“Writing, in general, is a very solitary process,” says Yauvanika Chopra, Associate Director at The New India Foundation (NIF), which, earlier this year, announced the 12th edition of its NIF Book Fellowships for research and scholarship about Indian history after Independence. While authors, in general, are built for it, it can still get very lonely, says Chopra, pointing out that the fellowship’s community support is as valuable as the monetary benefits it offers. “There is a solid community of NIF fellows, trustees, language experts, jury members, all of whom are incredibly competent,” she says. “They really help make authors feel supported from manuscript to publication, so you never feel like you’re struggling through isolation.”
Fellowships alternate every year between the NIF Book Fellowships and the NIF Translation Fellowships (for bringing non-fiction from Indian languages to English), with this year focused on the former. According to a release, since its inception two decades ago, the New India Foundation has sponsored the publication of 34 critically acclaimed, award-winning books across a wide range of topics detailing the trajectory of India after 1947.
Chopra lists some of them: Rahul Pandita’s Our Moon Has Blood Clots: The Exodus of the Kashmiri Pandits, Neyaz Farooquee’s Growing Up Muslim in India: An Ordinary Man’s Guide To Radicalism, Ayesha Kidwai’s translation of her grandmother Begum Anis Kidwai’s memoir titled In Freedom’s Shade, Jason Fernandes’ Citizenship in a Caste Polity: Religion, Language and Belonging in Goa and Kartik Shanker’s From Soup to Superstar: The Story of Sea Turtle Conservation Along the Indian Coast, among others. “On the website, we write that we are ecumenical in terms of genre and ideology; the only requirement is that the proposed works contribute to a fuller understanding of contemporary India,” she says. “That is really true. It is a pretty wide canvas.”
Reaching more people
The application form, currently accessible on the NIF website, is fairly straightforward, adds Chopra. In addition to details such as name, date of birth, address and contact number, applicants must provide a 5000-word research proposal and a similarly-sized writing sample. “Those are indicative,” she says. “Your proposal could be shorter, and your writing example could be from something else that you’ve written, although it’s recommended that it should be from the book you want to write because then we get a sense of what it would look like,” she says.
While the number of fellowships is variable, at least five are awarded from the 20-odd people shortlisted every year. Fellowship holders are granted a cumulative amount of ₹18 lakhs over a 12-month-long period, which includes a stipend of ₹1 lakh per month. The rest will be disbursed at the time of the final manuscript submission, states Chopra. “The other thing we offer is a one lakh subsidy directly to the publisher to offset printing costs,” she says. “If they can keep the price down for the book, they can make sure that it reaches more people.”
Applications for the NIF fellowship are open till December 31. To know more, log into www.newindiafoundation.org/nif-fellowships.
Published – November 27, 2024 09:00 am IST
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