Books on the ‘othering’ of the Indian Muslim, a people’s environment movement, stories numbers tell, the rigidity of maps and fluidity of borders, and exploring contemporary ideas of feminism have been shortlisted for the Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay NIF Book Prize, 2022.
Ghazala Wahab’s Born a Muslim, about what it means to hail from a minority community in India today, Shekhar Pathak’s The Chipko Movement: A People’s History, translated by Manisha Chaudhry, Rukmini S.’s Whole Numbers and Half Truths: What Data Can and Cannot Tell Us About Modern India, Suchitra Vijayan’s Midnight’s Borders: A People’s History of Modern India and Swethaa S. Ballakrishnen’s Accidental Feminism: Gender Parity and Selective Mobility Among India’s Professional Elite have made the shortlist from a longlist of 10 books.
Diverse subjects
Born a Muslim traces the arrival of Islam by multiple routes to India, and why Muslims feel vulnerable and insecure in present times, interspersing the narrative with personal experiences even as things come to a head during the Ayodhya movement of the 1990s. With the debate over climate change raging, Pathak’s book is pertinent, for by profiling the Chipko movement, it underscores the fact that the fight to protect the mountains and forests is far from over. In her attempt to explain India through numbers, Rukmini S. pores over mountain of data on population, wealth, economy, health indices and so forth; and Vijayan travels to the borders in the north, west and east, 9,000 miles over seven years, to report from ground zero. Ballakrishnen interviews more than 130 professionals to examine how underlying mechanisms like family structures and gendered socialisation give certain women egalitarian outcomes that are not available to all.
According to the jury, led by political scientist and writer Niraja Gopal Jayal, “This year’s shortlist is extraordinary, in terms of the wide range of themes covered, and the diversity of topics and perspectives.” The books, it said, offer keen insights into the making of India today and the transitions it is currently undergoing. The other members on the jury are entrepreneur Manish Sabharwal, historian and author Srinath Raghavan, historian and author Nayanjot Lahiri, former diplomat and author Navtej Sarna, and attorney and author Rahul Matthan. The winner of the ₹15 lakh prize will be announced on December 1. Dinyar Patel won in 2021 for his biography, Naoroji: Pioneer of Indian Nationalism.
The other books on the 2022 longlist were Partha Chatterjee’s The Truths and Lies of Nationalism as Narrated by Charvak (Permanent Black); Yashodhara Dalmia’s Syed Haider Raza: The Journey of an Iconic Artist (HarperCollins); Subrata Mitra’s Governance by Stealth: The Ministry of Home Affairs and the Making of the Indian State Oxford University Press; Mircea Raianu’s Tata: The Global Corporation That Built Indian Capitalism (Harvard University Press) and Usha Thakkar’s Congress Radio: Usha Mehta and the Underground Radio Station of 1942 (Penguin).
