Karwaan Book Award has announced its 2025 longlist of ten nonfiction books

The Heritage Exploration Initiative has announced the longlist for the 2025 Karwaan Book Award, featuring ten nonfiction titles that “illuminate India’s layered histories, intellectual traditions, political journeys, and cultural imagination”. This year’s longlist includes biography, political history, religion, law, medicine, environmental thought, and global intellectual exchange.

The shortlist will be announced in the first week of December and the winner on December 24.

This year’s jury comprises Dilip Menon (historian and the Mellon Chair in Indian Studies at the University of Witwatersrand), Sucheta Mahajan (historian and teacher), Rakhshanda Jalil (academic and translator), Sangeeta Dasgupta (researcher of Adivasi communities, colonial ethnographies, and environment, Kanad Singa (historian), and Shraddha Kumbhojkar (academic).

Here is the longlist:

• Being Hindu, Being Indian: Lala Lajpat Rai’s Ideas of Nationhood, Vanya Vaidehi Bhargava (Penguin Random House India)

• Casting the Buddha: A Monumental History of Buddhism in India, Shashank Shekhar Sinha (Pan Macmillan India)

• The DMK Years: Ascent, Descent, Survival, R Kannan (Penguin Random House India)

• The Dying Lineage: The Crisis of Political Power in the Mahabharata, Uma Chakravarti (Primus)

• The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World, William Dalrymple (Bloomsbury India)

• The Incarcerations: Bhima Koregaon and the Search for Democracy in India, Alpa Shah (HarperCollins India)

• Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay: The Art of Freedom, Nico Slate (HarperCollins India)

• The Last Great Plague of Colonial India, Natasha Sarkar (Oxford University Press)

• South Asia, the British Empire, and the Rise of Classical Legal Thought: Toward a Historical Ontology of the Law, Faisal Chaudhry (Oxford University Press)

• Speaking with Nature: The Origins of Indian Environmentalism, Ramachandra Guha (Harper Collins India)