This book proposal won Sohini Chattopadhyay a NIF fellowship for 'The Day I Became a Runner'

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The New India Foundation began over two decades ago with a single mission: to facilitate quantity and quality in histories of India after Independence. In the early 2000s, finding modern and contemporary analyses of the world’s largest democracy was still a task. Today, things have changed for the better. Yet there are still gaps in how public history is funded, and how it reaches the people it writes about. The NIF Book Fellowships aim to bridge this chasm by funding a diverse array of research projects from concept to publication.

Open for applications in alternate years, the NIF Book Fellowships are currently accepting proposals for Round 12 until December 31, 2024. A query we often receive is on the structure of the Proposal, which forms the main bulk of each application along with the Writing Sample (which is also supposed to be drawn from the Proposal). While a list of FAQs is available on our website

, it is perhaps more helpful to see samples of Proposals from our Fellows of the past few rounds. The selection of projects is indeed, as the proposals below will indicate, ecumenical with regards to topic and scope. There are no constraints on...