Writer, Rebel, Soldier, Lover: The Many Lives of Agyeya
AKSHAYA MUKUL
(Penguin)
Bangalore, Friday; December 1st, 2023: The New India Foundation announces the Winner of the Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay NIF Book Prize 2023 — Akshaya Mukul for Writer, Rebel, Soldier, Lover: The Many Lives of Agyeya, published by Penguin Random House.
The winner of the sixth edition was selected from a diverse shortlist of five magisterial books across a distinct range of Indian history, including Achyut Chetan’s Founding Mothers of the Indian Republic (Cambridge University Press), Rotem Geva’s Delhi Reborn: Partition and Nation Building in India’s Capital (Stanford University Press), Gita Ramaswamy’s Land, Guns, Caste, Woman: Memoirs of a Lapsed Revolutionary (Navayana), and Taylor C. Sherman’s Nehru’s India: A History in Seven Myths (Princeton University Press).
The Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay NIF Book Prize recognises excellence in non-fiction writings about modern and contemporary Indian history by writers of all nationalities. The winner receives a cash award of INR 15 lakhs, a trophy and a citation.
The winner was selected by an eminent Jury including political scientist Niraja Gopal Jayal (Chair); entrepreneur Manish Sabharwal; historian Srinath Raghavan; former diplomat Navtej Sarna; policy analyst Yamini Aiyar, and lawyer Rahul Matthan.
The Jury Citation for the Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay NIF Book Prize 2023:
“This is an outstanding biography of the writer, Sachidanand Hiranand Vatsyayan Agyeya, one of the towering figures of the Hindi literary world in the 20th century. Through Agyeya’s life, the book offers a panoramic view of the landscape of Hindi literature in possibly its most fertile period, and of the exceptional writers and poets who populated it.”
About Writer, Rebel, Soldier, Lover: The Many Lives of Agyeya
Sachchidanand Hirananda Vatsyayan ‘Agyeya’ is unarguably one of the most remarkable figures of Indian literature. From his revolutionary youth to acquiring the mantle of a (highly controversial) patron saint of Hindi literature, Agyeya’s turbulent life also tells a history of the Hindi literary world and of a new nation-spanning as it does two world wars, Independence and Partition, and the building and fraying of the Nehruvian state.
Akshaya Mukul’s comprehensive and unflinching biography is a journey into Agyeya’s public, private and secret lives. Based on never-seen-before archival material — including a mammoth trove of private papers, documents of the CIA-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom and colonial records of his years in jail — the book delves deep into the life of the nonconformist poet-novelist. Mukul reveals Agyeya’s revolutionary life and bomb-making skills, his CIA connection, a secret lover, his intense relationship with a first cousin, the trajectory of his political positions, from following M.N. Roy to exploring issues dear to the Hindu right, and much more. Along the way, we get a rare peek into the factionalism and pettiness of the Hindi literary world of the twentieth century, and the wondrous and grand debates which characterized that milieu.
Writer, Rebel, Soldier, Lover features a formidable cast of characters: from writers like Premchand, Phanishwarnath Renu, Raja Rao, Mulk Raj Anand and Josephine Miles to Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, revolutionary Chandra Shekhar Azad and actor Balraj Sahni. And its landscapes stretch from British jails, an intellectually robust Allahabad and modern-day Delhi to monasteries in Europe, the homes of Agyeya’s friends in the Himalayas and universities in the US. This book is a magnificent examination of Agyeya’s civilizational enterprise.
Akshaya Mukul is the author of Gita Press and the Making of Hindu India (2015), written under the aegis of a New India Foundation Book Fellowship, which won every major non-fiction award in India on its release, including the Crossword Book Award, Ramnath Goenka Award, Tata Literature Live Award, Atta-Galatta-Bangalore Literature Festival Prize and the Shakti Bhatt Award.
About the Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay NIF Book Prize
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 Naoroji: 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.
About the New India Foundation
Based in Bengaluru, the core activity of the New India Foundation is the NIF Book
Fellowships which have been awarded to scholars and writers for two decades to enable the highest standard of research and writing about India after Independence, resulting in the publication of 33 books covering an extraordinary range of topics. The NIF Translation
Fellowships were instituted in 2021 and expand upon the core idea of fostering non-fiction by translating knowledge texts from 10 Indian languages to English. The NIF Book and Translation Fellowships are awarded in alternate years.
Round 2 of the NIF Translation Fellowships is currently open for applications — please visit the website for further details.
Ramachandra Guha, Nandan Nilekani, Niraja Gopal Jayal, Manish Sabharwal and Srinath
Raghavan are the Trustees of the New India Foundation.
