There is some good news for the Congress party, by way of an award for compelling narrative. The Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay New India Foundation Book prize—one of the biggest non-fiction book awards in the country—has chosen Jairam Ramesh’s A Chequered Brilliance: The Many Lives of V.K. Krishna Menon as its winner.
Ramesh, former environment minister and a prolific writer, shares the award with young scholar Amit Ahuja, who has written Mobilizing the Marginalised: Ethnic Parties without Ethnic Movements. The two winners will split the prize money of Rs 15 lakh and will get a Book Prize trophy.
The Kamaladevi Chattopadyay prize was started two years ago. The idea of the NIF is to create a readable, well-researched scholarship for India post-Independence. Like history—which is often seen to end after 1947—scholarship that seeks to understand the complexity of India after freedom has not been focussed on often. The NIF aims to address this. In 2018, the prize was awarded to Milan Vaishnav for When Crime Pays: Money and Muscle in Indian Politics.
This is not Ramesh’s first biography. Over the years, Ramesh has carefully chronicled the lives of politicians to give readers a glimpse into the political spectrum of Congress leaders in the early post-indepenence era. He has written Indira Gandhi: A Life in Nature as well as a biography of her close confidant Intertwined Lives: P.N. Haskar and Indira Gandhi.
His latest book paints a portrait of Menon, who wore many hats as a propagandist, diplomat, editor and publisher. Menon was close to Jawaharlal Nehru and is believed to played an important role in the 1962 debacle. Dipping into archival material, Ramesh produces a “compelling portrait of a brilliant, complicated and controversial man, whose public life came to a rather tragic end,’’ the citation of the award read.
Ahuja’s book, meanwhile, explores why dalit ethnic parties perform well in states where their social mobilisation is strong and poorly where their social mobilization is weak.
“This is [an] elegantly written and accessible work of scholarship that richly illuminates the relationship between social movements and political parties in redeeming the promise of Indian democracy for marginalised groups,” the citation reads.
