Nightmarch: Among India’s Revolutionary Guerrillas | SOAS University of London
Channel: SOAS University of London
Date: 2019-01-21

This symposium titled "Nightmarch: Among India’s Revolutionary Guerrillas" was given by Dr Alpa Shah (LSE, University of London), Kheya Bag (New Left Review) at the Department of Development Studies, SOAS University of London on 30 October 2018. Find out more at http://bit.ly/2U1d7RO

Alpa Shah and Kheya Bag discuss some of the insights in Shah's new book, Nightmarch: Among India's Revolutionary Guerillas. Nightmarch refers to a seven-night trek when Shah found herself dressed as a man, walking across 250 km of dense, hilly forest in eastern India with a Naxalite guerrilla platoon. Framed by the media as a deadly terrorist group, the Naxalite 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. Based on years of living as an anthropologist with tribal communities, Shah explores why some of India’s poor have taken up arms to fight for a fairer society – and asks whether they may be undermining their own aims.

Alpa Shah is Associate Professor (Reader) in Anthropology at the London School of Economics. She is the author of In the Shadows of the State and a coauthor of Ground Down by Growth. She presented the radio documentary ‘India’s Red Belt’ for BBC Radio 4’s Crossing Continents.

Kheya Bag is an editor at New Left Review and Associate Publisher of Tribune Magazine.