New India Foundation Invites Applications for Round 3 of Translation Fellowship

UNN: The New India Foundation (NIF) has announced the opening of the third round of its NIF Translation Fellowshipfor the 2025 session, inviting applications from translators across the country. Applications will open on August 1, 2025, and will remain open until December 31, 2025.

The Fellowship is a step towards democratizing access to India’s rich intellectual history, much of which remains locked in regional languages.By supporting English translations of significant non-fiction works from Indian languages into English, the NIF Translation Fellowshipspresent India’s linguistic diversity to a wider readership in India and beyond.

The Fellowship offers a six-month grant of ₹6 lakhseach to support fellows to translate a non-fictionwork originally written in one often Indian languages: Assamese, Bangla, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Marathi, Malayalam, Odia, Tamil, and Urdu.By the end of the year, Fellows are expected to publish the translated works, which will be an extension of their winning proposals.

Speaking about the initiative, Srinath Raghavan, Trustee of the New India Foundation said:“India’s history isn’t confined to monuments or museums, it lives in the pages of books written in dozens of Indian languages. These texts hold the voices of thinkers, reformers, travelers, and everyday people whose ideas have shaped our understanding of the nation. Yet so many of these works remain unread today simply because they haven’t been translated. The Translation Fellowship is our way of giving these important texts a new life.”

Fellowship will be awarded based on the choice of text, quality of translation, and overall project proposal. The selected texts should be non-fiction works published post-1850, offering insights into India’s social, cultural, or economic landscape.

The Jury for these fellowships this year includes the NIF Trustees: political scientistNiraja Jayal Gopal, historian Srinath Raghavan, partner trilegalRahul Matthan, and entrepreneur Manish Sabharwal alongside the Language Expert Committee in all 10 languages, comprising of esteemed bilingual scholars, professors, academics and literary translators.