President Pranab Mukherjee today presented Sangeet Natak Akademi's Fellowships and Sangeet Natak Akademi Awards for the year 2015 at a function at Rashtrapati Bhavan. Akademi's Fellowships (Akademi Ratna) was presented to Bharatnatyam dancer and dance scholar C V Chandrasekhar. He received a shawl, a citation and a prize money of 3 lakh rupees. Only 40 individuals have been given a fellowship till date.<br/><br/>43 individual were given Sangeet Natak Akademi Awards. Eleven personalities won the award in the field of music.<br/><br/>They include Krishna Bisht and Mashkoor Ali Khan for Hindustani vocals and Kartik Kumar and Brij Narayan for Hindustani instrumental music. RN Thyagarajan, RN Tharanathan and Suguna Varadhachari were given awards for Carnatic vocals and Lalgudi GJR Krishnan and Mambalam MKS Siva got awards for Carnatic instrumental music.<br/><br/>Popular Singer Bhupinder Singh, Hridaynath Mangeshkar and Prafulla Kar got award for Sugam Sangeet.<br/> <br/>In the field of dance Ranganayaki Jayaraman got award for Bharatnatyam, G Padmaja Reddy for kuchipudi, Alok prava Kanungo for odissi, Sharodi Saikia for sattriya, Mandakini Trivedi for mohiniattam and Sadashiva Pradhan for chhau.<br/><br/>Theatre personalities who won were Nand Kishore Acharya and Shafaat Khan for playwriting, Parvez Akhtar and Mushtaq Kak for direction, and Manoj N Joshi and Himani Shivpuri for acting. While ten artistes won the Akademi award in the field of traditional, folk, tribal music, dance, theatre and puppetry.<br/> <br/>Writer Shanta Gokhale and Chaman Lal Ahuja won in the overall contribution and scholarship for performing arts category. They include Khem Raj for folk dance of Jammu and Kashmir, T N Shankarnathan for Puppetry, Chhaya and Maya Khutegaonkar for Lavani dance of Maharashtra and Khuman Lal Sao for folk music of Chattishgarh. <br/> <br/>The awardees received a shawl, a citation and a prize money of 1 lakh rupees.