New Delhi: The New India Foundation has announced a 10-book longlist for its Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay NIF Book Prize 2026. The books, all published in 2025, include biographies, memoir-histories, ethnographies, and studies of contemporary India.
“This year’s longlist reflects the diversity and depth of nonfiction writing on modern and contemporary India. The ten selected works offer distinctive and compelling perspectives on the people, ideas, and movements that have shaped the country. We look forward to celebrating these works and the conversations they will inspire,” the foundation said in a statement.
The winning author will receive a cash prize of Rs 15 lakh.
Of music, resistance, and scams
Here are the 10 longlisted books for the NIF Book Prize 2026.
Narayani Basu’s A Man for All Seasons: The Life of K.M. Panikkar tells the life of diplomat, historian, and public intellectual KM Panikkar, while also using his career to tell the story of a young India finding its place in the world.
Gopalkrishna Gandhi’s The Undying Light: A Personal History of Independent India combines memoir and history to look at India after Independence through Gandhi’s own experiences and encounters.
Partha Chatterjee’s For a Just Republic: The People of India and the State analyses the relationship between the nation-state and what Chatterjee calls the ‘people-nation’.
Rohit De and Ornit Shani’s Assembling India’s Constitution: A New Democratic History revisits the making of the Constitution from the perspective of people and groups beyond the Constituent Assembly.
Sam Dalrymple’s Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia traces five partitions that broke up the British Indian Empire and reshaped the map of modern Asia.
Devesh Kapur and Arvind Subramanian’s A Sixth of Humanity: Independent India’s Development Odyssey examines India’s distinctive development path since Independence, including its early embrace of democracy, services, globalisation, economic policy, and the role of the State.
Snigdha Poonam’s Scamlands: Inside the Asian Empire of Fraud That Preys on the World follows the networks and people behind fraud across India, Asia, and beyond.
Sumana Ramanan’s The Secret Master: Arun Kashalkar and a Journey to the Edge of Music follows a detective story about an underground Hindustani classical music scene in Mumbai, centred on khayal singer Arun Kashalkar and his artistic journey.
Shankar Ramaswami’s Souls in the Kalyug: The Politics and Cosmologies of Migrant Workers in Contemporary India looks at how migrant workers seek to build a good life through collective struggle, relationships and religious belief.
Sugata Srinivasaraju’s The Conscience Network: A Chronicle of Resistance to a Dictatorship tells the story of resistance to Indira Gandhi’s rule, focusing on the movement that developed in the United States and among the Indian diaspora.
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Jury for 2026
Started in 2018, the Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay NIF Book Prize is a literary award for nonfiction books on modern and contemporary India. It is open to books written in English as well as those translated into the language. The prize aims to encourage research and writing on modern India.
Previous winners include Aparajith Ramnath for Engineering a Nation: The Life and Career of M. Visvesvaraya; Ashok Gopal for A Part Apart: The Life and Thought of B.R. Ambedkar; and Akshaya Mukul for Writer, Rebel, Soldier, Lover: The Many Lives of Agyeya.
The jury for the 2026 prize includes Tata Sons chairman N Chandrasekaran, political scientist Niraja Gopal Jayal, Trilegal partner Rahul Matthan, science historian Jahnavi Phalkey, historian Srinath Raghavan, former Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao, and entrepreneur Manish Sabharwal.
The shortlist is expected by the end of October, and the award will be presented on 12 December at the Bangalore Literature Festival 2026.
(Edited by Prasanna Bachchhav)
The award should go to Noel Tata for keeping the conscience of the Tata group and not yielding to the vultures in the Tata Sons boardroom.