Faculty Fellow Nikhil Menon has been awarded the 2020 Joseph W. Elder Prize in the Indian Social Sciences from the American Institute of Indian Studies (AIIS) for his book manuscript Planning Democracy: India’s Cold War Experiment.
According to the AIIS, Menon’s book “situates India within the Cold War and global debates about economic development in the middle of the twentieth century. It maps transnational flows of ideas, individuals, and institutions between India, the United States, Europe, and the Soviet Union.
“Beyond just a perspective from the developing world, it argues that independent India’s endeavor, of combining Plans and Parliament, was rare in the history of global development. In fact, India sought to fashion itself as a model worth emulating by the rest of the decolonizing world during the Cold War.”
The AIIS book prize committee noted that Menon’s book “offers an especially rich historical understanding of ‘democratic planning’” during the period it addresses.
“We learnt a lot from reading [this] compelling and well-written account of state-led economic planning in post-independent democratic India in the 1950s and 1960s during the heyday of the Cold War,” the committee wrote.
Menon is an assistant professor of history who specializes in the history of modern South Asia and the intellectual and political history of 20th century India.