From over 900 applications received for the 10th New India Foundation (NIF) Fellowship, Dr Simin Patel’s proposal to write a book on the Irani restaurants of Bombay and Jaideep Hardikar’s proposed book on the rise and fall of "The Empress” (Mills) were among the 11 selected.
Patel’s book delves "into the world of Irani strongmen and dons and the cafes they operated from. Her DPhil dissertation from the University of Oxford traced the role the Parsi community played as cultural intermediaries in colonial Bombay.” Hardikar’s book explores "the story of Tata’s first venture, the Empress Mills — rise and eventual fall, and its lasting impact.”
Dr Simin Patel (l); and Jaideep Hardikar
The NIF Fellowship is awarded for non-fiction work and is given "for a period of one year with an annual stipend of Rs 18 lakhs (USD 25,584) to each recipient and includes editorial and publishing support for each project.” To date 22 books by recipients have been published, "many of these have become seminal and award winning works on contemporary Indian history,” notes the NIF announcement. Jury selection members for the Bangalore based Foundation include political scientist, Niraja Gopal Jayal; historian and author, Ramachandra Guha; chief executive officer, Pratham Education Foundation, Rukmini Banerji, entrepreneur and author, Nandan Nilekani, historian, Srinath Raghavan and chairman, Teamlease Services, Manish Sabharwal.
The other nine recipients are: Anjum Hasan, writer and critic, Shillong: First City of India’s Northeast; Chitrangada Choudhury, multimedia journalist and researcher, Power, Profit and Protests: Forest Communities on the Frontlines of Environmental Justice; Jayaseelan Raj, social anthropologist and academic, The Egalitarian Paradox: Dalits and the State in Kerala; Maya Ratnam, academic and researcher, Dwelling in the Forest: The Government of Nature in Tribal Central India; M. Mohsin Alam Bhat, lawyer and academic, Constitutional Culture: Muslims and Popular Constitutionalism in India; Raza Kazmi, conservationist, wildlife historian, researcher and writer, The First of Nine: The Story of Palamau Tiger Reserve; Sohini C, an independent journalist and writer, The Losers; A History of Women Runners, and Running in India; Srikar Raghavan, an independent researcher and writer, From Malnad to Mysore: Following the trail of Literature and Activism in Karnataka; and Suryakant Waghmore, sociologist, academic and writer, Is a Post Caste City Possible?: Examining Caste Erasure in contemporary Ahmedabad and Mumbai.