2024 NIF Translation Fellowship: Four translators from Tamil, Gujarati, Hindi, Urdu win this year

Initiated in 2021, each year the NIF Translation Fellowship awards a Rs 6-lakh grant to translators for translating historically significant non-fiction texts published from 1850 onwards from Indian languages.

This year’s winners are:

• Tamil: Vilasini Ramani, to translate Swaraj to Whom? by Malayapuram Singaravelar
  Singaravelar’s Swaraj to Whom? (Swarajyam Yaarukku?) is a compilation of writings by Malayapuram Singaravelar (1860-1946), 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; to Singaravelar, Swaraj would be incomplete without foregrounding questions of class and caste in arguing for an anti-colonial movement that ingrains a vision for creating an egalitarian society.

• Gujarati: Hemang Ashwinkumar, to translate The Dawn of Life by Prabhudas Gandhi
  Prabhudas Gandhi’s The Dawn of Life (Jivan Nu Parodh) is an account of the Gandhi family’s life in South Africa seen from the eyes of young Prabhudas Gandhi (1901-95), Mahatma Gandhi’s grandnephew, who had migrated to South Africa in 1905. In elaborate and precise ways, this memoir curates a precious archive of all that went into the making of the man who went on to organise a diverse, and mutually averse, subcontinent for swaraj in the spirit of ahimsa.

• Urdu: Matthew Reeck, to translate A Portrait of the West by Qazi...

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