other hand, writes without the safety net of music, stardom, or fan clubs. They work with silence, structure, and doubt. They wrestle with history, ethics, power, and human contradiction across hundreds or thousands of pages.
When I look at Vairamuthu’s work on the page, stripped of AR Rahman’s melodies and the faces of film stars, I mostly see sentimental overkill, repetitive nature imagery, and decorative metaphors that crumble when you look for actual thought behind them. It is polished kitsch. It tugs the heart; it does not stretch the mind.
To pretend that this level of work represents the pinnacle of Tamil’s literary civilisation is not just wrong; it is obscene.
The Andal Episode: Recklessness, Not Courage
I am still angry about what he did with Andal. Not because Andal is “above criticism”, but because what he did was not criticism at all—it was sloppy, attention-hungry vandalism dressed up as scholarship.
In a speech at Srivilliputhur, and in a Dinamani piece titled Tamizhai Aandal, he chose to foreground a line from a decades‑old chapter, stating that Andal “herself is a devadasi who lived and died in the Sri Rangam Temple”, and then tried to spin this as something that feminists and anti‑patriarchy people should “ponder”. He cited the work as if it were from “Indiana University”, bungling the very basic bibliographic facts; the chapter was actually from a book published by the Indian Institute of Advanced Study.
Historians later pointed out that this line was an unsupported personal interpretation, not anchored in primary evidence or rigorous scholarship. Yet he took this weak, unsubstantiated sentence and dropped it into the middle of a temple discourse, with full knowledge that it would explode. It did explode—devotees were outraged, petitions demanded an apology, and even Dinamani pulled the article and apologised. He then issued a so‑called clarification and “regret”, hiding behind the excuse that he had merely quoted another scholar.
I am not fooled.
This is not fearless inquiry; this is intellectual laziness weaponised for effect.
He did not carefully build an argument, weigh sources, and engage with counter‑evidence. He grabbed a sensational line and flung it at the heart of a living bhakti tradition for theatrical impact.
And now this is the man the Jnanpith committee has chosen to canonise as the highest literary conscience of Tamil. I find that choice contemptuous not only of believers, but of scholarship itself.
The #MeToo Allegations: I Believe the Women
Let me be even clearer on the #MeToo allegations.
In 2018, journalist Sandhya Menon shared an anonymous account of a then‑18‑year‑old woman alleging assault by Vairamuthu. Soon after, singer Chinmayi Sripaada stepped forward, put her own name on the line, and accused him of sexual harassment, describing in detail how she was allegedly pressured to “cooperate” with him by visiting his hotel room in Lucerne during a Switzerland programme.
She said she and her mother were told her career would be over if she refused, that she demanded to be flown back to India, and that years later, when she refused to sing Tamizh Thaai Vaazhthu at his book function, he allegedly shouted at her and threatened to ruin her image with a politician. She called him a “serial predator” and stated bluntly that in all her years in the industry, only he had behaved indecently with her.
Chinmayi has repeatedly paid the price for speaking out—lost work, institutional bans—and yet she has not backed down. She has said, again and again, that all the men named in #MeToo have been whitewashed while women like her are permanently tagged and professionally punished.
Now, in 2026, when the Jnanpith was announced, she once again called him a “molester” and publicly expressed her shock that a man named by “multiple women of different age groups” as their abuser had been chosen for India’s top literary honour. Press reports speak of as many as 18 women having levelled allegations in total.
You expect me to ignore all of this and clap politely because an award committee says “we are only looking at literature”? I will not.
I believe the women. I believe their specific, consistent, corroborated accounts over the wounded vanity of one powerful man and the cowardly silence of an industry that still happily works with him.
No, there has been no criminal conviction. That does not make these women liars, nor does it magically wipe clean the moral stain. The Jnanpith is not a trial court; its bar should be higher than “not yet jailed”. The question is: is this the best moral and intellectual emblem we can find for Tamil?
My answer is an emphatic no.
I See a Pattern of Dishonesty and Self‑Worship
The Andal recklessness, the MeToo testimonies, and the award lobby politics would already be bad enough. But there is more: stories of questionable endorsements and accusations of appropriation that add up to a disturbing pattern.
Jayakanthan’s daughter has publicly alleged that a letter of appreciation for Vairamuthu, supposedly written by her father—the last Tamil Jnanpith awardee before this farce—was a forgery, that no such letter existed. If that is true, it is not a small lapse; it is raw fraud in the service of self‑mythologising. To parade a legendary writer’s fake praise as a badge is the act of someone addicted to reverence and incapable of honest humility.
There was also the controversy where lyricist Karthik Netha said in interviews that the hit song “Sara Sara Sarakaathu” was originally his and that his “first bad experience” was seeing the credit go to Vairamuthu, suggesting this was not the only time such a thing had happened. He later walked it back under obvious pressure, and director Sargunam came out defending Vairamuthu, claiming Karthik had only given dummy lines and that the senior lyricist rewrote everything.
I know how this industry works: young writers hint at abuse and theft, then retreat into ambiguity when they realise the cost of crossing a powerful man. I am not naïve enough to treat these episodes as random misunderstandings.
Then there is his own grotesque self‑promotion. In 2025, at a conference literally organised in his own honour, “Vairamuthiyam”, he declared that his novel Kallikaattu Ithikasam is “worthy of a Nobel Prize” and favourably compared it to Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, while complaining that no one outside Tamil Nadu had recognised his greatness. This is not confidence; it is delusion. It is a man staring into a mirror and seeing a global titan where the world sees, at best, a regionally famous lyricist with some novels attached.
A writer seriously in dialogue with world literature does not need to stand on a stage and announce that his work deserves a Nobel. He lets the work argue on his behalf. Vairamuthu, by contrast, behaves like his own publicist, thug, and high priest rolled into one.
That the Jnanpith committee has rewarded this behaviour instead of recoiling from it tells me everything I need to know about their standards.
I Have Utter Contempt for This Jnanpith Decision
Let me state my contempt directly, without hedging.
I do not consider this Jnanpith a triumph for Tamil. I consider it a calculated spit in the face of:
- Every woman who spoke up about powerful men in the arts and paid for it with her livelihood.
- Every serious Tamil writer who has laboured for decades to build new forms, new philosophies, and new epics, without cinema’s megaphones or party‑state patronage.
- Every reader who genuinely believes that character matters when you choose a national symbol.
Reports make it quite clear that this award has “received a lot of backlash” from writers and artists who explicitly point to the sexual harassment allegations and to the earlier Andal controversy and forged‑letter claims. One prominent writer has called him a “ridiculous film lyricist”, underlining how far removed this choice is from what serious Tamil literature has been doing.
I stand firmly with that backlash. In my view, the Jnanpith Board has aligned itself with power, celebrity, and patriarchal impunity. They have chosen to hear only the applause of politicians, film stars, and tame cultural functionaries, and to ignore the dissent of survivors, feminists, and serious novelists.
They have, quite simply, disgraced themselves.
I Know Who Should Have Been Chosen
Against this circus, I cannot help but think of Jeyamohan.
Here is a writer who has spent his life travelling across India, listening to forgotten voices, absorbing philosophical traditions, and pouring all of that into works like Vishnupuram and the 26‑volume Venmurasu—a re‑imagining of the Mahabharata that stands as one of the most ambitious literary projects in contemporary Indian languages. Critics across the spectrum have described him as a “game changer” in modern Tamil literature, “one of India’s finest authors writing today”, and a writer whose original ideas and continuous writing have fundamentally reshaped the Tamil literary landscape.
Vishnupuram alone is a labyrinth of myth, history, and metaphysics that demands actual intellectual engagement from the reader. Venmurasu explodes the epic into dozens of narrative experiments—subaltern retellings, philosophical dialogues, ecological perspectives—each volume a new aesthetic risk.
If the Jnanpith were serious about honouring a Tamil writer whose work actually expands the philosophical, artistic, and civilisational boundaries of the language, the choice would have been blindingly obvious. Instead, they walked past this towering edifice of thought and handed the crown to a film lyricist with a trail of allegations and a taste for self‑canonisation.
I am supposed to believe this is a neutral literary judgment? I don’t. I see lobbying. I see proximity to power. I see a committee that either cannot read or refuses to read what truly matters.
I Refuse to Separate “Art” From Character Here
There are times when I can, reluctantly, accept the “separate the art from the artist” argument. This is not one of those times.
The Jnanpith is not a secret private admiration list; it is a public act of canon formation. It does not merely say, “Here is a writer we enjoyed.” It says, “Here is who we think should represent this language to the nation.” When that person is a man against whom multiple women have raised consistent allegations of sexual harassment, when he has disrespected a central religious figure with shoddy research, when he is accused of forging endorsements and is known for grandiose self‑worship, then choosing him is not an apolitical act.
It is, in fact, a statement:
- We do not care what women say about their experiences.
- We do not care about intellectual honesty in matters of religion and history.
- We do not care how this looks to readers who still believe that integrity is part of greatness.
I reject that statement completely.
My Verdict
So here is my personal verdict, as starkly as I can put it.
I consider Vairamuthu, as a literary figure, grossly overrated, philosophically shallow, ethically compromised, and shamelessly self‑promoting. His central status in Tamil public life is, to me, a by‑product of cinema, party politics, and patriarchal indulgence—not of genuine civilisational depth.
And I consider the Jnanpith committee’s decision to honour him as one of the most shameful acts in the history of that award: a conscious choice to side with celebrity over character, with noise over thought, and with power over truth.
They have not crowned the conscience of Tamil; they have wrapped a national shawl around a man whose record should have given them pause at every step.
I will not clap. I will not be gaslit into pretending this is a victory for Tamil.
It is a warning sign of how low our literary institutions are willing to sink when confronted with fame, patronage, and male impunity.
Amaruvi's Aphorisms 
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