One of the most prestigious literary awards in the country, the Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay Book Prize celebrates excellence in non-fiction about India published in the previous calendar year by writers of all nationalities. Established in 2018, the Book Prize carries a cash award of INR 15 lakhs and a citation. 

The 2023 KCBP Shortlist was selected by an eminent Jury, including political scientist Niraja Gopal Jayal (Chair of the Book Prize), historian Srinath Raghavan, columnist-writer Navtej Sarna, lawyer Rahul Matthan, columnist-writer Yamini Aiyar, and entrepreneur  Manish Sabharwal. 

The Jury said, “Each book on the Longlist presented important insights on the India in which we live, and deciding on a final selection was a difficult task. The five books finally selected in the Shortlist illuminate our understanding of how the nation and its citizens have come to be.” 

The Shortlist for the Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay NIF Book Prize 2023 is: 

1. Achyut Chetan — Founding Mothers of the Indian Republic 

(Cambridge University Press) 

2. Rotem Geva — Delhi Reborn: Partition and Nation Building in India’s Capital (Stanford University Press) 
3. Akshaya Mukul — Writer, Rebel, Soldier, Lover: The Many Lives of Agyeya (Penguin) 
4. Gita Ramaswamy — Land, Guns, Caste, Woman: Memoirs of a Lapsed Revolutionary (Navayana) 
5. Taylor C. Sherman — Nehru’s India: A History in Seven Myths 

(Princeton University Press) 

The Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay NIF Book Prize builds on the New India Foundation’s mission of sponsoring research and writing on all aspects of the world’s largest democracy. Works written

originally in English or translated into English are eligible across a range of genres. The Prize was named to honour the legacy of Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay: the great patriot and institution builder who contributed significantly to the freedom struggle, to the women’s movement, to refugee rehabilitation and to the renewal of Indian theatre and handicrafts. 

Shekhar Pathak was last year’s winner of the KCBP for his environmental history The Chipko Movement: A People’s History, translated from Hindi by Manisha Chaudhry (Permanent Black). Dinyar Patel won the 4th edition of the Prize for his definitive biography Naroji: Pioneer of Indian Nationalism (Harvard University Press). In 2020, the KCBP was jointly awarded to Amit Ahuja for his debut Mobilizing the Marginalized: Ethnic Parties without Ethnic Movements (Oxford University Press) and Jairam Ramesh for his biography A Chequered Brilliance: The Many Lives of V.K. Krishna Menon (Penguin Random House). Ornit Shani was recognised for her scholarly work, How India Became Democratic: Citizenship and the Making of the Universal Franchise (Penguin Random House) in 2019 and Milan Vaishnav for his remarkable debut When Crime Pays: Money and Muscle in Indian Politics (HarperCollins Publishers) in 2018. 

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Wednesday, September 20th, 2023: The New India Foundation (NIF) is pleased to announce the commencement of applications for the 2nd round of the NIF Translation Fellowships to be awarded in 2024. Aimed at encouraging translations from important non-fiction works in Indian languages into English, the NIF Translation Fellowships will showcase the country’s rich history through its diverse languages and literary knowledge traditions. The first round of the Fellowships (awarded to Bangla, Kannada and Marathi) are all slated for publication by 2025. These three significant translations will supplement the 32 books already published under the New India Foundation aegis through the flagship Book Fellowship programme. Our aim through the Translation Fellowships is to expand on the NIF’s mission to sponsor research and writing on all aspects of Independent India.

Proposals are invited from translators for ten Indian languages: Assamese, Bangla, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Marathi, Malayalam, Odia, Tamil and Urdu. Each language has a corresponding Expert from our Language Expert Committee, which consists of leading Indian authors and scholars, to ensure the highest standards of selection and support. The Fellowship will be awarded on the basis of the choice of text, quality of translation, and overall project proposal. The non-fiction source text from any of the 10 languages can be ecumenical, with no constraints on genre as long as it elucidates upon any socio-economic/cultural aspect of Indian history from the year 1850 onwards. NIF is expanding our mission of post-1947 India to include a broadly defined modern India only for the Translation Fellowship.

Awarded for a period of 6 months with a stipend of 6 lakhs to each recipient, the Translation Fellowships will be awarded to translators/writers working on bringing historical Indian-language texts to an English publication. By the end of the year, Fellows are expected to publish the translated works, which will be an extension of their winning proposals.

Speaking on this initiative, Manish Sabharwal, Managing Trustee of the New India Foundation said: “The Translation Fellowships are an attempt to bring Indian knowledge in Indian languages to wider audiences by publishing them in English. There are rich intellectual traditions in our bhashas which deserve to be made accessible and this is our effort towards that.”

Applications open: September 20th, 2023

Deadline for submissions: December 31, 2023

The Jury for these fellowships this year includes the NIF Trustees: political scientist Niraja Jayal Gopal, historian Srinath Raghavan, and entrepreneur Manish Sabharwal alongside the Language Expert Committee in all 10 languages, comprising of esteemed bilingual scholars, professors, academics, and literary translators.

About the New India Foundation

Based in Bengaluru, the core activity of the New India Foundation is the New India Fellowships aimed at enabling high-quality original research and translation on an eclectic range of topics around post-Independence India. The NIF Fellowships have resulted in the publication of a vibrant collection of 32 books through prestigious publishing houses.

Instituted in 2018, the Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay NIF Book Prize, awarded to the best non-fiction book on modern/contemporary India, has further built on this mission of sponsoring extraordinary research and writing on the world’s largest democracy. The 2022 Book Prize was awarded to Shekhar Pathak’s book The Chipko Movement: A People’s History translated from Hindi by Manisha Chaudhry (Permanent Black 2021).

The Annual NIF Lecture was started in 2004 and renamed in 2019 as the Girish Karnad Memorial Lecture in honour of the late multi-lingual scholar. The 2023 Lecture was delivered by Amory Lovins on ‘Can We Innovate Our Way Out of the Climate Crisis?’ at the Bangalore International Centre.

Ramachandra Guha, Nandan Nilekani, Niraja Gopal Jayal, Manish Sabharwal and Srinath Raghavan are the Trustees of the New India Foundation.

For more information, please contact:

Yauvanika Chopra (yauvanika@newindiafoundation.org)

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