Prizing India’s literature in English: The JCB Prize and the representation of Indian novels

Abstract

This article examines the proliferation of literary prizes in contemporary India through a focused analysis of the JCB Prize for Literature (2018–2025) and its role in reshaping the representation of Indian literary fiction nationally and internationally. Although the prize was discontinued in 2025, the article argues that prior to its establishment, Indian literary fiction in anglophone media — both domestic and international — was overwhelmingly represented by Indian authors writing originally in English. The JCB Prize challenged this dominance by consecrating novels written across India’s diverse languages through their English translations. While the prize was restricted to Indian fiction produced in English — defined as works either originally written in or translated into English — it departed from earlier models by making originals and translations compete within a single prizing category. In doing so, the JCB Prize produced a homogenized yet multilingual representation of Indian literature in English. The article shows that the JCB Prize acquired a dominant position within India’s literary discourse through specific institutional strategies aimed at correcting the under-representation of translated fiction, including citizenship criteria for authors, the requirement that books be published in India, and a mandatory quota for publishers to submit translated works.

Introduction

The discontinuation of India’s most prestigious literary prize in the last decade, the JCB Prize for Literature, has prompted considerable debate among literary critics and cultural commentators, given the prize’s significant impact on the field of post-independence Indian anglophone literature (Sinha, 2025; Anjum, 2025). Although its existence was brief (2018–2025), the prize rapidly garnered a dominant position within India’s anglophone literary field by focusing on English translations of literary fiction written across India’s major languages. Though the other literary prizes established prior to the JCB Prize, such as the Crossword Book Award (1998–present), The Hindu Literary Prize (2010–2019), the TATA Live! Literature Awards (2010–present), and the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature (2011–2019), did acknowledge translations within the ambit of Indian literary fiction, their focus was predominantly confined to Indian authors writing in English. The JCB Prize, however, marked a significant departure by offering formal recognition to writers working across India’s diverse languages. It introduced institutional strategies, such as a mandatory quota for publishers to submit translated literary works alongside those originally written in English, to rectify the underrepresentation of translated works. It was this shift in the representation of Indian literature through a focus on translations that played a key role in the rise of the JCB Prize as India’s most prestigious literary award.

Established in 2018, the JCB Prize aimed to “celebrate Indian writing and help readers worldwide discover the very best of contemporary Indian literature” (JCB Prize). More importantly, acknowledging the multilingual landscape in which the production of India’s literature takes place, the prize further emphasized that it gave “significant awards also to translators, without whose work no reader can appreciate the scale and diversity of literature written in over twenty languages” (JCB Prize). The prize amalgamated India’s literary fiction produced across multiple languages, via English translations, and placed it in a single category with Indian English fiction to compete for prestige and sales on the same level. Its longlists and shortlists consisted of English translations of Indian novels written in multiple Indian languages such as Bengali, Malayalam, Tamil, Hindi, and Urdu, alongside novels originally written in English. This article argues that the JCB Prize’s exclusive focus on Indian literary texts produced in English, either originally written in or translated into it, for prizing India’s literature paints a multilingual representation of Indian literature in a homogenized form. It further claims that by using English as a mediator, the JCB Prize collapses the distinction between originals and translations, and constructs a singular category of “Indian literature”. In doing so, the JCB Prize contests the representation of Indian literature in the international anglophone field that overwhelmingly circulates Indian novelists writing in English and publishing outside India, either in the UK or the US.

The JCB Prize gained prominence in comparison to other Indian literary prizes because it was the first to recognize and take into account the shifting trends in India’s anglophone literary production due to the social and economic changes brought by liberalization and globalization from the 1990s onwards. The integration of India into the global capitalist economy advanced the acquisition of the English language by a significant size of its population, which substantially increased the country’s anglophone readership. The expansion of English-medium education, driven by the pursuit of socio-economic advancement in an increasingly globalized economy, coupled with rapid urbanization and migration, has positioned India’s anglophone population as the second largest in the world today. This demographic and linguistic shift has, in turn, led to the proliferation of the translation of literary works from India’s diverse languages into English (Kothari, 2003; Sinha, 2014), catering to the needs of a multilingual-anglophone readership across the country and among the diaspora. The significance of the JCB Prize lies in grasping these changing dynamics and recognizing the role of translations in its consecration and representation of India’s literature. Against this background, this article examines the dynamic interplay between the rise of an anglophone readership, the proliferation of translations, and the emergence of corporate literary prizes in post-liberalization India.

The article is organized into four sections. It first situates literary prizes within longer histories of patronage and value-creation, and shows how the corporate-sponsored prizes of the contemporary period function as key mediators of literary prestige and commercial visibility. Drawing on prize theory and publishing studies, it conceptualizes literary prizes as reader-oriented institutions shaped by the rise of a middle-class readership, and traces how the expansion of a multilingual anglophone middle class in post-liberalization India created the conditions for English to emerge as the primary language of consecration. The next section examines how the JCB Prize constructs “Indian literature” as a prizing category through its mediated use of English, situating the prize within broader shifts toward corporate-sponsored literary consecration and spectacle. By comparing the JCB Prize with earlier Indian and South Asian awards, the article demonstrates its distinctive intervention in correcting the under-representation of translated fiction, arguing that while English is consolidated as a consecrating language, its dominance is simultaneously contested through institutional mechanisms such as mandatory translation quotas, producing a homogenized yet multilingual representation of Indian literature. The discussion subsequently turns to how criteria such as author citizenship and place of publication further shape this construction of Indian literature, showing how the JCB Prize positions itself against international awards like the Booker to contest the global dominance of Indian English fiction published abroad. Focusing on English translations produced for a domestic readership, it demonstrates how the prize privileges narratives grounded in local settings, internal migration, caste, class, and everyday social realities, and argues that English is mobilized here not to affirm an international canon but to cultivate a national anglophone readership. Finally, the article examines the discontinuation of the JCB Prize in 2025 as a case study in the fragility of corporate-sponsored cultural institutions, situating its closure within debates on sponsorship, scandal, and symbolic capital, and arguing that the prize’s inability to metabolize sustained criticism of its corporate patron marks a departure from established prize logics. While resisting a reductive reading of the prize as mere corporate soft power, it foregrounds the agency of administrators, jurors, translators, and authors, concluding that although the prize has ended, its institutional strategies are likely to shape future Indian literary awards.

Literary prizes and production of value

Awarding artistic talent and recognizing an author’s creative labour through the endowment of prizes has been a custom since the pre-modern period. Bestowing laurel wreaths on poets and playwrights in the oral and performative competitions held during the city festivals of ancient Greece and in kingdoms across the Indian subcontinent, prizes have served as powerful markers of literary value (Wright, 2009). However, with the rise of nation-states, new forms of patronage, such as state-sponsorship, came into existence for consecrating authors as representatives of a country’s national literature. Contemporary literary prizes carry over the function of generating prestige and fame for authors and their works. However, what distinguishes them from their predecessors is their reliance on corporate sponsorship, which also makes them participate in commercializing and mediating the consecrated texts for readers. As John Sutherland states, prizes address the “impatient” readers by letting them quickly discern which works of literature are worthy of attention, satisfying the reader’s desire “to know who the great contemporary writers are” by offering a form of “signposting” through their longlists and shortlists and providing “guidance” for navigating the literary landscape (Sutherland, 2013: 256). James English (2006: 7) conceptualizes this dual function of contemporary literary prizes that strive to balance prestige with sales and increase the value of a text in two distinct measures — aesthetic and commercial — as the “equivocality” of contemporary prizes. In this regard, as Beth Driscoll (2014: 21) argues, contemporary prizes function as reader-oriented institutions, catering primarily, if not exclusively, to a middle-class reader. This focus on the middle-class reader as the primary audience of literary prizes is not a coincidence; it reflects the fact that this demographic is the anglophone publishing industry’s main consumer base (Driscoll, 2014; Sadana, 2012). Catering to this readership, prizes generate “media visibility” for texts, producing both “literary and commercial values” by promoting and marketing them across print and digital media outlets (Driscoll, 2014: 134).

Since prizes undertake an equivocal value-production for novels aimed at middle-class readers situated in a literary field, there is no surprise that the rise of the Indian middle class as a burgeoning consumer of English-language fiction, as pointed out in the introduction, is a major condition of possibility for corporate-sponsored literary prizes to emerge in India. Their proliferation and exclusive focus on consecrating Indian texts by using English as a mediator is a response to the changing social reality wherein domestic and subsidiaries of international publishing houses have increased the production of English-language publications and translations in the country, catering to a burgeoning multilingual anglophone readership. After all, it was not that there were no prizes in India before the rise of corporate prizes during the past three decades. The state-sponsored Sahitya Akademi (Academy of Literature) Award, established in 1954, has been awarding texts produced in 22 officially recognized Indian languages ever since. It also awards novels written in English, the first example of which was R. K. Narayanan’s The Guide (1958). The Jnanpith (Abode of Knowledge) Award was established in 1965 to recognize the lifetime achievement of an author. In 2018, the Jnanpith Award, then in its 54th year, was, for the first time, given to an Indian author working in English: Amitav Ghosh. However, what is novel about the new corporate-sponsored prizes is the status of English as the lingua franca to produce value and consecrate texts under the banner of “Indian literature” for the consumption of the middle class.

Though the emergence of the middle class as burgeoning consumers of literature produced in various Indian languages can be traced back to the 1950s in India (Mandhwani, 2019), it wasn’t until the 1990s that a large-scale middle-class readership became a commercially viable market for English-language publications. As Rashmi Sadana (2012: 3) points out, it is only since the liberalization of the Indian economy that “English has become more integral to middleclass identity […] leading to the rise of a sizeable middle-class readership for English-language publications”. Sizeable enough that in just two decades, it has turned India’s anglophone publishing industry into the third largest in the transnational anglophone literary field. It is the growth of this anglophone readership in the last two decades that has brought an “unprecedented rise” in the production of English translations which have developed “from being a marginal event to a pervasive trend” (Kothari, 2003: 2) in contemporary India. As Arunava Sinha writes, today, while “there is no stemming the flow of original works of fiction in English, India’s biggest English language publishers — the majority of whom are global corporations — are warming up to the idea of commissioning and publishing more works in translation from regional languages” (Sinha, 2015). Since this proliferation is a recent phenomenon, statistical details about the scale of translations being produced are unavailable. However, Chittajit Mitra has recently started compiling a list of translated works on his Twitter (now X) profile, listing 91 works translated in 2022, 117 works translated in 2023, and 107 in 2024 (Mitra, 2024; Mitra, 2025).

The awareness of the JCB Prize’s administrators of such an expanding anglophone readership allowed the prize to position itself as a national literary award with a strong emphasis on English translations of Indian literary fiction. Rana Dasgupta, the first literary director of the JCB Prize, elaborates on this while making a strong case for the translator prize:

As for the translator prize, from the moment I began discussions with JCB, it was clear to all of us that we needed to represent the literature of the country, and not just one language in the country. For the JCB Literature Foundation, translation is a key concern. In order to be an Indian reader, you need to know what’s going on in Kannada literature and Bangla literature, for instance. (Ganglani, 2018)

Here, it is the Indian anglophone middlebrow reader that the JCB Prize identifies as its primary audience — one who is familiar with literature produced across India, in its diverse and rich linguistic traditions, not just that circulating under the label of “Indian English novels”. It is the acquisition of English by this multilingual anglophone readership that allowed Dasgupta to invoke the idea of an ideal Indian reader who can engage with fiction produced across various Indian languages.

The JCB Prize’s construction of “Indian literature” as a prizing category: The role of English translations

Literary prizes participate in the process of canon formation through their longlists and shortlists. For this reason, Graham Huggan contends that prizes should be viewed as ideological indices, reflecting the aesthetic tastes and cultural preferences that dominate the literary field in which they are situated. They function as “legitimizing mechanisms” (Huggan, 2001: 118), and serve as “powerful indicators of the social forces underlying […] the politics of literary recognition [… and] the ideological character of evaluation” (Huggan, 2001: 118). In this regard, an important aspect that deserves analysis is how the JCB Prize undertook its representation of India’s multilingual literature in the format of a prize. The prize was established in 2018 through the sponsorship of the British multinational manufacturing company of construction and demolition equipment, J. C. Bamford Excavators Limited (JCB), which has been in operation in India since 1979. Lord Bamford, the chair of the corporation, stated that the prize was the “obvious choice” to “give back to India”, a country he “fell in love with” when he first visited it “five decades back as a student” (Verma, 2018). This initiative exemplifies a broader shift from state-sponsored models of literary patronage toward corporate sponsorship as a means of cultural consecration in the national literary field (Huggan, 2001; English, 2006).

In Pierre Bourdieu’s terms, this trend reflects the conversion of economic capital (derived from construction and heavy industry) into cultural capital, with literature serving as a privileged site for symbolic legitimacy. Due to such reliance on corporate sponsorship, prizes in “literature and other ‘legitimate’ arts” increasingly emphasize “spectacular excitement”, aligning themselves more closely with entertainment awards like the Oscars, Emmys, BAFTAs, and Grammys (English, 2006: 34). These prizes adopt strategies such as the “single-winner axiom” to condense “a whole range of historically distinct aims and functions into a single prize”, sparking “widely divergent forms of competitive emulation and antagonism” (English, 2006: 54). Such an axiom constructs a narrative arc for a literary work in its journey from being a text among many submitted in the jury’s pile to the longlist, the shortlist, and finally being the single winner.

The JCB Prize’s decision to award a single winner in India’s multilingual literary landscape is a calculated effort to generate media attention, perfectly embodying the “single-winner axiom” of modern prize culture (English, 2006: 62). Its jury typically included four to five members and was chaired by writers and translators working across English and Indian languages. Chairs have included Jerry Pinto, a writer in English and translator from Marathi; Sara Rai, a Hindi writer and translator from Punjabi; Tejaswini Niranjana, a scholar and translator from Kannada; Srinath Perur, a writer and translator from Kannada; and Vivek Shanbhag, a Kannada writer whose work has been translated into English. While the total number of novels submitted is not disclosed by the prize, 12 to 13 are longlisted and five make it to the shortlist. If an author writing in English wins the prize, the cash prize is fixed at ₹25,00,000 (approximately $36,200). ¹ However, if a translated work wins the prize, the translator is invited alongside the author to accept the prize and is awarded ₹10,00,000 (approximately $14500). Additionally, each shortlisted author also receives a cash prize of ₹1,00,000 (approximately $1450), and if a translated work is shortlisted, the translator is awarded ₹50,000 (approximately $720). The scale of these awards, combined with this symbolic recognition, has played a crucial role in positioning the JCB Prize as one of the most visible and influential literary prizes in India. This visibility is reflected in its frequent description in media discourse as the country’s “biggest”, “richest”, and “most valuable” literary award (Scroll.in, 2020).

The JCB Prize’s approach was in stark contrast to India’s oldest literary award, the state-sponsored Sahitya Akademi Award, which recognizes literary works across all 22 officially recognized Indian languages. Furthermore, the Akademi’s expansive definition of literature encompasses not just novels but also essays, short stories, literary criticism, poetry, autobiographies, commentaries, sketches, and plays (Sahitya Akademi). In contrast, the JCB Prize awards fiction written in English exclusively and focuses solely on novels. When viewed alongside the Sahitya Akademi’s broad inclusivity, the JCB Prize’s narrow scope makes it difficult to position the prize as representative of India’s rich and diverse literary traditions. However, the JCB Prize’s decision to award just one prize, rather than several, creates a sense of public entertainment, and fills a gap left by the Sahitya Akademi Awards, which lacks a category for “the very best of contemporary Indian literature” (JCB Prize). The JCB Prize takes up this task, and constructs “Indian literature” as a prizing category by amalgamating texts written across multiple languages in the same category.

By categorizing works according to language, the Sahitya Akademi Awards prevent them from competing against one another. As a result, works from different linguistic traditions do not vie for recognition as “the best of” Indian literature in an annual competition. It is precisely such a friendly and entertaining competition between novels written across different Indian languages that the JCB Prize opens up — where a Tamil novel might face off against one written in Bengali, or a Malayalam novel might compete with one in Gujarati, in the form of English translations, to gain national recognition and stand as representative of India’s literature.

The JCB Prize was not the first corporate-sponsored Indian prize to eliminate the distinction between translations and originals, and maintain a single category to represent India’s literature. Rather, the credit goes to the Hindu Prize (2010–19), which was the first to remove such a distinction. However, despite creating a unified category for Indian fiction to compete for national recognition, the Hindu Prize had little impact on translated works. In its ten years of existence, no translated work ever won the award, and most often, translations were entirely absent from the shortlists. Its representation of Indian literature remained dominated by works written in English. The other major prize institutionalized in India in the second decade of the twenty-first century — the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature (2011–19) — was, in fact, the first corporate-sponsored award to recognize a work in English translation: Jayanth Kaikini’s No Presents Please (2017), translated from Kannada by Tejaswini Niranjana, which won the prize in 2018. However, this recognition was an exception rather than the norm. Over its nine years of existence, the DSC Prize shortlisted only five translated works, and eight of its nine winners produced their works in English. Despite its aim to promote “writing in regional languages and translations” (DSC), the prize disproportionately favoured English-language originals, underscoring a persistent imbalance in literary representation. This preference for original English fiction is particularly problematic considering the DSC Prize’s stated objective of representing South Asian literature — a region encompassing approximately 650 languages.

It is in light of this skewed representation of Indian literary fiction in favour of works originally written in English by most of the corporate-sponsored literary prizes that one has to note the substantive change brought by the JCB Prize. As Aamir R, Mufti remarks, whenever English emerges in a social context due to forces of globalization and capitalism, it is necessary to ask if English’s power as a world language in such a context is “a situation of hegemony” that is “normalized and naturalized” or “a form of domination that is incomplete and contested” (Mufti, 2016: 18). The prizes established prior to JCB are instances where English’s role as the dominant language of literary translation and expression in the transnational literary field can be seen — where English is treated “passively as [a] neutral or transparent medium […] of literary expression” (Mufti, 2016: 16). By contrast, the JCB Prize’s use of English as a consecrator is not a strict situation of hegemony where English’s presence as a dominant language is neutral or invisible, but one where such a hegemony is made visible and contested. Such a contestation is visible especially in the stratagems deployed by the JCB Prize in its “Rules for Entry” handbook, and the statements made by the prize’s administrators, where the dominant role of English language is used tactically for bringing recognition to those texts which were previously excluded from the representation of Indian literature as they were produced in languages other than English.

In the handbook (2018–21 edition), the prize mandates that the author has to be an “Indian citizen” and that the text should be “published in India”. It also states that each publisher can submit up to four books. However, “Works originally written in English” are allowed only “up to two entries”, and the remaining “two entries” are reserved for “Works translated into English”. Further, these “Quotas for works in translation may not be transferred to works written in English, nor vice versa” (JCB Handbook, 2021). Such rules are reiterated by Dasgupta, the prize’s administrator, as also “the JCB Prize’s Ethical Project” — which is “to create incentives for more translations” through procedures and rules which allow publishers up to four entries but reserve two of them “for works in translation” (Ganglani, 2018).

When Mita Kapur, the CEO of one of India’s leading literary agencies, Siyahi, became the prize’s administrator in 2020, and was asked, “What made you take on this role?”, she echoed this very rule as the reason for her acceptance: “I had an instinctive respect for the prize from the moment it was launched […] What really held my attention was that it is mandatory for publishers to submit translations […] which is the crying need of the hour” (Ghoshal, 2020). As such, while the exclusive focus on texts produced in English is shared by all the contemporary Indian prizes, the quota for translations was unique to the JCB Prize. It indicates the hold of the prize’s administrators over the changes in India’s anglophone literary field since the 1990s, resembling what Bourdieu posits as an institution or agent’s “practical mastery” of the “social codes” in a literary field that are required to “satisfy [the] cultural need” (1993: 227) of its audience.

The JCB Prize’s mandatory rule for publishers to submit translations stems from its recognition of the shortcomings of earlier prizes in curating India's literature for the anglophone reader. It is for this reason that one finds that, apart from Madhuri Vijay’s The Far Field (2019) and Upamanyu Chatterjee’s Lorenzo Searches for the Meaning of Life (2025), every novel to win the JCB Prize during its seven years of existence has been a translated work: the prize was awarded to Benyamin’s Jasmine Days, translated by Shahnaz Habib, in 2018; to Hareesh S.’s Moustache, translated by Jayashree Kalathil, in 2020; to M. Mukundan’s Delhi: A Soliloquy, translated by Fathima E. V. and Nandakumar K., in 2021; and to Khalid Jawed’s The Paradise of Food, translated by Baran Farooqi, in 2022. Apart from these, many other translated works have been included in the prize’s longlists and shortlists.

As such, the JCB Prize’s use of English as a mediator does not normalize the hegemonic position of English, but contests it by using English as a tool for creating a heterogeneous representation of Indian literature in a homogenized framework. Such efforts towards prioritizing translations should be seen as a tactic used by institutions and publishers operating “within a system that produces and packages the margins for consumption in the centre, by circulating less well-known writers and regions” (Miller, 2014: 115). In an interview given in December 2023, two years before the discontinuation of the JCB Prize, Sinha told me how the JCB Prize’s ability to generate literary value for Indian English translations motivated publishers to produce more English translations to submit for the prize:

many publishers now actually start looking for books that they can publish in translation to submit for awards like the JCB; so, I think it's a great thing that has happened and it has brought a lot more of transfer between linguistically different works of Indian fiction. (Arunava Sinha, 2023; personal communication)

Interestingly, in the modified “2024 Rules for Entry”, while the rules that the author must be an Indian citizen and the publisher must be based in India are in place, the rule related to maintaining a quota for translation had been removed. The absence of a mandatory quota attests to their success in promoting translations. Thus, instead of a mandatory rule, the 2024 rulebook states that the prize seeks to “foster translation between Indian languages, and to introduce readers to Indian writing in languages other than their own” (JCB Handbook, 2024).

Multilingualism in a homogenised form: Reshaping representation of India’s literature internationally

The JCB Prize’s emphasis on fiction representing the linguistic heterogeneity of India’s literature went beyond being a national project. By circulating translations of Indian literary fiction, the JCB Prize also intervened in the symbolic representation of “Indian literature” internationally. While the prize’s mandatory quota for translations shifted the representation of Indian literature nationally, its decision to restrict entry only to authors who are Indian citizens and to texts published in India signals a broader ambition to contest and reshape how Indian literature is represented internationally. Here, the Booker Prize emerges as a key point of comparison and, perhaps, rivalry. As stated by Dasgupta, the JCB Prize intends to “move beyond being a mere spectator to the Booker Prize” and to “alter the publishing scenario in India and create more space for literary fiction and translations” (Ganglani, 2018). Since the Booker Prize has a global rather than Indian scope, this begs the question: why is the JCB Prize positioning itself against the Booker Prize? As James English puts it, for a new prize to establish its credibility, it must often define itself in opposition to a well-established award; by taking an antagonistic stance, the new prize asserts its “own apparent necessity” (English, 2006: 63), and justifies its existence as an essential addition in a literary field. The JCB Prize’s positioning against the Booker Prize is not an attempt to usurp its status as a leading international award for English-language fiction: rather, it is to provide a representation of Indian literature that is distinct from the one prevailing internationally due to the prominence gained by Indian novelists who write in English and publish in the UK, and go on to win prizes such as the Booker.

Starting with the awarding of the Booker Prize to Salman Rushdie for Midnight Children (1981), which is seen as a “watershed” moment (Huggan, 2001: 110) that significantly changed the global perception of English-language literature, many novelists from India and other former British colonies went on to win the Booker Prize. As such, the Booker was credited for bringing value and recognition to a range of postcolonial writers. Crucially, however, this recognition is tied not only to institutional consecration but also to the kind of readership these texts address. The value of these Indian English novels, as Neelam Srivastava emphasizes, lies in their address to a dual audience: they make “appeals to an imagined community of readers represented by the Indian national and transnational English-speaking middle class” (Srivastava, 2007: 5). This dual orientation helps explain both their global circulation and their consolidation within anglophone literary markets. Addressing such an anglophone readership, these texts

engage intimately with national issues [… and] are historical novels, in the sense that they present versions of a national narrative built upon an interpretation of the Indian nation’s past (as opposed to India as a purely geographical and mythical location). (Srivastava, 2007: 6)

However, it is precisely this thematic concern with national issues that gets blurred and commodified when Indian English novels go on to win international prizes such as the Booker and become part of what Huggan calls “the postcolonial exotic” semiotic system. Within such a marketing and consecrating system, themes of these novels get decontextualized and the texts repackaged as “guidebooks” (Huggan, 2001: 70). They become embedded within a mode of cultural production in which concepts like “historicity”, “marginality”, “authenticity”, and “resistance” circulate as labels for marketing (Huggan, 2001: xvi). It is for this reason that Priyamvada Gopal notes in her historiography of the Indian English novel that though international publishers’ and the Booker Prize’s recognition of Indian English novels undoubtedly brought well deserved attention to them, they also gave a “representative status and institutional strength [… that is] starkly out of proportion” to the English language’s “actual presence as a spoken and comprehended language on the subcontinent” (Gopal, 2009: 1). It is in response to such a politics of recognition that the JCB Prize administrators positioned it against the Booker Prize. The prize attempted to establish the necessity of an Indian award representing Indian writers working on a “much less-known scale” and to contest the representative status accorded to authors published in the capitals of the anglophone literary field, New York or London (Casanova, 2004). As Dasgupta stated,

when designing the prize, we made an immediate decision to restrict it to Indian citizens. India’s literary diaspora is much decorated, and we didn’t want this prize to be another celebration of famous Americans, Brits, and so on. We wanted it to reflect the much less-known scale and variety of the Indian writing landscape itself. (Ang, 2019)

With an Indian anglophone readership as the primary consumer and audience for the JCB Prize, its focus on translations is an attempt to channel commercial and critical attention towards texts which do not subscribe to the prevalent themes of postcolonial fiction. Dasgupta states that:

[translations] were more dynamic and freer than the novels in English. For a long time, the postcolonial burden has weighed upon Indian writing. The novel has to represent the nation and explain who the Indian people are […] This has meant that many of the real struggles that Indians faced have not appeared in literature, because they are seen as minor and un-elevated. (Ang, 2019)

What Dasgupta refers to as the postcolonial burden is the task of narrating the nation primarily to an anglophone audience based outside India. This burden is largely absent from English translations of Indian novels because they are produced mainly for a domestic audience. Writing for a domestic audience, located in India, these novels do not have to “painstakingly” explain “what Indian trains and mud-thatched huts look like” (Orsini 2002: 86). As such, it is the “settings and sensibilities” of vernacular works of Indian fiction that most clearly distinguishes them “from the sensuous exoticism of world-fiction blockbusters” (Orsini, 2002: 88). The difference in setting that Dasgupta and Orsini point out is instantly discernible in the novels selected by the JCB Prize, especially those related to themes of migration, as I show below. Such migrations are often internal: from village to city, from urban to rural localities, and across not only linguistic but also caste and class divides. This kind of movement is less explored in texts published outside the country.

Benyamin’s Jasmine Days, translated by Shahnaz Habib, which won the inaugural award in 2018, revolves around the experiences of a Malayali migrant worker in an unnamed Middle Eastern country whose life becomes intertwined with the Arab Spring. ² Madhuri Vijay’s The Far Field (2019) won the prize the following year; the novel follows a young woman from Bangalore, South India, encountering the fraught political landscapes of Kashmir while searching for a lost figure from her childhood — a Kashmiri travelling salesperson cum vendor of clothes who used to visit her home and developed a close bond with her and her mother. Hareesh’s Moustache (translated by Jayashree Kalathil), which won the prize in 2020, was praised by Tejaswini Niranjana, the chair of the jury that year, as a text that “engages in an agile and deeply insightful way with the caste and gender equations of the Kuttanad region in this intricate and highly readable story” (TNM Staff, 2020). It is worth noting that in the text there is no explanation of why the protagonist Vavachan, a Dalit labourer, is growing a flamboyant moustache and refuses to shave. The moustache erupts in the text as fact, as detail, as a matter already saturated with meaning, with no account of its symbolic significance in Indian cultural codes. A local reader, who is familiar with the practice of caste in the social fabric of everyday life in India, will immediately recognize the provocation of a lower-caste man sporting a symbol historically reserved for dominant castes.

M. Mukundan’s Delhi: A Soliloquy (2021), translated by Fathima E. V. and winner of the JCB Prize in 2021, covers the history of Delhi from the 1960s, capturing historical events such as the 1984 anti-Sikh riot. Mukundan, who travelled for years through Delhi's underbelly, “among the homeless and poor”, said of his novel that in its representation of poverty, “very little […] is imagination” and dedicated his award to “the hungry people” who “can never win a prize but […] can help a writer win” (Nayar, 2021). Khalid Jawed’s 2022 prize-winning novel The Paradise of Food (translated by Baran Farooqi) stages a dense Indian lifeworld that presupposes a South Asian reader’s awareness of its setting. It is set within the confines of a middle-class Muslim joint family and explores the complexities of family dynamics, desire, and the human condition through the lens of the kitchen. A space symbolic of both nurturing and conflict, the kitchen is touched by taboos of purity and pollution, by everyday humiliations around meat-eating, and by the sacred/profane division of kitchens across religious households. Here, much like in Moustache, the text presumes that the reader recognizes the South Asian kitchen as a dense symbolic site: a place where caste, class, gender, and religion intersect.

Such narratives dramatize everyday experiences of exile within India, where characters are dislocated not across oceans but across rivers, deserts, class and linguistic borders. They assume that a reader is already within their structure of meaning; there is no homogenized image of “India”, but instead a representation of the very experience of being Indian as internal migrant, multilingual, and bound together with other Indians not by sameness but by shared dissonance. The JCB Prize mobilizes English as a vehicle for curating such vernacular works, showcasing a heterogeneous range of Indian literatures, foregrounding their multilingual and multicultural dimensions. In doing so, the prize directs its consecratory energies not toward an international readership or to affirm an already globalized canon, but towards cultivating an Indian anglophone readership that is domestic, middle class, and national in orientation.

However, it must be pointed out that the commercial value generated for JCB Prize–winning novels remains limited when compared to texts that receive international recognition. As Nawaid Anjum notes in a broader discussion of prize-winning fiction in India, a Booker Prize–winning novel can sell “upwards of 100,000 copies” in India, while “even the most acclaimed novels struggl[e] to cross 5000” (Anjum, 2025). Nonetheless, even if the commercial value of these novels is less, by emphasizing English translations and excluding writers who do not publish in India, the JCB Prize redefined the representation of Indian literature in the anglophone literary field. As the Tamil-English translator Priyamvada Ramkumar asserts, due to the JCB Prize, translations, instead of “being looked at as a stepchild [… with a] very patronizing attitude of ‘well we are also encouraging you’”, have become valued as “a creative pursuit”. The prize is “a public acknowledgement of the fact that there is really no difference from the reader's point of view or from the point of view of quality” between novels written in English and novels translated into English (Priyamvada Ramkumar, 2024; personal communication). Thus, while the sales garnered by the texts winning the JCB Prize might not be as huge as those of books that go on to win international prizes, due to a lack of marketing, the prize was pathbreaking as a model for exploring India’s multilingual literary production and countering the dominance of novels published in the capitals of the international anglophone literary field.

The closure of the JCB Prize

The JCB Prize’s attempt to change the representation of India’s literature both nationally and internationally in the anglophone literary sphere is a key reason for the media attention attracted by its discontinuation in 2025. The silence of the sponsors, administrators, and others who were closely associated with the prize compounded the interest. Cultural institutions — from literary prizes to festivals — depend heavily on corporate and philanthropic sponsorship to sustain their operations. These sponsorships are often precarious, shaped by corporate branding strategies, broader economic fluctuations, and the prevailing political atmosphere. While the prize was initially established through the JCB Foundation, which was registered as a not-for-profit trust in 2018, its abrupt closure in 2025, following the JCB Foundation's reclassification into a business organization for unspecified reasons, underscores the fragility of corporate cultural sponsorship. In 2024, the prize was criticized due to its sponsorship by the JCB Group. As with the Nobel and Booker Prizes — whose founders’ legacies are entangled with the economic profit made from the sales of dynamite during the World Wars (Alfred Nobel), and from enslaving nearly two hundred people in Guyana on sugar plantations (founders of Booker McConnell) — the JCB Prize is haunted by its corporate patron’s involvement in the demolition of homes and livelihoods across the world:

in the Middle East, the company is reportedly being used by Iranians, Israelis and Americans to dismantle dreams, slaughter hope, destroy the homes of Palestinians, Iraqis and Afghans. Before 2021, many governments in India used the same company to “cleanse” the land of the homes of countless tribal communities of Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Telangana, the Sundarbans and Odisha. (Deb, 2025)

In such contexts, the prize could be read as an exercise in cultural soft power, a way of laundering reputation and presenting the corporation as a benefactor of literature and culture (Anjum, 2025). Thus, while no official explanation has been offered for its closure, the widespread suspicion remains that the sustained criticism which the prize faced because of its corporate-sponsorship through an open letter signed by over 100 writers, poets, and activists from India and abroad, shaped the conditions under which the prize could no longer operate (Sinha, 2025; Anjum, 2025). In this regard, it is worth recalling English’s assertion about how the controversies surrounding a prize are not incidental but constitutive of the logic of literary prizes (English, 2006): disputes over sponsorship, jury decisions, or the politics of selection do not weaken a prize but, paradoxically, extend its media visibility and cultural relevance (English, 2006; Driscoll, 2014). The closure of the JCB Prize marks a departure from this established pattern. Rather than converting controversy into symbolic capital, as earlier prizes such as the Nobel or Booker have done (or could manage to do), the JCB Prize could not withstand sustained scrutiny of its sponsorship ties. Its abrupt end suggests that in the contemporary moment, when corporate and cultural legitimacy are increasingly interdependent, literary institutions, not just prizes, may not always be able to metabolize scandal into value as their predecessors once did.

However, here I must add that while acknowledging the contradictions of the JCB Prize as a literary institution sponsored by a corporation associated with the destruction of livelihoods, it is equally essential to view the prize as an institution animated by a network of agents embedded in the Indian literary field and its multiple linguistic subfields. The labour put in by the prize’s administrators, Rana Dasgupta and Mita Kapur, alongside the successive jurors, did produce change via the prize. Even though the prize has ceased, the strategies through which its administrators and jury consecrated India’s literature in English will persist. By demonstrating that a major prize could successfully mobilize symbolic capital for regional languages within the national and international field, the administrators, jury, authors, and translators involved with the JCB Prize have laid the groundwork for future awards. The Indian anglophone prizes that will emerge in the future are likely to inherit and adapt the template set by the JCB Prize, which served as a key institution that brought about change in the representation of India’s literature under the conditions imposed by the world literary system in which English functions as a dominant language.

Conclusion

This article has examined how Indian literary texts have been prized in post-liberalization India, addressing the cultural needs, aspirations, and norms of a rapidly expanding anglophone readership within a multilingual society. It has traced the emergence, significance, and eventual decline of the JCB Prize for Literature — the most influential prize of this period — and situated it against the broader landscape of Indian literary awards. It has discussed the consecrating and marketing techniques used by the prize for generating prestige and sales for Indian literary fiction produced in English for a burgeoning Indian anglophone readership through the construction of Indian literature as a prizing category. While many new Indian prizes were founded with the same exclusive focus on English language writing, the JCB Prize distinguished itself through its rules of nomination and categorical strategies of selection. Through mechanisms such as mandatory translation quotas, the inclusion of translators as co-recipients of prize money, and the requirement that submitted works be published in India, the prize produced a literary field in which texts written across multiple Indian languages were brought into competition within a single anglophone category. In doing so, it collapsed the distinction between original English-language fiction and translated works, generating a homogenized yet multilingual representation of Indian literature in English. By privileging domestically published works and authors tied to the Indian literary field, the JCB Prize reoriented literary consecration away from international circuits — such as the Booker Prize — and toward a national anglophone readership. The result was a form of literary mediation in which English functioned as a shared platform for circulating narratives rooted in diverse linguistic, regional, and social contexts within India.