India News | New India Foundation Announces Translation Fellowship Winners Across 10 Indian Languages

New Delhi, Jul 3 (PTI) The New India Foundation (NIF) on Wednesday announced the winners of the NIF Translation Fellowships for 2024-25 in Tamil, Gujarati, Hindi and Urdu.

The NIF Translation Fellowship is given for translation of non-fiction works from 10 Indian languages -- Assamese, Bangla, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Marathi, Malayalam, Odia, Tamil, Urdu -- to English.

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Awarded for a period of six months with a stipend of six lakhs to each recipient, the translation fellowships bring historical Indian-language texts published after 1850 towards English publication, the foundation said in a statement.

In Gujarati, Hemang Ashwinkumar has been awarded the fellowship for translating Prabhudas Gandhi's "The Dawn of Life" (Jivan Nu Parodh). It is an account of the Gandhi family's life in South Africa seen from the eyes of Mahatma Gandhi's grandnephew, who had migrated to South Africa in 1905.

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Author Achyut Chetan has won the translation fellowship in Hindi for Ramdhari Singh Dinkar's "Four Chapters of Culture" (Sanskriti Ke Chaar Adhyaya).

The book by Dinkar traces the roots of the syncretism and pluralism of Indian culture in four chapters, each conceptualised as the account of a revolution and a synthesis.

Vilasini Ramani has received the prize for her translation of Tamil revolutionary Singaravelar's "Swaraj to Whom?" (Swarajyam Yaarukku?) into English. It is a compilation of writings by Malayapuram Singaravelar, an intellectual and political activist often hailed as the first communist of South India.

Published between 1931-1934, these writings are a critical reflection on Swaraj, the idea of self-rule propagated by Indian nationalists.

In Urdu, Matthew Reeck has been named the winner for the translation of Qazi Abdul Ghaffar's "Portrait of the West" (Naqsh e Farang).

It is a travelogue narrating the author's trip as secretary of the Khilafat Movement's 1922 delegation to Britain.

"The idea of the Translation Fellowships is to translate from Indian languages key works of non-fiction about India into English, thus bringing these important texts to a much wider readership. In this round of Translation Fellowships, we had applications to translate a range of fascinating texts, all of which testify to the diversity of the intellectual resources that are available in this country and which are yet to come into broader circulation," Srinath Raghavan, chair of the NIF Fellowships, said in a statement.

The winners will also get editorial and financial support alongside the opportunity to work with the NIF's Trustees, and the Language Expert Committee consisting of bilingual scholars and writers, including Rana Safvi, KR Meera, Suhas Palshikar, Vivek Shanbhag and Tridip Suhurd.

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