- Grants of ₹6 Lakh each to encourage translations of non-fiction Indian texts to English, making regional literature accessible to wider audiences
- Applications have been invited from translators working in 10 Indian languages – Assamese, Bangla, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Marathi, Malayalam, Odia, Tamil and Urdu
Chennai: The New India Foundation (NIF) has announced the opening of the third round of its NIF Translation Fellowship for the 2025 session, inviting applications from translators across the country. Applications will open on August 1, 2025, and will remain open until December 31, 2025.
The Fellowship is a step towards democratizing access to India’s rich intellectual history, much of which remains locked in regional languages. By supporting English translations of significant non-fiction works from Indian languages into English, the NIF Translation Fellowships present India’s linguistic diversity to a wider readership in India and beyond.
The Fellowship offers a six-month grant of ₹6 lakhs each to support fellows to translate a non-fiction work originally written in one of ten Indian languages: Assamese, Bangla, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Marathi, Malayalam, Odia, Tamil, and Urdu. By the end of the year, Fellows are expected to publish the translated works, which will be an extension of their winning proposals.
Speaking about the initiative, Srinath Raghavan, Trustee of the New India Foundation said: “India’s history isn’t confined to monuments or museums, it lives in the pages of books written in dozens of Indian languages. These texts hold the voices of thinkers, reformers, travelers, and everyday people whose ideas have shaped our understanding of the nation. Yet so many of these works remain unread today simply because they haven’t been translated. The Translation Fellowship is our way of giving these important texts a new life.”
Fellowship will be awarded based on the choice of text, quality of translation, and overall project proposal. The selected texts should be non-fiction works published post-1850, offering insights into India’s social, cultural, or economic landscape.
The Jury for these fellowships this year includes the NIF Trustees: political scientist Niraja Jayal Gopal, historian Srinath Raghavan, partner trilegal Rahul Matthan, and entrepreneur Manish Sabharwal alongside the Language Expert Committee in all 10 languages, comprising of esteemed bilingual scholars, professors, academics and literary translators.
For more details and to apply, visit: www.newindiafoundation.org
Applications open: August 1, 2025 | Deadline: December 31, 2025
NIF remains dedicated to uncovering and documenting the history of independent India. Through its various fellowships and awards, NIF supports individuals committed to producing rigorously researched, publicly relevant non-fiction. With this mission, NIF runs multiple initiatives, including Book-writing Fellowships, which enable scholars and writers to undertake original research and produce non-fiction books on different aspects of Independent India. Recently, NIF announced the shortlist for Round 12 of its Book Fellowship, which includes a distinguished cohort of writers: Urvashi Butalia, Anima Pookkunniyil, Amandeep Sandhu, Bakhtiar K. Dadabhoy, and Amrita Sharma.
About the New India Foundation
Based in Bengaluru, the core activity of the New India Foundation is the New India Foundation Fellowships, aimed at enabling high-quality original research and translation on an eclectic range of topics around post-Independence India. The NIF Fellowships have resulted in the publication of a vibrant collection of 36 books through prestigious publishing houses. The most recent of these is Abhishek Choudhary’s Believer’s Dilemma: Vajpayee and the Hindu Right’s Path to Power 1977-2018, a sequel to his award winning best seller Vajpayee: The Ascent of the Hindu Right 1924-1977, released in 2025.
Instituted in 2018, the Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay NIF Book Prize, awarded for the best non-fiction book on modern/contemporary India, has further built on this mission. The 2024 Book Prize was awarded to Ashok Gopal for A part Apart: The life and thought of B.R. Ambedkar.
The Annual NIF Lecture was started in 2004 and renamed in 2019 as the Girish Karnad Memorial Lecture in honour of the late multi-lingual scholar. The 2023 Lecture was delivered by Amory Lovins on ‘Can We Innovate Our Way Out of the Climate Crisis?’ at the Bangalore International Centre.
Ramachandra Guha, Nandan Nilekani, Niraja Gopal Jayal, Manish Sabharwal Rahul Matthan and Srinath Raghavan are the Trustees of the New India Foundation.