The New India Foundation has announced Jayasree Kalathil, Mini Chandran, Murali Ranganathan, and Shefali Jha as the recipients of its 2026 Translation Fellowships. The translators represent Malayalam, Hindi, and Urdu languages, respectively. Each fellow will receive a six-month grant of Rs 6 lakhs.

The fellowship is awarded to translate a nonfiction work originally written in one of ten Indian languages: Assamese, Bangla, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Marathi, Malayalam, Odia, Tamil, and Urdu.

This year’s winners will work on the following projects

  • Jayasree Kalathil will translate Adimamakka (Children of the Enslaved), the autobiography of Adivasi land rights activist CK Janu. It is the history of the indigenous movement for land rights in Kerala. Janu unearths the history of the Adivasi people’s political struggle, missing from the records of Kerala’s much-lauded models of development.

  • Mini Chandran will translate Olivile Ormakal, the memoir of playwright Thoppil Bhasi – a prominent Malayalam playwright best known for the play Ningalenne Communistakki (You Made Me a Communist). The book spans a short five years – 1948 to 1953 – yet it is one of the most celebrated autobiographies in Malayalam.

  • Murali Ranganathan will translate Tibet Mein Savva Varsh by Rahul Sankrityayan. Originally published in 1934, the book is an account of Sankrityayan’s travels in search of the Buddha from December 1928 to June 1930, which started and ended in Colombo. Travelling incognito through India, Nepal and Tibet at a time when foreign entry was restricted, he offers a ringside view of the tensions between Nepal and Tibet on one hand, and Tibet and China on the other, while also parsing the role of the then colonial, but soon to be independent, Indian government.

  • Shefali Jha will translate Ibrahim Hussain Jalis’ Do Mulk, Ek Kahani, a work of subjective journalism documenting the turbulent political landscape of postcolonial South Asia. The book chronicles key moments in the making of postcolonial South Asia from the vantage point of a young Urdu writer and journalist. It is an unusual account of the last year of Hyderabad state (1947-48), where the Progressive writer Jalis (1923-1977) tells the story of his brief but intense participation in the politics and activities of the Ittehad-ul-Muslimin, as an anti-Nizam partisan of Hyderabad’s cause, and the eventual destruction of the state.