New Delhi: The New India Foundation (NIF), on Thursday, April 21, announced the awardees of its three inaugural translation fellowships.The awardees are literary translator Venkateswar Ramaswamy and statistician Amlan Biswas, who will translate Nirmal Kumar Bose’s Diaries 1946-47 from Bangla; academician and literary historian N.S. Gundur, who will translate D.R. Nagaraj’s Allamaprabhu Mattu Shaiva Pratibhe from Kannada; and academician and historian Rahul Sarwate, who will translate Sharad Patil’s Marxvad: Phule-Ambedkarvaad from Marathi.The foundation’s list of awardees for the inaugural translation fellowship.The fellowships are awarded for a six-month period and carry with them a stipend of Rs 6 lakh per translator/team. Additionally, the foundation notes that the fellowships also offer direct mentorship under the NIF’s Language Expert Committee as well as its trustees.Trustees of the NIF include Ramachandra Guha, Nandan Nilekani, Niraja Gopal Jayal, Manish Sabharwal and Srinath Raghavan.In a statement, the foundation said that the aim of the fellowships is to “foster scholarship and writing around all aspects of independent India” and “provide a wider audience for Indian-language texts”.The foundation places no restrictions vis-a-vis style or genre of the text, the nationality of the translator and so on, considering any work published after 1850 that “illuminate the development of modern and contemporary India”.The jury which selected the awardees for the inaugural fellowships consisted of trustees Jayal, Raghavan and Sabharwal, as well as the Language Expert Committee in all 10 languages, comprising esteemed bilingual scholars, professors, academics, and literary translators.The Language Expert Committee includes Kuladhar Saikia (Assamese); Ipshita Chanda (Bangla); Tridip Suhrud (Gujarati); Harish Trivedi (Hindi); Vivek Shanbhag (Kannada); Rajan Gurukkal (Malayalam); Suhas Palshikar (Marathi); Jatin Nayak (Odia); AR Venkatachalapathy (Tamil); Ayesha Kidwai & Rana Safvi (Urdu).“We are excited that this work will be introduced to readers through annotated translations and hope that the English editions of these books will spark conversations about the relevance of their ideas today,” Jayal said.Also read: Aalim Akhtar, Bilal Tanweer Named Joint Winners of 2021 Jawad Memorial Prize for TranslationTranslations and awardeesDiaries 1946-47 by Nirmal Kumar BoseNirmal Kumar Bose (1901-72) was an eminent anthropologist and professor who was requested by Mahatma Gandhi to be his Bengali interpreter and private secretary during his peace mission in the riot-affected areas of Noakhali (November 1946 – March 1947) and again during his stay in Calcutta (May-September 1947).His 1946–47 diaries offer a unique look into this period in Gandhi’s life, in the run-up to India’s Independence Day, August 15, 1947. They also provide a moving picture of Gandhi’s daily life.Ramaswamy worked for two decades as a grassroots social activist in Kolkata and Howra in West Bengal before taking up the work of translating the literature of marginalised voices. In the past, he has translated works by Subimal Misra, Manoranjan Byapari, Adhir Biswas, and most recently, Bangladeshi writer Shahidul Zahir. Biswas worked in the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO) before being posted to the Anthropological Survey of India (ASI) from where he retired as Assistant Director. He had been a junior colleague of Abhik Kumar Dey – who had originally edited Nirmal Kumar Bose’s diaries in Bangla – and thus became acquainted with the 1947 diary.The outbreak of communal violence in parts of Bangladesh in October 2021, in some of the very places where violence had broken out in October 1946 (as seen in Bose’s 1946 diary) prompted the selection of this text.Allamaprabhu Mattu Shaiva Pratibhe by D.R. NagarajD.R Nagaraj (1954-1998) is one of India’s foremost cultural critics and public intellectuals, known for his insightful writings on the Gandhi-Ambedkar encounter and the Dalit movement.His main works include The Flaming Feet and Other Essays: The Dalit Movement in India (2010) and Listening to the Loom: Essays on Literature, Politics and Violence (2012). Nagaraj also wrote extensively in Kannada on modern Kannada literature as well as Indian intellectual traditions. His main works include Amruta Mattu Garuda (1983), Shakti Sharadeya Mela: Adhunika Kannada Kavyada Adhyayana (1987), Sahitya Kathana (1996) and Samskriti Kathana (2001). Allamaprabhu Mattu Shaiva Pratibhe was Nagaraj’s last book and was posthumously published. It engages with the life and thought of the 12th century Shaiva mystic, Allama Prabhu. Nagaraj attempts to situate Allama in three different intellectual contexts: the mediaeval Shaiva intellectual world; bhakti as well as mystical traditions. N.S. Gundur is a literary historian specialising in modern Kannada literary cultures and their institutional roots. He was raised in an agricultural family in North Karnataka and completed his postgraduate studies as well as doctoral research at Karnatak University, Dharwar. Gundur began his teaching career at the National Defence Academy, Khadakwasla and is now a professor of English at Tumkur University. He writes in both English and Kannada for scholarly journals and popular media. His articles have been published by Economic and Political Weekly, the Indian Express, The Wire, the Hindu and Kannada newspaper Prajavani. He has translated Michel Foucault into Kannada, and authored Vartamanada Itihasakara: A Critical Introduction to Michel Foucault in Kannada (2017). Marxism: Phule-Ambedkarism by Sharad PatilSharad Patil (1925-2014) was a historian, a Sanskritist, an Indologist, a philosopher, an artist, and a life-long political activist whose principle preoccupation remained the annihilation of caste. Patil founded the Satyashodhak Communist Party in 1978, whose political philosophy was the conceptual and programmatic synthesis of Marxism with the anti-caste radical thought of Jotirao Phule and B.R. Ambedkar. Patil’s formulation of this synthesis is best illustrated in a collection of discursive essays in Marathi titled, Marxvad: Phule-Ambedkarvad, Some of Patil’s other works include, Dasa-Shudra Slavery, a two-volume historical work which argues that the great Indian civilization was founded upon the slavery of the Dasas and Shudras and Caste-Feudal Servitude which chronicles the philosophical battles between the brahmanical and anti-brahmanical epistemologies.Rahul Sarwate received his PhD in History from Columbia University. His work revolves around writing an intellectual and cultural history of modern ideas about self, society, and nation in colonial India. He explores categories like caste, vernacular print publics, literary culture, theological debates and various bodily and labour practices to interrogate the central contradiction between the ethical and political ways of being Hindu in modern India. He is also interested in exploring the various genealogies of anti-caste thought in modern Indian intellectual and cultural history.