A team of four Indian photographers from Reuters news agency — slain photojournalist Danish Siddiqui, Adnan Abidi, Sanna Irshad Mattoo and Amit Dave — have won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for feature photography for their coverage of the Covid-19 crisis in India.
Announcing the winners, the Pulitzer Prize website noted that they were receiving the award for “images of Covid’s toll in India that balanced intimacy and devastation, while offering viewers a heightened sense of place.”
Arguably the most coveted award for journalists from across the world, the Pulitzer is announced by America’s Columbia University and bestowed on the recommendation of the Pulitzer Prize Board.
Indians who have previously won the Pulitzer
A member of the Ghadar Party in America, Indian-American journalist Gobind Behari Lal, was the first from India to win the Pulitzer Prize for journalism in 1937. He won the award for reporting with four others, for their coverage of science at the tercentenary of Harvard University. A postgraduate from University of California, Berkeley, he also received the Padma Bhushan in 1969.
In 2003, Mumbai-born Geeta Anand was part of the team at Wall Street Journal that won a Pulitzer Prize for reporting on corporate corruption, and in 2016, Indian-American Sanghamitra Kalita, then managing editor of Los Angeles Times, won the Pulitzer in the Breaking News Reporting category with her team for their coverage of the San Bernardino shooting in California in 2015 and the terror investigation that followed.
In 2000, London-born Indian-American writer Jhumpa Lahiri won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction for her debut short story collection Interpreter of Maladies. In 2011, Siddhartha Mukherjee (Indian-American physician, biologist and author) won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction for his demystification of cancer in The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer.
In the Feature Photography Category, Siddiqui — who was killed on July 16, 2021, while covering a clash between Afghan security forces and Taliban forces in Spin Boldak district of Kandahar — was also awarded the Pulitzer in 2018 for his images of the Rohingya refugee crisis. He was part of the team from Reuters that bagged the award, which included another co-recipient from this year, Adnan Abidi.
The latter also won in the the 2020 Pulitzer in the Breaking News Photography category as part of the team from Reuters that covered the 2019-20 Hong Kong protests.
In 2020, Channi Anand, Mukhtar Khan and Dar Yasin of Associated Press won the Pulitzer in the Feature Photography category “for striking images captured during a communications blackout in Kashmir depicting life in the contested territory as India stripped it of its semi-autonomy,”
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Who was Joseph Pulitzer, after whom the awards are named?
Born to a wealthy family of Magyar-Jewish origin in Mako, Hungary, in 1847, Joseph Pulitzer had a stint in the military before he built a reputation of being a “tireless journalist”.
In the late 1860s he joined the German-language daily newspaper Westliche Post, and by 25 he had become a publisher. In 1978, he became the owner of St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Under him, the paper published several “investigative articles and editorials assailing government corruption, wealthy tax-dodgers, and gamblers”. In 1883, he also negotiated the purchase of The New York World, which was in financial straits, and elevated its circulation.
In 1884, he was elected to the US House of Representatives from New York’s ninth district as a Democrat and entered office on March 4, 1885. During his tenure, he led a movement to place the newly gifted Statue of Liberty in New York City.
When were the Pulitzer awards instituted?
The awards were instituted according to Pulitzer’s will, framed in 1904, where he made a provision for the establishment of the Pulitzer Prizes as an incentive to excellence. Pulitzer specified solely four awards in journalism, four in letters and drama, one for education, and five travelling scholarships.
In his will, Pulitzer bestowed an endowment on Columbia of $2,000,000 for the establishment of a School of Journalism, one-fourth of which was to be “applied to prizes or scholarships for the encouragement of public service, public morals, American literature, and the advancement of education.”
According to the Pulitzer prize website, he stated: “I am deeply interested in the progress and elevation of journalism, having spent my life in that profession, regarding it as a noble profession and one of unequaled importance for its influence upon the minds and morals of the people. I desire to assist in attracting to this profession young men of character and ability, also to help those already engaged in the profession to acquire the highest moral and intellectual training.”
After his death in 1911, the first Pulitzer Prizes were awarded in June, 1917.
Changes that have been made to the awards
A forward-looking entrepreneur, who knew that alterations might be necessary with the changing times, Pulitzer established an overseer advisory board and willed it “power in its discretion to suspend or to change any subject or subjects, substituting, however, others in their places, if in the judgment of the board such suspension, changes, or substitutions shall be conducive to the public good or rendered advisable by public necessities, or by reason of change of time.”
In keeping with the provision, several changes have been made, including the addition of new categories and inclusion of recognition of online content. In 2008, it was announced that content published in online-only news sources would also be considered, and, since 2016, print and online magazines, too, have been eligible to apply in all journalism categories.
The most coveted award for journalists from across the world, the Pulitzer is announced by America's Columbia University. (Wikimedia Commons) 
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