New India Foundation Announces Longlist For The Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay NIF Book Prize 2026

The longlist for the Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay New India Foundation (NIF) Book Prize 2026 features ten exceptional works of non-fiction focusing on modern and contemporary India. These books, published in the 2025 calendar year, explore a wide array of themes and genres from memoir-histories and data-rich reassessments to ethnographies and biographies.

The 2026 KCBP longlist was selected by an eminent Jury comprising chairman of Tata Sons and Tata Group N Chandrasekaran, political scientist Niraja Gopal Jayal, partner at Trilegal Rahul Matthan, historian of science Jahnavi Phalkey, historian Srinath Raghavan, former Foreign Secretary of India Nirupama Rao, and entrepreneur Manish Sabharwal. The winning author will be awarded a cash prize of Rs 15 lakh.

The shortlist for the prize will be announced at the end of October 2026 and the winner will be announced in December and awarded on December 12 at the Bangalore Literature Festival 2026.

Announcing the longlist, the Chair of the Jury, Professor Niraja Gopal Jayal said, “This year’s longlist reflects the diversity and depth of non-fiction 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 Longlisted Books

1 A Man for All Seasons: The Life of K.M. Panikkar (Context)

Narayani Basu

2 For a Just Republic: The People of India and the State (Permanent Black)

Partha Chatterjee

3 Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia  (HarperCollins - Fourth Estate)

Sam Dalrymple

4 Assembling India’s Constitution: A New Democratic History (Penguin Random House - Allen Lane)

Rohit De and Ornit Shani

5 The Undying Light: A Personal History of Independent India  (Aleph)

Gopalkrishna Gandhi

6 A Sixth of Humanity: Independent India’s Development Odyssey (HarperCollins)

Devesh Kapur and Arvind Subramanian

7 Scamlands: Inside the Asian Empire of Fraud That Preys on the World (Penguin Random House - Viking)

Snigdha Poonam

8 The Secret Master: Arun Kashalkar and a Journey to the Edge of Music (Context)

Sumana Ramanan

9 Souls in the Kalyug: The Politics and Cosmologies of Migrant Workers in Contemporary India (Permanent Black)

Shankar Ramaswami

10 The Conscience Network: A Chronicle of Resistance to a Dictatorship (Penguin Random House - Vintage Books)

Sugata Srinivasaraju

Instituted in 2018, the NIF Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay Book Prize (KCBP) is India’s largest and most prestigious book prize for non-fiction books on modern and contemporary India.  The work can be originally written in English or translated into English, and welcomes a wide range of non-fiction genres.

Previous winners include Aparajith Ramnath (2025) for Engineering a Nation: The Life and Career of M. Visvesvaraya, Ashok Gopal (2024) for A Part Apart: The Life and Thought of B.R. Ambedkar, Akshaya Mukul (2023) for Writer, Rebel, Soldier, Lover: The Many Lives of Agyeya, among others.

The NIF Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay Book Prize embodies the NIF's mission to foster high-quality research and writing on all aspects of the world’s largest democracy.

The New India Foundation

The New India Foundation runs three key programmes: the NIF Book Fellowship, the Translation Fellowship, and the Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay NIF Book Prize. NIF also partners with the Ashoka Centre for Translation on Bhashavaad, an annual translation conference, which has launched a unique, searchable database of translations in India (bhashavaad.in) that now holds over 30,000 entries and counting.

Over the past two decades, the NIF Book Fellowship has supported 40 high-quality nonfiction books exploring various aspects of post-1947 India — from political biographies and cultural histories to memoirs — each offering a distinctive interpretation of contemporary India and being published to widespread critical acclaim.