The Wire Staff 
New Delhi: The New India Foundation has announced the 10-book longlist of the New India Foundation’s Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay Book Prize 2024.
The longlist of the seventh edition of the prize features books which provide a window into understanding independent India.
The prize is one of India’s largest book prizes for non-fiction, with an award of Rs 15 lakhs as well as an annual citation at the Bangalore Literature Festival. It was named to honour the legacy of Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, who contributed significantly to the freedom struggle, to the women’s movement, to refugee rehabilitation and to the renewal of Indian theatre and handicrafts.
The 2024 longlist was selected by a jury of political scientist Niraja Gopal Jayal (chair of the Book Prize), historian Srinath Raghavan, entrepreneur Manish Sabharwal, former diplomat and author Navtej Sarna, lawyer Rahul Matthan, and public policy researcher Yamini Aiyar.
The 2024 longlist (in alphabetical order of the last names of the authors) is:
Aditya Balasubramanian: Toward a Free Economy: Swatantra and Opposition Politics in Democratic India (Princeton University Press)
Sudha Bharadwaj: From Phansi Yard: My Year with the Women of Yerawada (Juggernaut)
Joya Chatterji: Shadows at Noon: The South Asian Twentieth Century (Penguin)
Neerja Chowdhury: How Prime Ministers Decide (Aleph Book Company)
Ashok Gopal: A Part Apart: The Life and Thought of B.R. Ambedkar (Navayana)
Radhika Iyengar: Fire on the Ganges: Life Among the Dead in Banaras (HarperCollins)
Michael O’Sullivan: No Birds of Passage: A History of Gujarati Muslim Business Communities 1800-1975 (Harvard University Press)
Kunal Purohit: H-Pop: The Secretive World of Hindutva Pop Stars (HarperCollins)
A.R. Venkatachalapathy: Swadeshi Steam: V.O. Chidambaram Pillai and the Battle Against the British Maritime Empire (Penguin)
Chitralekha Zutshi: Sheikh Abdullah: The Caged Lion of Kashmir (HarperCollins)
The shortlist for the prize will be announced in September and the winner in November.