The Art of the Borderland across South and Southeast Asia: a public conversation with Arkotong Longkumer & Clare Harris yale.edu - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from yale.edu Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay NIF Book Prize longlist picks 12 power-packed titles
The covers of the books in the longlist of the prize.Premium
1 min read
Share Via
Read Full Story
The Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay NIF Book Prize, instituted by the New India Foundation (NIF) in 2018, for the best book-length work of non-fiction about India announced its longlist of 12 titles for the 2020 prize. The announcement was made online on Wednesday by writer and historian Ramachandra Guha, one of the members of the jury. A shortlist of 6 will be announced on 16 November.
From a biography of V.D. Sarvarkar to an investigative book on the pharma industry, the books cover a wide and eclectic ground. Written by scholars, journalists and activists, the titles were picked by the jury, consisting of Niraja Jayal Gopal, Ramachandra Guha, Srinath Raghavan, Nayanjot Lahiri, Nandan Nilekani and Manish Sabharwal.
An Indian American political science professor at U.C. Santa Barbara, Amit Ahuja, was named a co-winner of the Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay New India Foundation Book Prize 2020, the countryâs most prestigious honor for non-fiction.
Growing up in India, Ahuja knew little about Dalits, the people at the bottom of the countryâs caste system who were long known as âuntouchables.â Although large in numbers, they were mostly invisible in textbooks â as they were expected to be in society, the university said in a news release.
Ahuja in recent years visited hundreds of Dalit communities to understand their evolving place in Indian politics.
Housing and Development Newsletter
“We are thrilled to hear the news that our colleague has won such prestigious international recognition for his research,” she said. “Professor Ahuja’s work is at the core of our departmental focus on the politics of identity. His book, “Mobilizing the Marginalized,” examines how poor and marginalized people gain access to the political system by mobilizing political identities. He has also published work on the politics of religious identity and military cohesion, racial prejudice and nationalism. We are proud to be associated with him.”
Through their political activism, Ahuja said, Dalits have succeeded in undermining the legitimacy of a 2,000-year-old social system that excluded and humiliated them by treating them as untouchables.