John F. Richards Prize Recipients
The John F. Richards Prize in South Asian History recognizes the most distinguished work of scholarship on South Asian history published in English during the previous calendar year.
2023
Shailaja Paik, The Vulgarity of Caste: Dalits, Sexuality, and Humanity in Modern India (Stanford Univ. Press)
2022
Shahla Hussain, Kashmir in the Aftermath of Partition (Cambridge Univ. Press)
2021
Nira Wickramasinghe, Slave in a Palanquin: Colonial Servitude and Resistance in Sri Lanka (Columbia Univ. Press)
2020
Sheetal Chhabria, Making the Modern Slum: The Power of Capital in Colonial Bombay (Univ. of Washington Press)
2019
Sebastian R. Prange, Monsoon Islam: Trade and Faith on the Medieval Malabar Coast (Cambridge Univ. Press)
2018
Faiz Ahmed, Afghanistan Rising: Islamic Law and Statecraft between the Ottoman and British Empires (Harvard Univ. Press)
2017
Audrey Truschke, Culture of Encounters: Sanskrit at the Mughal Court (Columbia Univ. Press)
2016
Nayanjot Lahiri, Ashoka in Ancient India (Harvard Univ. Press)
2015
Richard Eaton and Phillip Wagoner, Power, Memory, Architecture: Contested Sites on India’s Deccan Plateau, 1300-1600 (Oxford Univ. Press)
2014
Sunil S. Amrith, Crossing the Bay of Bengal: The Furies of Nature and the Fortunes of Migrants (Harvard Univ. Press)
2013
A. Azfar Moin, The Millennial Sovereign: Sacred Kingship and Sainthood in Islam (Columbia Univ. Press)
2012
Douglas Haynes, Small Town Capitalism in Western India (Cambridge Univ. Press)
2011
Farina Mir, The Social Space of Language: Vernacular Culture in British Colonial Punjab (Univ. of California Press)
2023 Richards Prize
Shailaja Paik, University of Cincinnati
The Vulgarity of Caste: Dalits, Sexuality, and Humanity in Modern India (Stanford Univ. Press)
Shailaja Paik’s Vulgarity of Caste is a powerful work inspired by a moral imagination. Centering the life stories of Tamasha women, Paik reveals their willful agency and pursuit of legitimacy and manuski (dignity). Paik combines sophisticated theoretical discussion of caste, labor, sexuality, and gender, of “surplus women and caste slavery,” with comprehensive research methodology including oral history, ethnography, and the recovery of a sparse documentary archives to present this subaltern and marginalized community.