Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy Book Prize

The Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy Book Prize honors a distinguished work of scholarship in South Asian Studies that promises to define or redefine the understanding of whole subject areas. The committee particularly seeks nominations of broad scholarly works with innovative approaches that may concern any topic in any discipline or may cross disciplinary lines.

The prize recognizes a distinguished scholarly monograph beyond the author or authors’ first monograph or published research project. First monographs should be submitted for the Bernard S. Cohn Prize.

Prize

$1,000 to the author.

Guidelines for Submission

• Nominated books must be original, scholarly, nonfiction works with a 2021 copyright date, and must be the first publication of this text in English anywhere in the world.
• The book’s subject matter must deal with South Asia (India, Pakistan, Nepal, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh).
• Works are not eligible if they are reference works, exhibition catalogs, textbooks, essay collections, poetry, fiction, memoirs, or autobiographies.
• Translations will be eligible only if they include a substantial introduction, annotation, or critical apparatus.
• Co-authored books are eligible; edited volumes of essays are not.
• Publishers must complete the book nomination form. Each press may nominate a maximum of six books for the Coomaraswamy Prize.
• Only publishers may nominate books.
• Upon receipt of a completed nomination form, publishers will be provided with addresses for prize committee members. A copy of each entry, clearly labeled “Coomaraswamy Prize,” must be sent to each member of the committee.

Deadline

Nominations must be received by June 30, 2022 to be eligible for the 2023 awards.

Coomaraswamy Prize Committee

2022 Award

Winner and Citation

Benjamin D. Hopkins, Ruling the Savage Periphery: Frontier Governance and the Making of the Modern State (Harvard University Press, 2020)

Ruling the Savage Periphery by Benjamin Hopkins shows how a British colonial experiment in South Asia shaped modern frontier governmentality across the globe. Drawing on an array of archival sources, the book powerfully argues how the imperial governing practice of drawing Pathan tribes of the India’s northwest frontier into a relationship of excluded dependency on the colonial state served as a template for ruling peripheries in Africa and the Americas. Hopkins documents the ways in which the draconian Frontier Crimes Regulation, the legal instrument deployed by the British to administer their Afghan frontier after 1872, influenced the way empires and nations treated their extremities globally. The system initially devised by Robert Sandeman in Baluchistan ensnared tribal peoples into contributing to their own surveillance and subjugation. The economic squeeze on the tribes and the persistent threat of state coercion ensured compliance for the most part but the violence inherent in the regime of frontier governmentality remained a clear and present danger in the colonial mind. The FCR and the Sandeman System were replicated, in spirit if not always in form, as far afield as the Northern Frontier Province of colonial Kenya, South Africa, Iraq, Jordan and Palestine, the San Carlos Apache reservation in southern Arizona, and the “Pais de Las Manzanas” lining the Argentine pampas. A gripping historical study, this book excavates the origins of contemporary crises in Pakistan’s border regions with Afghanistan, in northern Nigeria, Kenya’s troubled northern border with Somalia, in Iraq and Palestine—all products of late nineteenth century frontier governmentality. Hopkins’ provocative contention that violence created colonial empires but sustains post-colonial states ought to stir up a debate that might help correct the mythifications and delusions of the nation and its narrations.

Past Awards