The Karwaan Heritage Exploration Initiative has announced the shortlist for the 2025 Karwaan Book Award, featuring five nonfiction titles. The shortlist represents “exceptional scholarship across themes of civilisation, gender, religion, law, and nationalism, offering new ways to read and understand the many histories of the subcontinent.”

The winner will be announced on December 24

Historian Dilip Menon, Chair of the jury, said, “It is both a delight and a task to choose from the many excellent works of history, both academic and those written for a broader audience. We like to look for books that are original in their arguments, painstaking in their research, and a pleasure to read – books that draw in newer audiences to the importance of facts, truth, and the larger purpose of knowledge. Given the number of books that come out every year, we maintain certain basic guidelines: no edited works, no translations, no autobiographies, and so on. This year, we have an extraordinary range of deep dives and broad-brush narratives: biographies, histories of law and medicine, and accounts of the ancient world and colonial India. Each book is a reflection of years of work and scholarship worn lightly.”

This year’s jury comprises Dilip Menon (historian and the Mellon Chair in Indian Studies at the University of Witwatersrand), Sucheta Mahajan (historian and teacher), Rakhshanda Jalil (academic and translator), Sangeeta Dasgupta (researcher of Adivasi communities, colonial ethnographies, and environment, Kanad Singa (historian), and Shraddha Kumbhojkar (academic).

Here are the shortlisted titles: