ANNUAL BASAS PRIZE

Since 2000, the British Association of South Asian Studies (BASAS) has awarded a prize for the most outstanding paper given by a student at its annual conference. The paper may be on any subject relevant to the conference.

AWARD:

  • For the 2010 annual conference, the BASAS Prize consisted of a monetary award of £250.
  • Depending on the topic of the paper, prize-winning papers will be considered for publication in the annual BASAS issue of Contemporary South Asia or in South Asian Studies. Nevertheless, the papers will undergo the normal review process.

ELIGIBILITY:

  • The student must be studying for a degree in an institution of higher learning at the time of the BASAS annual conference.
  • The paper must be accepted in advance by a panel convenor, submitted electronically in advance to BOTH the panel convenor AND the conference organiser, presented in person by the student at the BASAS annual conference, and not have been presented elsewhere or published previously.
  • The paper shall not exceed 8,000 words (including bibliography and footnotes). Papers longer than this word limit will be automatically disqualified.

JUDGING:

  • Both the paper and its presentation form part of the judging criteria.
  • The judging panel will consist of BASAS Council members and other notable figures in South Asian studies.
  • The judging panel reserves the right not to present the award and will not enter into correspondence concerning its final judgment.

FURTHER DETAILS:

Lawrence Saez
BASAS Secretary
School of Oriental and African Studies
London
UK
Email secretary@basas.org.uk

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PREVIOUS WINNERS

2010 winner

  • Sahana Ghosh (University of Oxford) "Cultures and commodities in cross-border interactions in everyday life in the Bengal borderland."

2009 winner

  • Rebecca Walker (University of Edinburgh), "Every-other-day violence": Questioning the integrity of the ordinary and everyday life on the East coast of Sri Lanka.

2008 Winner

  • Nico Slate (Harvard University) "I am a coloured woman": Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya in the United States, 1939-41.

2007 Winner

Dr Bhaskar Vira presents the BASAS Prize 2007 to Radhika Govinda

Radhika Govinda (University of Cambridge), Re-inventing Dalit Women's Identity? Dynamics of Social Activism and Electoral Politics in North India.

2006 Winner

Special Commendation

2005 Winner

Special Commendations

2004 Winner

  • Anja Kovacs (University of East Anglia) Gender and Violence, Tradition and Violence: Refashioning Durga in the Service of Hindu Nationalism. A revised version of this paper was published as But you don’t understand, we are at war! Refashioning Durga in the service of Hindu nationalism in Contemporary South Asia, 13:4, 2004.

Special Commendations

  • Francis Lim (University of London SOAS) Hotels as Sites of Power: Tourism, Status and Politics in Nepal Himalaya
  • Sunita Puri (University of Oxford) Picturing Plague: Visual Narratives of the Indian Body, Colonial Power, and Infectious Disease in Bombay, 1896-1897.

2003 Winner

  • Yasmin Khan (St Anthonys, University of Oxford) Creating the Secular State: Reactions to Partition Refugees in Uttar Pradesh. A revised version of this paper was published as The arrival impact of Partition refugees in Uttar Pradesh, 1947-52 in Contemporary South Asia, 12:4, 2003.

Special Commendations

  • Alpa Shah (London School of Economics) The Love of Labour: Seasonal Migration from a Jharkhandi Village to Brick Kilns in West Bengal
  • Boria Majumdar (University of Oxford) The Politics of Cricket in Colonial Bengal: 1880-1947: Invocation of a Lost History.

2002: No prize awarded.

2001 Joint Winners

  • Michael Carrington, The "Pucka" Viceroy's Moral Empire Under Threat: the looting of monasteries during the 1903/4 Younghusband mission to Tibet
  • D. Tyrer, Pulp Friction: Constructing Fundamentalism and Muslim Student Antagonisms.

2000 Winner

  • Therese O'Toole, Secularising the Sacred Cow: The Relationship between Religious Reform and Hindu Nationalism.

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