And the 2025 Balakian Prize goes to….

Many congratulations to Dr Adhira Mangalagiri, winner of the 2025 Balakian Prize with the book States of Disconnect: The China-India Literary Relation in the Twentieth Century (Columbia University Press, 2023).

The Balakian Prize, established from a joint donation from the family of Anna Balakian and the Friends of the AILC-ICLA, and consisting in a prize of $1000 + travel expenses up to $1000 to attend the Congress to receive the award, is awarded to an exceptional first monograph in the field of comparative literary studies and published by a scholar under age of 40 in a period for three years between ICLA Congresses (in this case, between 1 January 2022 and 31 December 2024).

We thank the members of the Jury for their work reading through all the submissions.  

The Chair of the Balakian Prize Committee and chair of the jury, Professor E.V. Ramakrishnan, with the other jury members Professor Wen-chin Ouyang and Professor Sandra Maggio, said of the winning volume:

The jury members have singled out Adhira Mangalagiri’s States of Disconnect for its impressive achievement in evolving a method of reading literary texts in languages and cultures which are embroiled in an environment of antagonism, rupture and crisis of understanding. Her well-researched monograph provides a corrective to the prevailing critical vocabulary of comparative literature practices grounded in the humanist ethos of ‘literary kinship’ and ‘aesthetic alliance,’ with no reference to the exclusionary logic of the nation-states and the asymmetrical power relations between communities and countries complicated by globalisation. 

Through a nuanced analysis of a rich archive of seminal texts drawn from Chinese and Hindi, Adhira attempts to make sense of the volatile and ambiguous relationship between India and China in the twentieth century. She demonstrates how the idea of ‘disconnect’ can be deployed productively through its various manifestations such as friction, ellipsis and contingency which are elaborated in great detail. The figure of the Indian policeman in the Chinese short stories set in Shanghai during the British colonial period, the ‘China’ stories of Agyeya written in Hindi, and the ‘correspondence’ between Premchand and Lu Xun who never knew each other, explored in the core chapters of the book exemplify her search for an alternative paradigm of comparison ‘which grants the literary its full potential as a lively and disruptive world-making force, capable of forging transnational relation when none seems at hand’. Despite its occasional didactic and utopian overtones, Ahdira’s critical method recovers the larger ethical burden of comparative studies in our overwrought times, when the politics of difference informs and defines the idea of the literary. She has an engaging style which moves effortlessly through texts and ideas with depth and lucidity.   

We also congratulate Xiaolu Ma on her honourable mention for her book Transpatial Modernity: Chinese Cultural Encounters with Russia via Japan (1880-1930) (Harvard University Asia Center, 2024). Of this book, the jury said:

Xiaolu Ma’s scholarly monograph examines how the languages of Russian and Japanese played a formative role in shaping the modernity of Chinese literature. The book proposes ‘relay transculturation’ as a method of looking at the relationship between Russian literature and Chinese literature through the mediation of Japanese translations and reception. The main chapters discuss in detail the Chinese reception and transformation of Russian ‘sentiment’, ‘nihilism’, ‘humanism’ and the ‘language reform’, to bring out the multicultural sources of Chinese modernity. Her discussion of the emergence of the Chinese ‘vernacular’ in the twentieth century as a resistance against the prevailing elitist mode of articulation is particularly instructive in the context of the literary transformations that have taken place in South Asia as a whole. Xiaolu’s command of Chinese, Russian and Japanese is admirable, as she crosses the boundaries of languages and cultures with authority and insight. Interwoven into the main argument of the book is her own journey of struggle to make sense of the complex nature of Chinese modernity. That the Chinese authors like Lu Xun were proficient in German and other European languages, makes the trajectory of intercultural relations discussed here complex and dense. Her discussion cuts across the fields of translation, reception, hybridization, transculturation and re-spatialization. Xiaolu Ma’s well-researched book demonstrates how multi-lingual competence can enrich comparative studies of literatures in our times. 

The Balakian Prize will be officially awarded to Adhira Mangalagiri at the Seoul Congress.