Slain photojournalist Danish Siddiqui was awarded the Pulitzer Prize along with three others for their coverage of the COVID-19 crisis. A look back shows that Gobind Behari Lal was the first Indian to win the honour in 1937
Slain photojournalist Danish Siddiqui was among the four Indians to win the Pulitzer for their “images of COVID’s toll in India”. PTI
India on Tuesday awoke to the news that slain scribe Danish Siddiqui, along with three other photojournalists, had won the prestigious Pulitzer Prize for their coverage of the coronavirus crisis in India.
The other three, who were awarded the honour are — Adnan Abidi, Sanna Irshad Mattoo, Amit Dave. While Abidi is based in New Delhi, Mattoo is a photographer from Kashmir. Dave is based in Ahmedabad, from where he covers local and national news assignments for Reuters.
The jury said that the prize was awarded to the four photographers for their images of the crisis that “balanced intimacy and devastation, while offering viewers a heightened sense of place”.
As we celebrate the high honours for our four journalists, here’s a better understanding of the award and other Indians who have been conferred upon the accolade.
History of the Pulitzer Prize
Established in 1917, the Pulitzer Prize — administered by New York’s Columbia University — is the most coveted award for journalists across the world. The award is to honour exceptional achievements in journalism, be it in newspaper, magazine, online journalism, literature and musical composition.
The Pulitzer Prize is named after the Jewish, Hungarian-born, American newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer.
Pulitzer, Hungarian-born, was described as an intense indomitable figure and an avid crusader against public and private corruption.
As the publisher of the St Louis Dispatch and New York World, he revolutionised journalism in that he made his papers must-reads for the general public.
He was credited with using illustrations and it was his goal to condemn public and private corruption whether it be at the hands of the government or wealthy business owners. His papers featured exposes and lengthy editorials that held a populist appeal.
He was also the first to call for the training of journalists at the university level in a school of journalism.
And the Pulitzer Prize was born…
In 1904, seven years before his death, Pulitzer drew up a will that made provisions for the establishment and endowment of the Pulitzer Prize.
A whopping $2,000,000 was given to Columbia University in New York to establish a school of journalism and for the prizes.
Initially, the awards were meant for: journalism, letters (awards for an American novel, book, play, biography; American history, and an American history of public service by the press), education, and traveling scholarship.
However, Pulitzer created a provision that allowed the Pulitzer Prize Board of Advisories to make changes, cancellations, suspensions, substitutions, and the authorisation to create more categories. This allowed for the very relevant awards today, such as online journalism.
Indians winning Pulitzers
This is Danish Siddiqui’s second Pulitzer Prize; he had won his first in 2018 for his series documenting the plight of Myanmar’s minority Rohingya community and their mass exodus to Bangladesh.
However, Siddiqui isn’t the first Indian to win the honour. In 1937, Gobind Behari Lal became the first Indian to win the Pulitzer Prize for journalism, along with four others, for his coverage in the field of science.
Lal also participated in the Indian Independence movement, and was the son of Bishan Lal, the governor of the princely state of Bikaner. He studied at the University of California in Berkeley on a Guru Govind Singh Sahib scholarship and later became the science editor of The San Francisco Examiner.
In the early 2000s, Indian-origin Jhumpa Lahiri and Siddhartha Mukherjee won the Pulitzer for their non-fiction work. While Lahiri won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for her book Interpreters of Maladies in 2000, Mukherjee won the prize in 2011 in the general non-fiction category for an elegant work documenting the history of cancer – The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer.
In 2003, Mumbai-born Geeta Anand, an investigative reporter and feature writer for The Wall Street Journal, won the award for her investigative writing on corporate corruption.
Adding to India’s pride was Sanghamitra Kalita, the managing editor of Los Angeles Times, who was part of the team, which won the Pulitzer in 2016 in the Breaking News Reporting category for their coverage of the San Bernardino shooting and the terror investigation that followed.
With inputs from agencies
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