When Rabindranath Tagore won the Nobel Prize for Literature in the year 1913, he became the first Indian, rather, Asian, to do so. Since his historic win, only 8 others of Indian origin or long-term Indian residents have won this coveted accolade in all categories. That makes the grand total number of Indians who have won the prize a mere 9 out of 1000 individuals and 28 organizations. That is, 0.8% of Nobel Prize winners come from a country with roughly 18% of the world’s population.
The Nobel is considered one of the most distinguished and difficult prizes awarded to only the most exceedingly talented scholars in their respective fields. Yet such a small share of winners cannot reflect a shortage of talent on the Indian subcontinent; far from it. A more telling explanation appears on the Nobel Prize’s own website, in its citation for Tagore: “…He has made his poetic thought, expressed in his own English words, a part of the literature of the West.” The Nobel made space for Tagore within its existing hierarchies, a social stratum that defines the West as the standard.
The marginalization of Global South scholars has long been a part of any conversation about the Nobel. Every October, the prize commands about two and a half weeks of attention, with laureates celebrated across Sweden; before the spotlight fades and we are reminded that, beyond the already exclusive world of the award, there are many equally accomplished scholars and pioneers worth hearing from.
It is of course natural to look beyond the Nobel for other honors. Take the Pulitzer Prize, which was long open only to US citizens and now also admits long-time US residents. The change was a way to widen its pool of voices: Indian-origin winners in the Books category include Jhumpa Lahiri, Siddhartha Mukherjee and Vijay Seshadri. As Ingrid Rojas Contreras, a 2023 Pulitzer finalist, put it: “The Pulitzer changing their citizenship requirements matters on so many levels…Migrant literature is American literature.”
The shift is certainly welcome, but books must still be published by a US publisher to qualify, and as award-winning translator Daisy Rockwell wrote on her now deleted X account: “This may seem an unsurprising fact to many but it’s taken nearly thirty years to get one of my translations published in the US.” Rockwell, who has been translating books from Hindi and Urdu to English for nearly three decades, never had a translation published in the US till Geetanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand, after it received the International Booker Prize.
Both iterations of the Booker – the Booker Prize and the International Booker Prize – consider only books published in the UK and Ireland. Although its recognition of the vital work of translators is valuable, it still leaves open the question of whose stories are positioned to travel. The Booker does well to bring recognition to insightful and deeply personal stories from India – consider The God of Small Things written by Arundhati Roy and Heart Lamp, written by Banu Mushtaq and translated by Deepa Bhasthi – and yet, other Indian genres, such as science fiction and satire, rarely find recognition at such a scale, while their Western counterparts flourish.
Why must we look outwards at all?
India has plenty of esteemed awards of its own: the Jnanpith Award, the Sahitya Akademi Award, the Rabindra Puraskar (named after the Nobel laureate himself), the Yuva Puraskar, and more. These awards provide recognition as well as monetary support, and have reach that travels far and wide. Like any long-standing institution, these awards have occasionally faced controversies, a reminder that the work of making literary recognition more transparent and inclusive is ongoing.
It would be patronising to say writers shouldn’t seek recognition at all; for many, it is a way out of poverty, abuse, and discrimination. And even when it isn’t, art that appears once in many lifetimes deserves to be appreciated. It is not the pursuit of accolades that we must dissuade writers from; it is that the nesting ground of acclaim seems to be in one corner of the world. Looking beyond this space – and the English language – opens up countless stories, experiences, and emotions waiting to be felt. We must be careful to tread the thin line between peer-led validation and Indian subordinance.
What matters most are the stories: accounts of human experience that differ vastly from our own, yet are whole and worth listening to. If we approach literature with a little sonder, a recognition that every life is as vivid and complex as our own, perhaps we won’t need prize lists to tell us what to read. Our recommendation is to read widely, read fairly, and read uncomfortably. The world is far wider than the juries at the top would have us believe; we only have to open our eyes to the brilliance that already exists.
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