Nightmarch: Among India's Revolutionary Guerrillas

In Nightmarch, Alpa Shah explores the Naxalite movement in India, a decades-long battle with the Indian state. She seeks to understand why some of India's poor have shunned democracy and taken up arms to fight for a fairer society, questioning whether they may be undermining their own aims.

Format: Hardback
Length: 256 pages
Publication date: 23 August 2018
Publisher: C Hurst & Co Publishers Ltd

In a protracted and under-reported insurgency, the Naxalites have been engaged in a decades-long conflict with the Indian state. Often portrayed in the media as a terrorist organization, the movement comprises Marxist ideologues and lower-caste and tribal combatants who aim to overthrow a system that has subjected them to abuse. In 2010, anthropologist Alpa Shah embarked on a seven-night trek alongside some of these communist guerrillas, traversing 250 kilometers through the dense, hilly forests of eastern India. Speaking with leaders and immersing herself in the lives of villagers in guerrilla strongholds for years, Shah endeavors to comprehend the factors that have led some of India's impoverished individuals to reject the world's largest democracy and resort to armed resistance in pursuit of a more equitable society. Nightmarch offers a thought-provoking exploration of dispossession and conflict at the core of contemporary India.

Shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Writing in 2019, the New India Foundation Book Prize in 2019, and the 2020 Association for Political and Legal Anthropology Book Prize, Nightmarch is a 2018 New Statesman Book of the Year.

Weight: 568g
Dimension: 146 x 222 x 33 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781849049900