Bengaluru: The New India Foundation (NIF) Wednesday announced that fellowships will be awarded to three translators or writers for research and translation of crucial non-fiction works about India from various Indian languages to English.
Proposals have been invited from translators for 10 languages; Assamese, Bangla, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Marathi, Malayalam, Odia, Tamil and Urdu. To be selected by a language expert committee, the fellowships will be granted on the basis of the choice of text, quality of translation, and overall project proposal, the organisers said.
The non-fiction source text from any of the 10 languages can be ecumenical, with no constraints on genre as long as it elucidates upon any socio-economic/cultural aspect of Indian history from the year 1850 onwards, the NIF said in a statement.
The fellowships will be awarded to translators or writers working on bringing historical Indian-language texts into an English publication for a period of six months with a stipend of Rs 6 lakh to each recipient.
By the end of the fellowship, fellows are expected to publish the translated works, which will be an extension of their winning proposals, the statement said.
The deadline for submissions is December 31.
The jury for these fellowships this year include NIF trustees – political scientist Niraja Gopal Jayal, historian Srinath Raghavan, and entrepreneur Manish Sabharwal alongside the language expert committee.
The committee comprises bilingual scholars, professors, academics, and literary translators like 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), and Ayesha Kidwai and Rana Safvi (Urdu).
Speaking on the initiative, Jayal said, “There is an old saying about India that ‘kos-kos mein badle paani; chaar kos mein vaani’. A culture is captured by its symbols, heroes, rituals, history and writing; the NIF translation fellowships aim to make more of our culture accessible to new audiences.