The Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay NIF Book Prize Announces the Winner of its Sixth Edition
Writer, Rebel, Soldier, Lover: The Many Lives of Agyeya
AKSHAYA MUKUL
(Penguin)
Bangalore: The New India Foundation announces the Winner of the Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay NIF Book Prize 2023 — Akshaya Mukul for Writer, Rebel, Soldier, Lover: The Many Lives of Agyeya, published by Penguin Random House.
The winner of the sixth edition was selected from a diverse shortlist of five magisterial books across a distinct range of Indian history, including Achyut Chetan’s Founding Mothers of the Indian Republic (Cambridge University Press), Rotem Geva’s Delhi Reborn: Partition and Nation Building in India’s Capital (Stanford University Press), Gita Ramaswamy’s Land, Guns, Caste, Woman: Memoirs of a Lapsed Revolutionary (Navayana), and Taylor C. Sherman’s Nehru’s India: A History in Seven Myths (Princeton University Press).
The Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay NIF Book Prize recognises excellence in non-fiction writings about modern and contemporary Indian history by writers of all nationalities. The winner receives a cash award of INR 15 lakhs, a trophy and a citation.
The winner was selected by an eminent Jury including political scientist Niraja Gopal Jayal (Chair); entrepreneur Manish Sabharwal; historian Srinath Raghavan; former diplomat Navtej Sarna; policy analyst Yamini Aiyar, and lawyer Rahul Matthan.
The Jury Citation for the Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay NIF Book Prize 2023:
“This is an outstanding biography of the writer, Sachidanand Hiranand Vatsyayan Agyeya, one of the towering figures of the Hindi literary world in the 20th century. Through Agyeya’s life, the book offers a panoramic view of the landscape of Hindi literature in possibly its most fertile period, and of the exceptional writers and poets who populated it.”
About Writer, Rebel, Soldier, Lover: The Many Lives of Agyeya
Sachchidanand Hirananda Vatsyayan ‘Agyeya’ is unarguably one of the most remarkable figures of Indian literature. From his revolutionary youth to acquiring the mantle of a (highly controversial) patron saint of Hindi literature, Agyeya’s turbulent life also tells a history of the Hindi literary world and of a new nation-spanning as it does two world wars, Independence and Partition, and the building and fraying of the Nehruvian state.
Akshaya Mukul’s comprehensive and unflinching biography is a journey into Agyeya’s public, private and secret lives. Based on never-seen-before archival material — including a mammoth trove of private papers, documents of the CIA-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom and colonial records of his years in jail — the book delves deep into the life of the nonconformist poet-novelist. Mukul reveals Agyeya’s revolutionary life and bomb-making skills, his CIA connection, a secret lover, his intense relationship with a first cousin, the trajectory of his political positions, from following M.N. Roy to exploring issues dear to the Hindu right, and much more. Along the way, we get a rare peek into the factionalism and pettiness of the Hindi literary world of the twentieth century, and the wondrous and grand debates which characterized that milieu.
Writer, Rebel, Soldier, Lover features a formidable cast of characters: from writers like Premchand, Phanishwarnath Renu, Raja Rao, Mulk Raj Anand and Josephine Miles to Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, revolutionary Chandra Shekhar Azad and actor Balraj Sahni. And its landscapes stretch from British jails, an intellectually robust Allahabad and modern-day Delhi to monasteries in Europe, the homes of Agyeya’s friends in the Himalayas and universities in the US. This book is a magnificent examination of Agyeya’s civilizational enterprise.
Akshaya Mukul is the author of Gita Press and the Making of Hindu India (2015), written under the aegis of a New India Foundation Book Fellowship, which won every major non-fiction award in India on its release, including the Crossword Book Award, Ramnath Goenka Award, Tata Literature Live Award, Atta-Galatta-Bangalore Literature Festival Prize and the Shakti Bhatt Award.