Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-995ml Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-19T09:17:34.243Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Naxalbari at its Golden Jubilee: Fifty recent books on the Maoist movement in India*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 July 2017

ALPA SHAH
Affiliation:
Department of Anthropology, London School of Economics and Political Science, United Kingdom Email: a.m.shah@lse.ac.uk
DHRUV JAIN
Affiliation:
York Centre for Asian Research, York University, Canada Email: dhruv@yorku.ca

Extract

There are not many other issues in South Asia that have attracted as much scholarly attention in the last decade as India's Naxalite or Maoist movement. At least 50 scholarly or political books, several novels, and numerous essays have been published since 2007. What we hope to do in this article is to ask why this movement has generated such attention at this moment in time, to analyse the commentaries that have emerged and the questions that have been asked, and also to identify some of the shortfalls in the existing literature and propose some lines of research to be pursued by future scholars.

Type
Review Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

Acknowledgements: We are grateful to Modern Asian Studies for seeing this as an important field of literature for analysis and requesting us to undertake it. We apologize, however, that it has taken more than three years to come to fruition. We hope that in some small way we have compensated for this long wait by the fact that the initial hope of reviewing a handful of books has turned into an article on 50 books. We thank Norbert Peabody for his generosity and his patience, and the reviewers of Modern Asian Studies for their helpful comments. The ESRC and ERC have generously funded Shah's research, enabling her to co-author this piece.

References

Azad (2010). Maoists in India: writings and interviews. Hyderabad: Friends of Azad.Google Scholar
Ajitha (2008). Kerala's Naxalbari: Ajitha, memoirs of a young revolutionary (Ramachandran, S., trans.). New Delhi: Srishti.Google Scholar
Babu, Y. N. (2008). From Varna to Jati: political economy of caste in Indian social formation. New Delhi: Daanish Books.Google Scholar
Balagopal, K. (2011). Ear to the Ground: selected writings on class and caste. New Delhi: Navayana Publishers.Google Scholar
Banerjee, S. (1980). In the Wake of Naxalbari: a history of the Naxalite movement in India. Calcutta: Subarnrekha.Google Scholar
Bappaditya, P. (2014). The First Naxal: an authorised biography of Kanu Sanyal. New Delhi: Sage.Google Scholar
Basu, P. (ed.) (2011). Red on Silver: Naxalites in cinema. Kolkata: Setu Prakashani.Google Scholar
Bhattacharyya, A. (2016). Storming the Gates of Heaven: the Maoist movement in India. A critical study 1972–2014. Kolkata: Setu Prakashani.Google Scholar
Bhushan, R. (2016). Maoism in India and Nepal. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Chakrabarty, B. and Kujur, R. K. (2010). Maoism in India: reincarnation of ultra-left wing extremism in the twenty-first century. Abingdon: Routledge.Google Scholar
Chakravarti, S. (2007). Red Sun: travels in Naxalite country. New Delhi: Penguin.Google Scholar
Chandhoke, N. (2015). Democracy and Revolutionary Politics. London, Oxford: Bloomsbury Academic.Google Scholar
Chenoy, A. M. and Chenoy, K. A. M. (2010). Maoist and Other Armed Conflicts. New Delhi: Penguin.Google Scholar
Choudhary, S. (2012). Let's Call Him Vasu. New Delhi: Penguin.Google Scholar
Das, A. (2015). Footprints of Foot Soldiers: experiences and recollections of the Naxalite movement in Eastern India 1960’s and 1970’s. Kolkata: Setu Prakashani.Google Scholar
D'Mello, B. (ed.) (2010). What is Maoism and Other Essays. Kolkata: Cornerstone Publications.Google Scholar
Ferreira, A. (2014). Colours of the Cage: a prison memoir. Delhi: Aleph Book Company.Google Scholar
Gates, S. and Roy, K. (2014). Unconventional Warfare in South Asia: shadow warriors and counterinsurgency. London and New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Gayer, L. and Jaffrelot, C. (eds) (2009). Armed Militias of South Asia: fundamentalists, Maoists and separatists. London: Hurst and Company.Google Scholar
Ghandy, A. (2011). Scripting the Change: selected writings of Anuradha Ghandy. Delhi: Daanish Books.Google Scholar
Ghosh, A. (2014). ‘Neel Mukherjee's The Lives of Others: a review’. Retrieved from http://amitavghosh.com/blog/?p=6400, [accessed 31 March 2017]Google Scholar
Ghosh, S. K. (2009). Naxalbari, Before and After: reminiscences and appraisal. Kolkata: New Age Publishers.Google Scholar
Goswami, N. (2015). Indian National Security and Counter-Insurgency: the use of force vs. non-violent response. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Government of India. (2008). Development Challenges in Extremist Affect Areas. Report of an Expert Group to the Planning Commission. New Delhi: Government of India.Google Scholar
Gudavarthy, A. (2014). Maoism, Democracy and Globalisation: cross-currents in Indian politics. New Delhi: Sage Publications India.Google Scholar
Jeffrey, R., Sen, R. and Singh, P. (eds) (2012). More than Maoism: politics, policies and insurgencies in South Asia. New Delhi: Manohar.Google Scholar
Joshi, P. C. (2013). Naxalism at a glance. Delhi: Kalpaz Publications.Google Scholar
Joshi, P. C. (2014). Naxalism: how to cope with. Delhi: Kalpaz Publications.Google Scholar
Hussain, Wasbir and Deka, H.K. (2011). Study of Social, Economic and Political Dynamics in Extremist Affected Areas. Available at: www.bprd.nic.in/WriteReadData/userfiles/file/201608020304142891765Report.pdf, [accessed 11 March 2017]Google Scholar
Kaldor, M. (1999). New and Old Wars: organized violence in a global era. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Kunnath, G. J. (2012). Rebels from the Mud Houses: Dalits and the making of the Maoist revolution in Bihar. Delhi: Social Science Press.Google Scholar
Lahiri, J. (2013). The Lowland. London: Bloomsbury.Google Scholar
People's Committee Against Police Atrocities (2013). Letters from Lalgarh: the complete collection of letters from the Peoples' Committee Against Police Atrocities. Kolkata: Setu Prakashani.Google Scholar
Mehrotra, S. (ed.) (2014). Countering Naxalism with Development: challenges of social justice and state security. New Delhi: Sage.Google Scholar
Mitra, D.M. (2010). Executive Summary of ‘Genesis and Spread of Maoist Violence and Appropriate State Strategy to Handle It’. Available at: www.bprd.nic.in/WriteReadData/userfiles/file/201608020504121803343ExecutiveSummary.pdf, [accessed 11 March 2017]Google Scholar
Mohanty, M. (2015). Red and Green: five decades of the Indian Maoist movement. Kolkata: Setu Prakashani.Google Scholar
Mukherjee, N. (2014). The Lives of Others. London: Chatto and Windus.Google Scholar
Mukherji, N. (2012). The Maoists in India: tribals under siege. London: Pluto Press.Google Scholar
Myrdal, J. (1986). India Waits. Chicago: Lake View Press.Google Scholar
Myrdal, J. (2012). Red Star Over India: as the wretched of the earth are rising. Impressions, reflections and preliminary inferences. Kolkata: Setu Prakashani.Google Scholar
Navlakha, G. (2012). Days and Nights in the Heartland of Rebellion. New Delhi: Penguin.Google Scholar
Navlakha, G. (2014). War and Politics. Kolkata: Setu Prakashani.Google Scholar
Pandita, R. (2011). Hello Bastar: the untold story of India's Maoist movement. Manipal: Tranquebar Press.Google Scholar
Paul, S. (ed.) (2013). The Maoist Movement in India: perspectives and counterperspectives. New Delhi: Routledge.Google Scholar
Roy, B. (2014). War and Peace in Junglemahal: people, state and Maoists. Kolkata: Setu Prakashani.Google Scholar
Rao, V. (2010). Captive Imagination: letters from prison. New Delhi: Penguin.Google Scholar
Roy, A. (2011). Broken Republic. New Delhi: Hamish Hamilton.Google Scholar
Roy, B. (2014). War and Peace in Junglemahal: people, state and Maoists. Kolkata: Setu Prakashani.Google Scholar
Roy, M. S. (2011). Gender and Radical Politics in India: magic moments of Naxalbari (1967–1975). Abingdon: Routledge.Google Scholar
Roy, S. (2012). Remembering Revolution: gender, violence, and subjectivity in India's Naxalbari movement. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Satnam (2010). Jangalnama: travels in a Maoist guerrilla zone (V. Bharti, trans.). New Delhi: Penguin.Google Scholar
Sen, I. (2011). Inside Chhattisgarh: a political memoir. New Delhi: Penguin.Google Scholar
Shah, A. (2010a). In the Shadows of the State: indigenous politics, environmentalism and insurgency in Jharkhand, India. Durham, North Carolina, and London: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Shah, A. (2010b) ‘Alcoholics Anonymous: the Maoist movement in Jharkhand, India’, Modern Asian Studies, 45 (5), pp. 10951117.Google Scholar
Shah, A. (2012). ‘Eco-incarceration: walking with the comrades’, Economic and Political Weekly, 47 (21), pp. 3234.Google Scholar
Shah, A. (2013a). ‘The intimacy of insurgency: beyond coercion, greed or grievance in Maoist India’, Economy and Society, 42 (3), pp. 480506.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shah, A. (2013b). ‘The tensions over liberal citizenship in a Marxist revolutionary situation: the Maoists in India’, Critique of Anthropology, 33 (1), pp. 91109.Google Scholar
Shah, A. and Pettigrew, J. (eds) (2012). Windows into a Revolution: ethnographies of Maoism in India and Nepal. Delhi: Social Science Press.Google Scholar
Shah, A., Lerche, J. and Harriss-White, B. (2013). ‘Agrarian questions and Left politics in India’, Journal of Agrarian Change, 13 (3).Google Scholar
Sinha, C. (2014). Kindling of an Insurrection: notes from Junglemahals. Delhi: Routledge.Google Scholar
Subramanian, K. S. (2010). ‘State Response to Maoist Violence in India: a critical assessment’, Economic and Political Weekly, August 7, pp. 23–26.Google Scholar
Sundar, N. (2016) The Burning Forest: India's war in Bastar. New Delhi: Juggernaut.Google Scholar
Tyler, M. (1977). My Years in an Indian Prison. Letchworth, Hertfordshire: Garden City Press.Google Scholar
Venugopal, N. (2013). Understanding Maoists: notes of a participant observer from Andhra Pradesh. Kolkata, Delhi: Setu Prakashani.Google Scholar
Zedong, M. (1927). Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan. Retrieved from https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-1/mswv1_2.htm, [accessed 31 March 2017]Google Scholar