A Prize for Patel

"I was very surprised when I received a call in November telling me that I had won…I was under the impression that the award was given for books which cover material after 1947, and my book, of course, details episodes well before independence,” said Dr Dinyar Patel, historian and assistant professor of history at S. P. Jain Institute of Management and Research, who was awarded the fourth Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay NIF (New India Foundation) Book Prize for his book Naoroji: Pioneer of Indian Nationalism on December 4, 2021. "I was very humbled because this year’s long list and short list contained some really excellent books… I was really happy that my book was selected alongside them, and pleasantly surprised that it was ultimately judged the winner,” Patel shared his thoughts on receiving the Prize.

Dr Dinyar Patel; right: prize-winning book

Naoroji was selected from a short list of six by a panel that included political scientist Niraja Gopal Jayal, entrepreneur Nandan Nilekani, historians Srinath Raghavan and Nayanjyot Lahiri and entrepreneur Manish Sabharwal. The jury said that Patel’s book "is an exemplary biography about one of India’s first nationalists, written with great lucidity and detail by a promising scholar,” reported The Hindu on December 1. The Prize carries a cash award of Rs 15 lakhs, notes the website of NIF. Naoroji is Patel’s second book on the eponymous liberal thinker. His first was Dadabhai Naoroji: Selected Private Papers, co-edited with S. R. Mehrotra (see "Dadabhai’s dossier,” Books, Parsiana, June 21, 2017).
Naoroji’s life work "was finding out ways to eradicate the desperate poverty which India found itself in during the 19th century… He wanted India to grow into a rich, prosperous country where ordinary people could enjoy a fundamental decency in their lives.” Patel bemoaned that though "India has made enormous progress, (the country) needs to do much more on poverty eradication and, more importantly, creating the good governance which is necessary for improving the quality of life for the average Indian.” The historian was responding to Parsiana’s queries on the significance of Naoroji’s thoughts and works today. "As current things stand, a country like Bangladesh has seemed to have better learned these lessons than modern India.”
Speaking of Naoroji’s political ethos, Patel stated that liberalism is "in great need today to be revived… He made the Congress an inclusive, welcoming organization which strove to represent India’s diversity… I think he would be quite jolted at today’s political culture which is being defined more and more by aggressive majoritarianism and communalism.” Adding that Naoroji was "fundamentally committed to education and bringing educational opportunities to all Indians,” the historian stated that Naoroji "made one of the earliest calls for state-supported free education…. While India has recently made some impressive strides in literacy and access to education, once more it is a question of quality… Modern India has still not learned something which early nationalists preached over a century ago: the critical importance of quality universal primary and secondary education.”
Instituted in 2018, the Prize is awarded for "the best non-fiction book on modern/contemporary India published in the previous year… This Prize is named to honor the legacy of Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay: great patriot and institution-builder who contributed significantly to the Indian freedom struggle, the women’s movement, theater resurgence, refugee rehabilitation and the renewal of handicrafts,” notes the Foundation’s website. Previous winners include, among others, politician Jairam Ramesh for his A chequered brilliance: The many lives of V. K. Krishna Menon. F. J.