Charu Gupta’s ‘Hindi Hindu Histories’ wins AK Coomaraswamy Prize for her work in South Asian Studies

The 2026 AK Coomaraswamy Prize for the best scholarly work in South Asian Studies was awarded to Charu Gupta for her bookHindi Hindu Histories: Caste, Ayurveda, Travel, and Communism in Early Twentieth Century India (Permanent Black Ranikhet, and SUNY Press New York). The award is presented by the American Association for Asian Studies.

This award honours distinguished non-fiction scholarly works that define or redefine their fields across various disciplines.

Charu Gupta is Professor of History at Delhi University. Her book looks at caste, ayurveda, travel, and communism in early-20th-century India to reveal the breadth and depth of Hindu ideas a hundred years back, and shows by implied contrast a narrowing of certain Hindu worldviews in contemporary India.

Her first monograph – a revised version of her PhD at SOAS, London – is the classic Sexuality, Obscenity, Community, which also looks at the social and religious ethos of the Hindi belt a hundred years ago. This book investigates Hindu patriarchy and hostility to Muslims.

A review on Scroll noted that Gupta’s “[…] fine-grained studies of lesser-known vernacular intellectuals and practitioners illuminate a whole range of important questions. Most immediately striking was their sheer inventiveness, as they sought ways to accommodate their own “Hindu” life experience to the forces of colonial modernity, globalisation, the emergence of new social norms and knowledges.”