Prof. & Author Nandini Das

NRI Prof. & Author Nandini Das wins major
British Academy book prize

Los Angeles, Nov 02,2023
NRIpress.club/Ramesh/ A.Gary Singh

Professor Nandini Das has been awarded the 11th British Academy Book Prize for Global Cultural Understanding. The announcement was made by Chair of the Book Prize judging panel, Professor Charles Tripp FBA, at a celebration at the British Academy.

2023 British Academy Book Prize for Global Cultural Understanding, a leading international non-fiction prize worth GBP 25,000, for her book ‘Courting India: England, Mughal India and the Origins of Empire'.

Professor Das is a Professor of Early Modern Literature and Culture, presents an important new perspective on the origins of empire through the story of the arrival of the first English ambassador in India, Sir Thomas Roe, in the early 17th century.

Professor Nandini Das said:

• I began Courting India as a reassessment of the origins of some of the most fundamental assumptions about cultural differences between Europe and Asia,  assumptions that drove imperial ambition and colonial violence in their time, assumptions that continue to throw their long shadow across the inexorability with which we continue to move into greater and yet greater violence and dissonance today.
• Yet possibilities of understanding and exchange cropped up, sometimes almost despite the actors and agents involved, in the interstices of those accreted assumptions. I want to dedicate this award to that possibility -- of contact, of exchange, of understanding,  between individuals -- that has always so stubbornly persisted, then, and now.

According to the  British Academy, media reported :

• Commenting on behalf of the judging panel, Professor Charles Tripp said: “Nandini Das has written the true origin story of Britain and India. By using contemporary sources by Indian and by British political figures, officials and merchants she has given the story an unparalleled immediacy that brings to life these early encounters and the misunderstandings that sometimes threatened to wreck the whole endeavour. At the same time, she grants us a privileged vantage point from which we can appreciate how a measure of mutual understanding did begin to emerge, even though it was vulnerable to the ups and downs of Mughal politics and to the restless ambitions of the British.

“Through her beautiful writing and exceptional research, the judging panel was drawn to the contrast between an impoverished, insecure Britain and the flourishing, confident Mughal Empire and the often-amusing, sometimes querulous exchanges between their various representatives. Moreover, we were reminded through this story of the first ambassadorial mission of the value of international diplomacy, but also of the cultural minefields that surround it in ways that still have resonance today.”

Sources: humanities.ox.ac.uk and UK Media