Essays Winners 2026

Almost all submissions this year fell under Category One.

Category Two essays: In this category, we expected essays that provide the participant’s family history of at least FIVE generations, preferably more. Under this category, we expected the essays to make extensive use of vanshaavalis kept within the family or by specialised upjaatis who used to maintain such records, as well as documents kept by the family, archival research, government records such as District Gazetteers, ASI’s People of India project report, etc. (For more details, click here).

Since no essay met the Category Two criteria, we limited the prizes to Category One.

• The judges were truly moved by the accounts of close-knit families, intergenerational bonding, and respect for your elders’ sacrifices and the values they lived by.
• We are also touched that almost all of you wrote that establishing a new kind of bond with your family elders has been a very enriching experience. Many of you also expressed pride in being the first to document your family elders’ oral accounts in writing.  In that sense, the Essay Competition has served its purpose. We hope you and other family members will take the process further.
• Each of you has given us valuable insights into the processes that forced the break-up of the joint family system, so valued by your parents and ancestors, to start fraying and breaking up despite its many advantages and bounties.
• The jury was impressed to find that more than half of the submissions offered insightful observations on various aspects of social life in India, especially the transition from rural life to urban areas and the challenges of migration.
• The stories of each family’s upward mobility against very heavy odds are also very impressive. This is the kind of “Economic History” India needs to promote and learn from.

After we shortlisted about 16 essays in Category One, we found it hard to give only three/four prizes, as initially announced, because several essays moved us deeply, even though we wished the authors had given us more details. Most essays are lavish with adjectives when describing the character traits and ordeals of earlier generations, but fewer provide enough concrete examples to justify those laudatory epithets.

The following factors made it difficult for us to choose the winners.

• the uneven quality of submissions;
• the newness of the theme of the competition;
• the lack of clarity regarding the extent to which AI tools are permissible and even desirable,
• multiple-language submissions (e.g., Hindi, English, and Bengali), along with widely varying lengths,

In order to encourage future scholarship and more rigorous research into constructing our family/village/town community histories, the jury decided on the following:

Provide multiple prizes in each of the 1st, 2nd and 3rd prize categories. This does not mean the winners will have to share the announced prize money. Each winner will receive the full amount for that category.

• We will publish the prize-winning submissions on the Kishwar Memorial website, along with brief critical comments from the jury, for future revisions or for the benefit of contestants in future competitions on the same theme.
• We encourage those who did not make it to the winners list this year to submit their essays for the 2027 competition. We intend to make it an ongoing yearly competition.
• For the coming years, we will accept two types of essays: 
• a) those written without the use of AI, 
• b) those that explicitly use AI tools to enhance the storytelling while retaining factual accuracy. However, we expect each author to inform us about the extent to which they relied on AI tools.  
• This time, we used ChatGPT to indicate what percentage of the writing was AI-based. We chose the winners based on ChatGPT’s high scores for minimal or reasonable AI use. For instance, Shahida would definitely have been on the winners’ list because her essay documented her family’s struggles in rich detail. But the narrative was clearly almost 100% AI-generated.
• We do intend to publish all the prize-winning essays in a special volume. 
• We encourage participants to revise and improve their essays if they would like to add more details or enhance the style.