The Association for Asian Studies announced the winners of this year’s prizes on February 11.
The prizes recognise outstanding scholarship and contribution to the field, and the Association annually awards them at a ceremony during the annual conference. This year’s ceremony will be held in Vancouver on March 13.
This year, south Asian writers Rishad Choudhury, Charu Gupta, and translators Sipra Mukherjee and Mrinmoy Pramanick are the winners of the Bernard S Cohn Prize, Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy Prize, and AK Ramanujan Prize for Translation, respectively.
Here is the complete list of winners of the South Asia Council:
Bernard S Cohn Prize (First book on South Asia)
Hajj Across Empires: Pilgrimage and Political Cultures After the Mughals, 1739-1857, Rishad Choudhury, Cambridge University Press
Legalizing the Revolution: India and the Constitution of the Postcolony, Sandipto Dasgupta, Cambridge University Press
Honourable mention: Body, History, Myth: Early Modern Murals in South India, Anna Lise Seastrand, Princeton University Press
Honourable mention: If All the World Were Paper: A History of Writing in Hindi, Tyler Williams, Columbia University Press
Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy Prize (for English-language scholarly work on South Asia beyond the first book)
Hindi Hindu Histories: Caste, Ayurveda, Travel, and Communism in Early Twentieth Century India, Charu Gupta, Permanent Black/SUNY Press
Music and Musicians in Late Mughal India: Histories of the Ephemeral, 1748–1858, Katherine Butler Schofield, Cambridge University Press
AK Ramanujan Prize for Translation
I Belong to Nowhere, Kalyani Thakur Charal, translated from the Bengali by Sipra Mukherjee and Mrinmoy Pramanick, Tilted Axis Press
Honourable mention: Again I Hear These Waters, translated from the Assamese by Shalim M Hussain, Tilted Axis Press
Honourable mention: Needle at the Bottom of the Sea: Bengali Tales from the Land of the Eighteen Tides, Tony K Stewart, University of California Press
Corrections and clarifications: An earlier version of this article erroneously referred to Rishad Choudhury as Indian. The error has been corrected.
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