Twelve books feature on the longlist of the New India Foundations’s Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay NIF Book Prize for the best non-fiction book on modern or contemporary India in 2019. Since the mandate of the prize does not set limitations on genre or writer’s nationality, the net is cast far and wide when it comes to inviting entries.
Not surprisingly, therefore, the longlist spans politics, nature, history, investigative reporting, anthropology, and biography. The shortlist will be announced in November and the winner of the Rs 15-lakh prize, in December. The winners of the last two editions of the prize were Milan Vaishnav in 2018 for When Crime Pays, and Ornit Shani in 2019 for How India Became Democratic.
Here is the longlist, in no particular order, along with excerpts from the publishers’ blurbs.
