Launched with big money and even bigger promises in 2018, The JCB Prize for Literature, India’s glitziest literary award, has vanished without a word. Here is why it doesn’t come as a surprise
The JCB Prize for Literature, launched in 2018 with one of the most ambitious mandates in Indian literary history, has folded in on itself. There was no formal statement from the JCB Literature Foundation, which gave away the prize at glitziest ceremonies that cost more than most authors make in a year, no last hurrah. However, for those watching it closely, the shutting down of the prize did not come as a surprise. In fact, the end had been years in the making.
The JCB Literature Foundation was set up “to promote the art of literature in India and communicate to readers everywhere the full diversity and energy of Indian Literature by creating an enduring cultural legacy and make a long-term and sustained contribution in promoting literature from India.” The vision was grand, but too good to be true. Touted as the Indian Booker, it promised to recognise the best of contemporary Indian fiction each year, with a cash award of Rs 25 lakh for the author and Rs 10 lakh for the translator (if there was one).
Also read: Over 100 writers slam JCB literature prize's 'hypocrisy' ; 'act of immorality', says Meena Kandaswam
An irony, not lost on writers
The Prize was launched under the literary stewardship of Rana Dasgupta, the globe-trotting novelist-essayist, who served as its first Literary Director. In late 2019, Dasgupta exited, almost unceremoniously, and the Prize that began with a great vision had an unspoken gap at the top. Into that gap stepped Mita Kapur, founder of literary consultancy Siyahi and a known figure on festival circuits, in January 2020.
In the beginning, especially during the challenging years of the pandemic, the prize did seem to shake things up. It backed translations, boosted regional language publishers, put the spotlight on lesser-known writers and even lesser-known translators. It partnered with festivals, launched sensory reading kits for disabled children, funded rural libraries, and facilitated translation diplomas. For a few years, it looked like Indian literature had found its sugar daddy.
But for those of us in the know, there was always a nervous cough behind the applause. Because here was a literary prize funded by a company best known for, well, bulldozers. The juxtaposition wasn’t lost on anyone, least of all the writers, who can smell irony faster than they can sniff out a poorly constructed metaphor. It was not lost on them when a popular pan masala company had come on board as a sponsor of a well-known literature festival.
A jewel without a crown
The JCB Prize’s early years were marked by a blitzkrieg of glitz seldom seen in Indian literary circles. Launch events were held in imperial-style venues: the inaugural ceremony at Delhi’s Imperial Hotel in April 2018 took place in the presence of Lord Bamford, the Chairman of JCB, who conceptualised the prize, JCB India CEO and MD Deepak Shetty, and Dasgupta — complete with ceremonial speeches and lavish decor.
In 2019, Jaipur hosted the prize night at the opulent Rambagh Palace. There were candles, lanterns, cascading floral installations and theatrical readings before authors and translators retired to poolside meals at the adjoining five-star JW Marriott. It seemed to be an experiential showcase: hoteliers hosted intimate readings, sarangi musicians performed, and authors mingled in designer lobbies — an aesthetic entirely at odds with the modest publicity budgets of typical literary launches. It was a publishing industry fever dream. And some of us smelled too much perfume in the air.
Several shortlisted authors were flown to Jaipur multiple times, attending prelim shortlist events, jury dinners, festival sessions at Jaipur Literature Festival (JLF), and finally the award gala. In 2021 and 2023, announcements for longlists and shortlists were staged as salon events at Jai Mahal Palace and Clarks Amer Hotel. JCB even managed a dedicated prize-branded bookstore at JLF.
These gestures created an aura of grandeur, an immersive branding that both dazzled the literary ecosystem and set expectations trucks ahead of India’s mundane, infrastructurally-starved publishing realities. Literary prizes, we must realise, don’t operate in vacuum. They depend on a functioning literary economy in which a prize win leads to more reviews, reprints, translations, global rights sales.
In the UK, Booker winners routinely sell upwards of 100,000 copies. In India, even the most acclaimed novels struggle to cross 5,000. Even a prize-winning novel rarely sells more than a few thousand copies. The infrastructure just doesn’t exist. Distribution is poor. Media coverage is sporadic. Even big publishers run on fumes. Editors double as marketers. Most readers rely on posts and videos of bookstagrammers, if not WhatsApp forwards. It’s a miracle serious literary fiction in India gets written at all.
Also read: Upamanyu Chatterjee wins JCB Prize for Literature 2024 for Lorenzo Searches for the Meaning of Life
The JCB Prize was a wager that serious literature in India could be backed by corporate money without being compromised by it. That wager, noble as it was, didn’t hold. While it offered an enormous cash award, JCB alone could not build the kind of cultural scaffolding needed to turn that award into lasting momentum. There were attempts — book trailers, jury interviews, author events, etc. But these were unevenly executed. The prize remained, in the end, a jewel without a crown, if you will.
The bigger problem
The JCB Prize was open to both original English-language novels and translations, but by 2022, the long-promised equilibrium had tipped dramatically. That year’s shortlist was made entirely of translations, and by 2024, five out of seven winners had been translated works. This wasn’t a problem in itself — translated literature is essential in a multilingual country like India — but the change wasn’t explained publicly. This created confusion.
Some English-language writers, who assumed that it was meant to be a Booker-style reward for English fiction, began to ask if the prize was still meant for them. Others wondered what the prize’s real purpose was: to support translations, regional literature, English fiction, something else?
A last‑ditch attempt to revive its faltering trajectory came in autumn 2024, when the prize was awarded to Upamanyu Chatterjee — back to original English writing — for Lorenzo Searches for the Meaning of Life. The prize to the grand old man of Indian-English satire, known and loved since English, August became a cult classic, arrived like a course correction or an afterthought, but it was too late. The damage was already done: most English writers had disengaged, and moved on.
Also read: 2024 JCB Prize for Literature: Longlist split evenly between English novels, translations
To some, Lorenzo Searches for the Meaning of Life felt like a safe, predictable choice, not quite the literary leap people had come to expect from the prize. Critics pointed out that while Chatterjee’s book was philosophically rich, it didn’t quite outshine other compelling entries on the shortlist, like Sharankumar Limbale’s gritty Sanatan or Saharu Nusaiba Kannanari’s Chronicle of an Hour and a Half, one of the best debut novels of the year.
A much larger controversy erupted in 2024. A group of over 100 writers and publishers wrote an open letter calling out JCB, the parent company, for its role in what had come to be known as “bulldozer justice” — the use of bulldozers in demolition drives in parts of India, many of which were in Muslim neighbourhoods and often took place without due process.
JCB machines were used in these demolitions. Many in the literary community found it unacceptable that the same company sponsoring a prize for literature and diversity was also being linked to acts of destruction and displacement. The Foundation did not respond to the letter and remained tight-lipped on the issue. The 2024 winner, Chatterjee, was handed over the prize by Shetty at a lacklustre event held at JCB’s India headquarters at Ballabhgarh in Faridabad (Haryana). In hindsight, it was the precursor of an end foretold.
In March this year, the JCB Foundation dropped its license as a Section 8 non-profit—the legal form that had tied it to a mission of promoting literature in India. It has been asked to register itself as a private limited company. The motive behind the change remains unclear; no explanation was issued by JCB India, the foundation’s board, or its literary director, Mita Kapur, beyond a line stating that it has shut down.
All that’s left behind
For those of us who had watched the arc of the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, the JCB’s collapse felt chillingly familiar. The DSC Prize was launched in 2010 by the Narulas — Surina Narula and Manhad Narula — wealthy patrons with ties to the JLF. It offered a lavish purse of $50,000, which was later revised to $25,000. It was a prize that recognised South Asian writing wherever it was produced: Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, the diaspora.
In its heyday, the DSC Prize gave us stunning winners: Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland, HM Naqvi’s Home Boy, Shehan Karunatilaka’s Chinaman, Jeet Thayil’s Narcopolis, Anuradha Roy’s Sleeping on Jupiter. In 2015, after the DSC separated from the JLF, the prize began hopping from country to country, from Galle to Dhaka to Nepal. In 2019, the DSC Prize quietly faded, even though it had planned to be back in 2021 for its 10th edition.
Six years later, the JCB Prize has wheeled itself into the sunset like one of its own backhoes: engine off, headlights dimmed. For all its five-star sparkle, it died the way most Indian literary initiatives do, without the courtesy of a proper farewell. The JCB Prize may disappear from memory fast, but as a cautionary tale about ambition, optics, and ethical blindspots, its ghost will linger much longer.
For now, all that’s left behind are the muffled sighs of writers and translators nursing the quiet heartbreak of knowing that this was it — the one literary prize in India where, for once, the money actually matched the labour. And far exceeded the advances from publishers. For many, it was the one gleaming carrot in a field of dry sabzi; it was never just the cake, but the cherry, the icing, and the three-tier stand as well. With the golden goose gone, it’s back to reality: patchy advances, paltry royalty, and the vague hope that someday, someone might hand them an award as cash-rich as the JCB Prize.
