The American Institute of Indian Studies (AIIS) held a reception on March 31, 2005 in conjunction with the annual Association of Asian Studies (AAS) conference in Chicago. The reception was co-sponsored with the AAS South Asia Council and marked the inaugural year of the AIIS Book Prize, with titles published by Indiana University Press. Prior to the unveiling, H.E. Arun Kumar, Consular General of the Indian Consulate in Chicago, gave remarks about the importance of AIIS in bilateral relations. The 2004 winners were Pika Ghosh, associate professor of Art History at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, wrote Temple to Love: Architecture and Devotion in Seventeenth-Century Bengal, and Aseema Sinha, associate professor of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, wrote The Regional Roots of Developmental Politics in India: A Divided Leviathan. Richard Wolf, associate professor of Ethnomusicology at Harvard University, won this year’s Edward C. Dimock, Jr. Book Prize in the Indian Humanities for his book, The Black Cow's Footprint: Time, Place, and Music in a South Indian Tribe. In addition, Choudhri Naim, emeritus professor in the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago was honored for his new book entitled A Wilderness of Possibilities: Urdu Studies in Transnational Perspective in honor of Choudhri Naim. The book is edited by AIIS board member Kathryn Hansen and David Lelyveld and published by Oxford University Press.