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The New India Foundation has announced the winner of the fourth edition of the Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay NIF Book Prize 2021. History professor Dinyar Patel has won the award for his book Naoroji: Pioneer of Indian Nationalism, published by Harvard University Press, a biography of the nineteenth-century activist who founded the Indian National Congress, was the first British MP of Indian origin, and inspired Gandhi and Nehru.
Patel gets a cash award of Rs 15 lakh and a citation.
The winner was selected from a shortlist of six books that covered a variety of themes and subjects and showcased some of the finest non-fiction writing about the world’s largest democracy. Patel’s book Naoroji is the first comprehensive study of the most significant Indian nationalist leader before Gandhi.
Instituted in 2018, the Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay NIF Book Prize celebrates high-quality non-fiction literature on modern and contemporary India from writers of all nationalities published in the previous calendar year.
This year’s winner, Dinyar Patel, Assistant Professor of History at the S.P. Jain Institute of Management and Research in Mumbai, , was selected by a jury panel which included political scientist and author Niraja Gopal Jayal (Jury Chair), entrepreneur and author Nandan Nilekani; historian and author Srinath Raghavan; historian and author Nayanjot Lahiri; and entrepreneur Manish Sabharwal.
The Prize will be presented to Dinyar Patel at an event on 4 December held in collaboration with the Bangalore International Centre.
Previous winners of the prize include Milan Vaishnav for his book When Crime Pays: Money and Muscle in Indian Politics ( HarperCollins Publishers) in 2018 and Ornit Shani for her scholarly work How India Became Democratic (Penguin Random House) in 2019. The 2020 Prize 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 compelling biography of VK Krishna Menon, A Chequered Brilliance (Penguin Random House).
About the book
Naoroji – Pioneer of Indian Nationalism
by Dinyar Patel
Harvard University Press
320 pages (Hardcover); Rs 2727
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