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 for the 2024 Coomaraswamy Prize must be original, scholarly, nonfiction works with a 2022 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

The nomination deadline has passed. Award recipients will be announced in early 2024.

Coomaraswamy Prize Committee

2023 Award

Winner and Citation

Elora Shehabuddin, Sisters in the Mirror: A History of Muslim Women and the Global Politics of Feminism (University of California Press)

Using a rich and varied historical archive to study Western and Muslim feminism from the eighteenth century to the present, Sisters in the Mirror puts to rest any notion of Islam serving as a barrier to the articulation of women’s rights and aspirations. By foregrounding the entangled lives and worldviews of women and men in South Asia, Britain, and the United States, Shehabuddin demonstrates how Muslim women, especially Bengali women, have negotiated their demands for rights while resisting racial discrimination and material exploitation during both the colonial and the post-colonial period. The author tells many stories, traces multiple historical encounters that narrate the diverse voices of Muslim women, and the book subtly explores how stereotypes in the West and the refusal to acknowledge complexity in categories of Islam and its practices have evolved. Her book finally holds up a mirror to the unifying, braided futures underlying so-called “Western” and “Muslim” feminism that are both undermined by the power of capital, the world trade order, and cynical geopolitics.   

Past Awards