New India Foundation Announces the Longlist of the Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay Boom Prize 2024

The New India Foundation announces the Longlist of the NIF Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay Book Prize 2024 for the finest non-fiction on modern and contemporary Indian history published in the previous calendar year. The Longlist of the 7th edition comprises 10 remarkable books which provide a window into understanding independent India.

The NIF Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay Book Prize (KCBP) is India’s largest and most prestigious Book Prize for non-fiction. Open to writers of all nationalities who have worked on any aspect of Indian history after Independence, the KCBP was instituted in 2018 and carries an award of INR 15 lakhs as well as an annual citation at the Bangalore Literature Festival.

Each year, the Prize receives an enormous number of nominations from around the world and a diverse range of books about key aspects of India’s legal, economic, socio-cultural, political, and other histories. The Jury has selected 10 books from amongst these as the Longlist for this seventh edition of the Prize.

The 2024 KCBP Longlist was selected by an eminent Jury, including political scientist Niraja Gopal Jayal (Chair of the Book Prize), historian Srinath Raghavan, entrepreneur Manish Sabharwal, former diplomat and author Navtej Sarna, lawyer Rahul Matthan, and public policy researcher Yamini Aiyar.

Jury Comment: “The landscape of Indian non-fiction today is prolific, exciting and constantly pushing boundaries, and we congratulate all the nominated authors and their publishers.”

The 2024 Longlist (in alphabetical order of the last names of the authors) is:

Aditya Balasubramanian: Toward a Free Economy: Swatantra and Opposition Politics in Democratic India (Princeton University Press)

Sudha Bharadwaj: From Phansi Yard: My Year with the Women of Yerawada (Juggernaut)

Joya Chatterji: Shadows at Noon: The South Asian Twentieth Century (Penguin)

Neerja Chowdhury: How Prime Ministers Decide (Aleph Book Company)  

Ashok Gopal: A Part Apart: The Life and Thought of B.R. Ambedkar (Navayana)

Radhika Iyengar: Fire on the Ganges: Life Among the Dead in Banaras (HarperCollins)

Michael O’Sullivan: No Birds of Passage: A History of Gujarati Muslim Business Communities 1800-1975 (Harvard University Press)

Kunal Purohit: H-Pop: The Secretive World of Hindutva Pop Stars (HarperCollins)

AR Venkatachalapathy: Swadeshi Steam: V.O. Chidambaram Pillai and the Battle Against the British Maritime Empire (Penguin)

Chitralekha Zutshi: Sheikh Abdullah: The Caged Lion of Kashmir (HarperCollins)

For more detailed information on the books for this year’s longlist, please watch the video.

The NIF Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay Book Prize builds on the New India Foundation’s mission to sponsor high-quality 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. 

Akshaya Mukul was last year’s winner of the KCBP for his authoritative biography Writer, Rebel, Soldier, Lover: The Many Lives of Agyeya (Penguin). The 2023 Prize went to Shekhar Pathak for his environmental study of 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.

About the New India Foundation

Based in Bengaluru, the core activity of the New India Foundation is the NIF Book Fellowships (currently accepting applications) 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 34 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. The 12th Round of the NIF Book Fellowships is open for applications until December 31st, 2024; 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.

The Shortlist for the Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay NIF Book Prize 2024 will be announced in September 2024.

The Winner of the KBCP 2024 will be announced in November.

The Award-Winner of the 7th Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay NIF Book Prize 2024 will be featured in conversation with an NIF Trustee at the Bangalore Literature Festival on December 14th.