Former Past & Present Fellow Dr. Somak Biswas Wins the 2024 RHS Gladstone Prize
by the Past & Present editorial team Past and Present was pleased to learn that Dr. Somak Biswas (Cambridge) has been awarded the 2024 UK Royal Historical Society’s (RHS) Gladstone Prize. The RHS website explains: “The Gladstone Book Prize was launched in 1998 following a founding donation from the Gladstone Memorial Trust on the centenary of William Gladstone’s death. The prize offers an annual award of £1,000 for a work of history on a topic not primarily related to British history that is the author’s first sole book publication. In 2015, the Linbury Trust made a generous donation of £12,500 in support of the Gladstone Prize.” Dr. Biswas was awarded this year’s prize for his book Passages through India: Indian Gurus, Western Disciples and the Politics of Indophilia, 1890–1940 (Cambridge, 2023) which he worked on while a Past and Present Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research, London. The judges citation states: “We are very pleased to award this year’s prize to Somak Biswas’s ‘Passages Through India: Indian Gurus, Western Disciples and the Politics of Indophilia, 1890-1940′. The panel agreed that is an elegantly written and inventive study that provocatively unsettles our historical understandings of leading Hindu Indian figures (including Gandhi, Tagore, […]