Aparajith Ramnath’s extensive biography of M. Visvesvaraya, one of the foremost builders of modern India, has been awarded the Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay NIF Book Prize for 2025. Engineering a Nation (Penguin) traces the life of Mokshagundam Visvesvaraya who started out as a civil engineer and grew to become a skilled administrator, as he took over as the 19th Dewan of Mysore from 1912 to 1918.
In her review for The Hindu, Uma Mahadevan-Dasgupta said Visvesvaraya pushed strongly for industrial modernity in a colonial era that could not conceive of the idea of Indian self-reliance and made remarkable contributions across multiple dimensions of governance.
Visvesvaraya was committed to modernising education, engineering, and infrastructure with a view to improve the quality of people’s daily lives. The Jury said the “remarkable biography” profiles an extraordinary figure: an engineer, a bureaucrat, an administrator, a constitutionalist, and a developmental thinker.
“In a fine display of the biographer’s art, as well as the historian’s craft, Ramnath explores the many social, political, and intellectual worlds that Visvesvaraya traversed and the deep genetic imprint that he left behind on the Indian nation-state and its technological aspirations.”
His book was selected from a shortlist that included Janaki Bakhle’s Savarkar and the Making of Hindutva, Bela Bhatia’s India’s Forgotten Country: A View from the Margins, Avinash Paliwal’s India’s Near East: A New History and Manu S. Pillai’s Gods, Guns and Missionaries: The Making of the Modern Hindu Identity, all published by Penguin.