NEW YORK: Five Indians are among this year’s Guggenheim Foundation 2008 Fellows. The Foundation handed out $8.2 million to a total of 190 scholars, artists, journalists and others, selected from 2600 applicants.

The five Indians in this list of elite Fellows are: Meena Alexander, poet, Hunter College, City University of New York (CUNY); Sumit Guha, South Asian studies scholar, Rutgers University; Ashutosh Varshney, political scientist, University of Michigan; Chandrashekhar B. Khare, mathematician, UCLA; and Tony D’Souza, author. Allahabad-born Meena Alexander has been living in New York for past several decades and is known worldwide for her autobiography Fault Lines, which traces her growth as a writer and a woman.

Distinguished Professor of English at Hunter College and the City University of New York Graduate Centre, Meena recently published Quickly Changing River: Poem. Sumit Guha, the professor of History at Rutgers University, is the author of several books including the well-known Environment and Ethnicity in India: 1200-1991 and Health and Population in South Asia from Earliest Times to the Present.

Eminent mathematician Chandrashekhar Khare had helped cracking a mathematical puzzle - Serre’s conjucture - which gave him an instant international recognition. Khare is a professor at the University of California. Ashutosh Varshney, the professor of political science at the University of Michigan, is one of the rare few to be awarded with two major fellowships.

Besides the Guggenheim, he has also bagged the prestigious Carnegie Corporation Scholar fellowship worth $1,00,000. Writer D’Souza at the age of 32 is possibly one of the youngest recipients of this fellowship. Born and raised in Chicago, his first novel Whiteman received the prestigious Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

His second novel, The Konkans was released in February this year. Previous Indian recipients of this award include Pulitzer Prize winner novelist Jhumpa Lahiri; mathematicians Manil Suri and Santosh Srinivas Vempala; curator Meenakshi Wadhwa and historian Sumathi Ramaswamy. Musician Pandit Pran Nath is said to be one of the earliest Indian-American recipient of Guggenheim fellowship, way back in 1974.