Kambara to get Akademi fellowship

Littérateur Chandrasekhar Kambara has been selected for the Sangeet Natak Akademi fellowship to be presented by President Pranab Mukherjee on October 9. Besides Kambara, ‘sarod’ maestro Amjad Ali Khan and 11 other cultural luminaries will also be given the fellowship.

Puppeteer Belagallu Veeranna is another recipient from Karnataka.  The Akademi Fellowship –  Akademi Ratna – will be conferred on Mukund Lath, Hariprasad Chaurasia, Shivkumar Sharma, Umayalpuram Kasiviswanatha Sivaraman, Mohan Chandrasekaran, Rajkumar Singhajit Singh, Kalamandalam Gopi, Padma Subrahmanyam and Heisnam Kanhailal. They will receive a purse of Rs three lakh, besides an ‘angavastram’ and a ‘tamrapatra’, the Ministry of Culture said in a statement on Friday.

The Akademi Fellowship is the rarest honour conferred on a limited number at a given time. There are at present only 40 living Fellows of the Sangeet Natak Akademi.

Theatre, music

In the field of theatre, eight persons who will receive the awards are: Kirti Jain for direction, Amitabh Srivastava, Vikram Chandrakant Gokhle, Neena Tiwana and A R Srinivasan for acting, R Nageswara Rao for major traditions of theatre – company theatre, Andhra Pradesh and Kamal Jain for allied theatre arts (lighting).

The nine awardees in the field of music are Shruti Sadolikar Katkar and Marathe Venkateshkumar for Hindustani vocal, Tota Ram Sharma (Pakhawaj) and Pushpraj Ramlal Koshti (Surbahar) for Hindustani instrumental, J Venkatraman for Carnatic vocal, Ellapulli Mahadevaiyer Subramaniam (Ghatam), Ayyagari Syamasundaram (Veena) and Seshampatti T Sivalingam (Nagaswaram) for Carnatic instrumental, and Gopal Chandra.