The Naxalbari movement marks a significant moment in the postcolonial history of India. Beginning as an armed peasant uprising in 1967 under the leadership of radical communists, the movement was inspired by the Marxist-Leninist theory of revolution and involved a significant section of the contemporary youth from diverse social strata with a vision of people’s revolution. It inspired similar radical movements in other South Asian countries such as Nepal. Arguing that the history and memory of the Naxalbari movement is fraught with varied gendered experiences of political motivation, revolutionary activism, and violence, this book analyses the participation of women in the movement and their experiences. Based on extensive ethnographic and archival research, the author argues that women’s emancipation was an integral part of their vision of revolution, and many of them identified the days of their activism as magic moments, as a period of enchanted sense of emancipation. The book places the movement into the postcolonial history of South Asia. It makes a significant contribution to the understanding of radical communist politics in South Asia, particularly in relation to issues concerning the role of women in radical politics.

Remembering Revolution constitutes one of the first major studies of women's role and involvement in the late 1960s' radical Left Naxalbari movement of West Bengal, the birthplace of Indian Maoism. relation to women's involvement in the late 1960s' radical Naxalbari movement of West Bengal. Drawing from historiographic, popular, and personal memoirs, it provides an innovative conceptual analysis of the Naxalbari movement principally in terms of gender, violence, and subjectivity.

It seldom happens that the story of an individual becomes so intertwined with the cause she or he stands for that it becomes impossible to separate the one from the other. Kanu Sanyal’s is one such rare story: to read it is to relive the history of the Naxalite Movement, which the Indian establishments call the country’s biggest internal security threat. This book narrates the making of Kanu Sanyal right from his childhood to the days of the Naxalbari uprising and beyond. It delves deep into Sanyal’s evolution as a Communist rebel and throws light on the various stages of the Naxalite Movement with relevant background information. What is significant about this book is that this is the only authorised biography of Kanu Sanyal in any language—he personally read and cleared all its chapters but the last one, which deals with his aberrant demise.

This is the first book to examine and compare how rebels govern civilians during civil wars in Latin America, Africa, Asia, and Europe. Drawing from a variety of disciplinary traditions, including political science, sociology, and anthropology, the book provides in-depth case studies of specific conflicts as well as comparative studies of multiple conflicts. Among other themes, the book examines why and how some rebels establish both structures and practices of rule, the role of ideology, cultural, and material factors affecting rebel governance strategies, the impact of governance on the rebel/civilian relationship, civilian responses to rebel rule, the comparison between modes of state and non-state governance to rebel attempts to establish political order, the political economy of rebel governance, and the decline and demise of rebel governance attempts.

On 14 March 2012, two Italian nationals, Paolo Bosusco and Claudio Colangelo, were taken hostage from the tribal-dominated Kandhamal area of Odisha, in eastern India. The kidnappers belonged to the extreme left- wing radical group known as the CPI (Maoists). They were led by Sabyasachi Panda who had been involved in several militant activities since 1999. What followed was a dramatic month-long crisis in which a crew of television journalists engaged with the Maoist leader and facilitated the release of Claudio. An Unfinished Revolution: A Hostage Crisis, Adivasi Resistance and the Naxal Movement is a racy, first-hand account that tells the tale of the hostages, from abduction to release. It also chronicles the history of tribal resistance which was appropriated by the Maoists — a movement that has been one of India’s major internal security challenges since the late 1960s.

History of the Naxalite movement in India.

Winner of the 2020 Association for Political and Legal Anthropology Book Prize Shortlisted for the Orwell Prize Shortlisted for the New India Foundation Book Prize Anthropologist Alpa Shah found herself in an active platoon of Naxalites—one of the longest-running guerrilla insurgencies in the world. The only woman, and the only person without a weapon, she walked alongside the militants for seven nights across 150 miles of dense, hilly forests in eastern India. Nightmarch is the riveting story of Shah's journey, grounded in her years of living with India’s tribal people, an eye-opening exploration of the movement’s history and future and a powerful contemplation of how disadvantaged people fight back against unjust systems in today’s world. The Naxalites have fought for a communist society for the past fifty years, caught in a conflict that has so far claimed at least forty thousand lives. Yet surprisingly little is known about these fighters in the West. Framed by the Indian state as a deadly terrorist group, the movement is actually made up of Marxist ideologues and lower-caste and tribal combatants, all of whom seek to overthrow a system that has abused them for decades. In Nightmarch, Shah shares some of their gritty untold stories: here we meet a high-caste leader who spent almost thirty years underground, a young Adivasi foot soldier, and an Adivasi youth who defected. Speaking with them and living for years with villagers in guerrilla strongholds, Shah has sought to understand why some of India’s poor have shunned the world’s largest democracy and taken up arms to fight for a fairer society—and asks whether they might be undermining their own aims. By shining a light on this largely ignored corner of the world, Shah raises important questions about the uncaring advance of capitalism and offers a compelling reflection on dispossession and conflict at the heart of contemporary India.