Alpa Shah on her latest book, “The Incarcerations: Bhima Koregaon and the Search for Democracy in India,” winning Auther Awards Season 6, and more

On March 21, 2025, The Times of India and JK Paper hosted the AutHer Awards Season 6, a prestigious celebration honoring exceptional women authors and their inspiring literary contributions across various themes and categories.
The awards featured four primary categories: Best Fiction, Best Non-Fiction, Best Debut, and Best Children’s Literature. This season, the process partner, screening committee, and grand jury faced the challenging task of selecting the winners in each category, given the outstanding quality of submissions.
Alpa Shah is an acclaimed author, known for her award-winning works Nightmarch and In the Shadows of the State, as well as co-authoring Ground Down by Growth. She has also contributed as a writer and presenter for BBC Radio 4’s Crossing Continents and From Our Own Correspondent. Raised in Nairobi, she pursued her education at Cambridge and the London School of Economics, where she currently serves as a professor of anthropology.
Alpa Shah was honored in the Best Non-Fiction category at the AutHer Awards Season 6 for her book The Incarcerations: Bhima Koregaon and the Search for Democracy in India. The AutHer Awards, a joint initiative of JK Paper and The Times of India, annually recognize outstanding Indian women writers for their exceptional literary contributions across various genres.
In this interview, she shares insights into her book and more. Excerpts from the conversation:
Congratulations on winning the AutHer Award for Best Non-Fiction! What does this recognition mean to you, especially for a book that delves into such a critical and politically charged issue?
Alpa Shah: One should not write to win awards, to please juries or readers. However, sometimes awards really matter in drawing attention to important hidden stories, ways of thinking, knowing, and acting, especially when they are against the grain of dominant narratives. In the case of The Incarcerations, winning the AutHER award is exceptionally important to draw wide attention to the grave injustices faced by the persecuted people at the heart of the book, the significance of their fight for democracy on the ground for India’s most marginalised communities – Adivasis, Dalits and Muslims, and what their imprisonment reveals about the collapse of democracy in the world’s largest democracy. This is especially so because many of them remain incarcerated, those who are out on bail have very restricted lives, and because the issues they were fighting for remain as crucial as ever.
What motivated you to write about the Bhima Koregaon case, and what was the most alarming or eye-opening discovery during your research?
Alpa Shah: I didn’t choose to write the book. My previous editor suggested it was an important book to write and I was the person to do it as I had worked as a scholar on many of the same issues that some of the BK-16 incarcerated had devoted their lives to and because I knew several of them. The suggestion weighed heavily on me. I couldn’t say yes because I had a very full teaching and admin load in my London university and had no time to write except at night. But at the same time, I couldn’t say no. When Father Stan Swamy was incarcerated at the age of 83, despite his severe ailments and the COVID pandemic raging, I started to unpick the story. When Stan Swamy died in prison, I knew there was no turning back. The deeper I went into researching the story, the more shocking it got. The most alarming was the discovery that evidence used to incarcerate the BK-16 had been implanted on some of their computers and the investigation I undertook to find out how it was done.
Do you feel that awards like this help bring more global attention to the issues covered in your book?
Alpa Shah: Absolutely! They are crucial.
Given the nature of your book, were there any unexpected challenges in publishing or promoting it?
Alpa Shah: I was very fortunate to have the most brilliant editors in both India and the UK who worked closely together and thought very carefully about when to publish and how to spread the story. But not even in my wildest dreams, could I have imagined the exposure, spread and reach the book has had. The fantastic handling of The Incarcerations by HarperCollins India and UK (William Collins) gives me great hope in the possibilities and importance of publishing houses today. There are some language translations underway and I hope there will now be many more, especially in India.
As an anthropologist and journalist, how do you see the role of literature in protecting democracy and human rights?
Alpa Shah: It is crucial but not always in the most straightforward way. The primary purpose has to be to uncover truths, different ways of knowing and understanding the world, including those you may not agree with.
What’s next for you? Are you working on another project that explores similar themes?
Alpa Shah: I am working on another book project but it’s too early to share!
Tell us something about the AutHer Awards.
Alpa Shah: It is so important to have an award that recognises women authors that is supported by some of the most significant newspapers in the country. I am sure that it will inspire many more women, girls too, to write and also to read. In a world which is increasingly being dominated and narrowed by artificial intelligence, this celebration of creativity will become more important than ever.
Who is your one favourite woman author, and why?
Alpa Shah: This is an impossible question to answer. There are so many female authors I admire and who have inspired me. If I had to single out one woman author, it would probably be to draw attention to someone who ought to be more recognised. So let me choose Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960), the Harlem renaissance writer and anthropologist for her astonishing 1937 book Their Eyes Were Watching God. Told by a 40-year-old African-American female character and set in Florida just after the end of slavery, this is a fictional story of sexual awakening, marriage and love. It is unusual for laying bare the nuances and differences within the black community. It focuses on the grip of patriarchy and the fight for women’s liberation, including from within one’s own household. It reminds us of the need to identify the conjoined axes of oppression as they bear upon but also within communities and hence the need for many-pronged struggles for liberation. It is only in recent years that Hurston is getting the recognition she deserves, and that’s still only in some quarters.
Name one book that is so dear to you that you can never lend it to anyone.
Alpa Shah: Books must be shared and spread. But when I was writing Nightmarch, Professor Maurice Bloch who taught me anthropology, gave me the original edition of George Orwell’s Road to Wigan Pier published by Victor Gollancz with a special inscription. I think I would find it hard to part with this particular book except to one day pass it on to my daughter.
One piece of advice you would like to give to budding authors.
Alpa Shah: Perseverance, and struggling and seizing every moment that you can to write are as important as creativity, imagination and keeping alive the passion for the story that you want to tell.
And lastly, how would you complete the sentence: I write because....
Alpa Shah:…there is a story to tell that fires up our imagination, allows us to know the world with greater wisdom and in ways that we would not expect.
Disclaimer: This article has been produced on behalf of J.K Paper by Times Internet’s Spotlight team