“The New India Foundation initiative to celebrate knowledge in Indian languages and literature”

Chennai, Sep. 2023

The New India Foundation (NIF) is pleased to announce the commencement of applications forthe 2nd round of the NIF Translation Fellowshipsto be awarded in 2024. Aimed at encouraging translations from important non-fiction works in Indian languages into English, the NIF Translation Fellowships will showcase the country’s rich history through its diverse languages and literary knowledge traditions. The first round of the Fellowships (awarded to Bangla, Kannada and Marathi) are all slated for publication by 2025. These three significant translations will supplement the 32 books already published under the New India Foundation aegis through the flagship Book Fellowship programme. Our aim through the Translation Fellowships is toexpand on the NIF’s mission to sponsor researchand writing on all aspects of Independent India.

Proposals are invited from translators for tenIndian languages: Assamese, Bangla, Gujarati,Hindi, Kannada, Marathi, Malayalam, Odia, Tamil and Urdu. Each language has a corresponding Expert from our Language Expert Committee, which consists of leading Indian authors and scholars, to ensure the highest standards of selection and support. The Fellowship will be awarded on the basis of thechoice of text, quality of translation, and overall project proposal. The non-fiction source text fromany of the 10 languages can be ecumenical, withno constraints on genre as long as it elucidatesupon any socio-economic/cultural aspect of Indianhistory from the year 1850 onwards. NIF isexpanding our mission of post-1947 India to include a broadly defined modern India only for the Translation Fellowship.

Awarded for a period of 6 months with a stipend of 6 lakhs to each recipient, the TranslationFellowships will be awarded to translators/writersworking on bringing historical Indian-languagetexts to an English publication. By the end of theyear, Fellows are expected to publish thetranslated works, which will be an extension oftheir winning proposals.

Speaking on this initiative, Manish Sabharwal, Managing Trustee of the New India Foundation said: “The Translation Fellowships are an attempt to bring Indian knowledge in Indian languages to wider audiences by publishing them in English.There are rich intellectual traditions in our bhashaswhich deserve to be made accessible and this isour effort towards that.”

Applications open: September 20th, 2023; Deadline for submissions: December 31, 2023

The Jury for these fellowships this year includesthe NIF Trustees: political scientist Niraja JayalGopal, historian Srinath Raghavan, and entrepreneur Manish Sabharwal alongside the Language Expert Committee in all 10languages, comprising of esteemed bilingualscholars, professors, academics, and literarytranslators.

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