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Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay NIF Book Prize 2021
Dialogue with the 2021 Prize-Winner Dinyar Patel
Speakers
The fourth annual New India Foundation Book Prize, named after the remarkable patriot and institution-builder Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, has been awarded to Dinyar Patel for his superbly-researched biography, Naoroji: Pioneer of Indian Nationalism published by Harvard University Press. On December 4th, 6.30 pm at the Bangalore International Centre, Dinyar will be in conversation with NIF Trustees Niraja Gopal Jayal and Manish Sabharwal. The event will also be live-streamed on the New India Foundation YouTube channel.
About the Book:
“Naoroji is a superbly researched portrait of a man of many parts – an incisive critic of imperialism, an adviser to princes, the first-ever Indian MP in the British Parliament, and a visionary who forged alliances across the world with anti-imperialists, socialists, and suffragists. This is a work of fine scholarship.” – Niraja Gopal Jayal, Chair of Prize Jury
The definitive biography of Dadabhai Naoroji, the nineteenth-century activist who founded the Indian National Congress, was the first British MP of Indian origin, and inspired Gandhi and Nehru.
Mahatma Gandhi called Dadabhai Naoroji the “father of the nation,” a title that today is reserved for Gandhi himself. Dinyar Patel examines the extraordinary life of this foundational figure in India’s modern political history, a devastating critic of British colonialism who served in Parliament as the first-ever Indian MP, forged ties with anti-imperialists around the world, and established self-rule or swaraj as India’s objective.
Naoroji’s political career evolved in three distinct phases. He began as the activist who formulated the “drain of wealth” theory, which held the British Raj responsible for India’s crippling poverty and devastating famines. His ideas upended conventional wisdom holding that colonialism was beneficial for Indian subjects and put a generation of imperial officials on the defensive. Next, he attempted to influence the British Parliament to institute political reforms. He immersed himself in British politics, forging links with socialists, Irish home rulers, suffragists, and critics of empire. With these allies, Naoroji clinched his landmark election to the House of Commons in 1892, an event noticed by colonial subjects around the world. Finally, in his twilight years he grew disillusioned with parliamentary politics and became more radical. He strengthened his ties with British and European socialists, reached out to American anti-imperialists and Progressives, and fully enunciated his demand for swaraj. Only self-rule, he declared, could remedy the economic ills brought about by British control in India.
Naoroji is the first comprehensive study of the most significant Indian nationalist leader before Gandhi.
About the Author:
Dinyar Patel is Assistant Professor of History at the S.P. Jain Institute of Management and Research in Mumbai. He previously taught in the Department of History at the University of South Carolina. He has written for BBC News and the New York Times, among other publications. More at www.dinyarpatel.com
About the Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay NIF Book Prize:
The Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay NIF Book Prize builds on the New India Foundation’s mission of sponsoring high-quality research and writing on all aspects of independent India. The prize was named after Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, the great patriot and institution-builder who had contributed significantly to the freedom struggle, to the women’s movement, to refugee rehabilitation and to the renewal of handicrafts. Previous winners of the prize include Milan Vaishnav for his remarkable book When Crime Pays: Money and Muscle in Indian Politics (HarperCollins Publishers) in 2018 and Ornit Shani for her scholarly work How India Became Democratic (Penguin Random House) in 2019. The 2020 Prize was jointly awarded to Amit Ahuja for his outstanding debut Mobilizing the Marginalized: Ethnic Parties Without Ethnic Movements (Oxford University Press) and Jairam Ramesh for his compelling biography of VK Krishna Menon, A Chequered Brilliance (Penguin Random House).
Presented by The New India Foundation. Collaborator – Bangalore Literature Festival
*Please note: BIC Venue events need attendees to be double vaccinated and comply with all health and safety protocols
Speakers
Dinyar Patel
Dinyar Patel is a historian of modern India, focusing on Indian nationalism, the city of Bombay/Mumbai, and the Parsi Zoroastrian community. He is currently Assistant Professor of History at the S.P. Jain Institute of Management and Research (SPJIMR) in Mumbai. Prior to joining SPJIMR, he was Assistant Professor of History at the University of South Carolina, where he received Fulbright and National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships. Patel earned his PhD in History from Harvard University in 2015 and his BA in International Relations from Stanford University in 2004.
Patel’s first book, Naoroji: Pioneer of Indian Nationalism, was published by Harvard University Press and HarperCollins India in May 2020. The book is a biography of Dadabhai Naoroji (1825-1917), India’s first nationalist leader and the first Asian elected to the British Parliament. Aside from detailing the moderate, pre-Gandhian phase of Indian nationalism—a period that has been significantly neglected by scholars—Patel’s book demonstrates how Naoroji contributed to the growth of global anti-colonialism by putting Indian nationalism in touch with Irish nationalism, British and European socialism, American Progressives, and African-American and West Indian political activists.
Patel is the co-editor of two published volumes: From Ghalib’s Dilli to Lutyens’ New Delhi, with Mushirul Hasan (Oxford University Press, 2014); and Dadabhai Naoroji: Selected Private Papers with S.R. Mehrotra (Oxford University Press, 2016). He has written for the New York Times online, BBC News, Atlantic, Indian Express, Hindu, India Today, Scroll.in, and Himal Southasian. At the moment, he is researching and writing a book on Indian nationalism through 1920.
Niraja Gopal Jayal
Professor Niraja Gopal Jayal is the Avantha Chair at King’s India Institute, King’s College, London. She also holds a Centennial Professorship (2019-23) at The London School of Economics, in the Department of Gender Studies. She was formerly Professor at the Centre for the Study of Law and Governance at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.
Her book Citizenship and Its Discontents (Harvard University Press and Permanent Black, 2013) won the Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy Prize of the Association of Asian Studies in 2015. She is also the author of Representing India: Ethnic Diversity and the Governance of Public Institutions (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006) and Democracy and the State: Welfare, Secularism and Development in Contemporary India (OUP, 1999). She has co-edited The Oxford Companion to Politics in India, and edited, among several others, Democracy in India (OUP, 2001) and Re-Forming India: The Nation Today. (Penguin Random House, 2019) Her most recent book is Citizenship Imperilled: India’s Fragile Democracy (Permanent Black).
Jayal delivered the Radhakrishnan Memorial Lectures at All Souls College, Oxford in 2009, and was Vice-President of the American Political Science Association. (2011-12). She has held visiting appointments at, among others, Princeton University, King’s College, London, and the EHESS, Paris.
Manish Sabharwal
Manish is currently the Chairman and co-founder of Teamlease Services, India’s largest staffing and human capital firm. Teamlease has over 95,000 employees in 1800 cities and is implementing India’s first vocational university in Gujarat and first national PPP apprenticeship program.
In 1996 he co-founded India Life, an HR outsourcing company that was acquired by Hewitt associates in 2002. Consequently he was CEO of Hewitt Outsourcing (Asia) in Singapore.
Manish serves on various state and central government committees on education, employment and employability and is a columnist for the Indian Express and Economic Times. He got his MBA from The Wharton School in 1996 and is an alumni of Shriram College, Delhi and Mayo College, Ajmer.
