Saraswati Samman for Tamil scholar Manavalan

Corporate Affairs and Power Minister M Veerappa Moily presented a citation plaque, a memento and a cheque of Rs 7.5 lakh to Manavalan at a function organised by K K Birla Foundation here.

Praising Manavalan's work, Moily said, "The work is the nectar which has come out after exploration of Ramayana written in different languages," adding, it does not belong to Tamil literature only but to the world.

"The book deals with the plot, characters and individual insertions and deletions that has taken place during the course of migration. It took a geographical, linguistic and cultural approach to bring out Ramayana's influence over the South East Asian culture during the last two millennium," the Foundation's president Shobhana Bhartia said.

'Irama Kathaiyum Iramayakalyum' is a comparative study of 48 Ramayanas written in Sanskrit, Pali, Prakirt, Tibetan, Tamil, Old Javanese, Japanese, Telugu, Assamese, Malayalam, Bengali, Kannada, Marathi, Hindi, Odisi, Persian, Malay, Burmese, Maranao, Thai, Laotian and Kashmiri.

Saraswati Samman, instituted in 1991 by noted industrialist and former MP K K Birla who established the K K Birla Foundation, is a prestigious award in the field of literature.

The Foundation also gives two other awards -- Vyas Samman and Bihari Purushkar for literary work in the field of Hindi and to Rajasthani writers.