The New India Foundation announced the longlist for the prestigious Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay NIF Book Prize 2022. The prize especially acknowledges the vast pool of non-fiction writing and writers who deal with a reformed idea of India. The award made its debut in 2018 and has been named after Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay who played a significant role in India’s freedom struggle, representing the power of women.
The jury is chaired by Niraja Goyal Jayal, political scientist and author. She said, “The shortlist for the Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay-NIF Book Prize 2022 is wonderfully diverse. The many themes in modern Indian history that it covers have great relevance today. If the histories of nationalism, business, the environment and state institutions offer a sobering historical lens on the present, the more contemporary works on feminism and data give reasons for optimism about the future. Deeply researched and engagingly written, these works of history reflect on the contemporary Indian condition.”
This year, the longlist was declared on September 29 and the following 10 books made it to the mark. Accidental Feminism: Gender Parity and Selective Mobility Among India’s Professional Elite by Swethaa S. Ballakrishnen (Princeton University Press); The Truths and Lies of Nationalism as Narrated by Charvak by Partha Chatterjee (Permanent Black); Syed Haider Raza: The Journey of an Iconic Artist by Yashodhara Dalmia (HarperCollins); Governance by Stealth: The Ministry of Home Affairs and the Making of the Indian State by Subrata Mitra (Oxford University Press); The Chipko Movement: A People’s History by Shekhar Pathak (Permanent Black); Tata: The Global Corporation That Built Indian Capitalism by Mircea Raianu (Harvard University Press); Whole Numbers and Half Truths: What Data Can and Cannot Tell Us About Modern India by Rukmini S. (Context/Westland); Congress Radio: Usha Mehta and the Underground Radio Station of 1942 by Usha Thakkar (Penguin); Midnight’s Borders: A People’s History of Modern India by Suchitra Vijayan (Context/Westland); and Born a Muslim: Some Truths about Islam in India by Ghazala Wahab (Aleph).
The various aspects of India, the past, present, future, and a developing country has been re-imagined through these books which range from biographies to art history, from environmental and government focused writing to industrial domination.
The jury for the fifth edition includes Manish Sabharwal, entrepreneur; Srinath Raghavan, historian and author; Nayanjot Lahiri, historian and author; Navtej Sarna, former diplomat and author; and Rahul Matthan, attorney and author. The jury is chaired by Niraja Goyal Jayal.
Previous winners include When Crime Pays: Money and Muscle in Indian Politics by Milan Vaishnav (HarperCollins Publishers) in 2018; How India Became Democratic by Ornit Shani (Penguin Random House) in 2019; Mobilizing the Marginalized: Ethnic Parties Without Ethnic Movements by Amit Ahuja (Oxford University Press) and A Chequered Brilliance by Jairam Ramesh (Penguin Random House) in 2020; and Naoroji: Pioneer of Indian Nationalism by Dinyar Patel (Harvard University Press) in 2021.
The shortlist will be declared on November 8, 2022 and the winner on December 1, 2022.
