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, Vivekananda), through analysing the intimate and affective ways in which their relations (embodied, spatial, social and imagined) with Western devotees was brokered and negotiated.
Somak’s book provides a nuanced reading of a strikingly emotive epistolary archive (English source material), and fluently moves from intimate registers to more expansive debates on subjecthood, transnational allegiances and the politics of belonging. ‘Passages Through India: Indian Gurus, Western Disciples and the Politics of Indophilia, 1890-1940′ is a very worthy winner of this year’s prize and we send our congratulations to Somak for his achievement.”
Our congradulations to Dr. Biswas on his scholarship being recognised in this way.
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