Alpa Shah’s book, Nightmarch: Among India’s Revolutionary Guerrillas (published in 2019 by Chicago University Press), is situated firmly in the field of Social Anthropology and goes beyond the existing ‘Political-Economic’ studies of the Maoist Naxalite movement in order to uncover the human relationships, ties of solidarity, and the myriad of social structures that went into the making of this most intractable of revolutionary movements anywhere in the world. In doing this, the book doesn’t seek to reject the political-economic understandings of the movement but merely makes a practical (and intellectual) suggestion that these approaches should be complemented by a comprehensive understanding of the actual ‘people’ involved in the movement and their ways, often very personal, of relating to it. In this, the book seems to be asking a fundamental question: what explains the resilience of these revolutionary guerrillas in the face of decades of brutal state repression and raises questions about the ideas of ‘community’ and ‘belonging’ and how India’s Adivasi communities traverse these social relationships?

Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted amongst the Adivasi communities living in and around the forested hills of Jharkhand, particularly in a place called ‘Lalgaon’ (the Red Capital of the Maoist Naxalites), the book seeks to study the Maoist Naxalite movement not in its ‘generalities’ but strives to paint a picture which takes into account the nuances, complexities and ironies of the interminable encounter taking place not only between the movement and the state but also between the movement and the Adivasi communities surrounding it. In this regard, the book also provides a commentary on the life of Indian Democracy and how it has been shunned by the marginalized of the new ‘nation-state’. That the ‘official’ leadership of the movement and the ‘foot soldiers’ respond to the ideas of ‘revolutionary’ struggle and violence in radically different and sometimes even contradictory ways is one of the central arguments of the book highlighting the antinomy between the domains of ‘elite/official’ and ‘mass/popular’ politics.

The book is divided into seven parts with each part spanning three chapters. Part one provides a historical background of the Maoist Naxalite movement and seeks to map a historical genealogy of the Adivasi communities’ relationship with the ‘state’ from the late medieval to the modern periods. It also discusses how the Adivasi communities have devised what the author calls egalitarian “countercultures” to keep away an encroaching ‘capitalist modernity’. Part two discusses how these egalitarian Adivasi communities provided a fertile ground for the Maoist Naxalite movement to nurture their dream of a future revolutionary egalitarian society and the development of parallel state structures which the Adivasis refer to as the ‘Jungle Sarkaar’ or ‘The Party’ in their ‘vernacularized’ idiom. Here the author also directs attention towards the official functioning of these parallel state structures and the co-optation by the state of other mercenary groups often formed around caste and class loyalties to challenge the ‘monopoly of violence’ that this parallel state of ‘Jungle Sarkaar’ or ‘The Party’ supposedly enjoys in these ‘peripheries’ of the ‘nation’.

In part three, the author begins with a discussion of her journey with a Maoist Naxalite platoon undertaking a journey to attend the Maoist state conference, a journey which covers the entirety of the rest of the book. Here, the author asks why English-educated, urban, upper or middle-class and caste leaders renounce everything and give their lives to a revolutionary cause. While these leaders insist on the violence and injustice perpetuated by the Indian state and the need to overthrow it, the author directs attention to the continuities between this tradition of revolutionary struggle and violence and the historical tradition of renunciation and sacrifice for liberation in India. Part four probes into the meaning of the ideas of ‘belonging’ and ‘community’ and how the Adivasi youth who joined the movement interpreted these ideas in their own ‘autonomous’ and largely ‘personal’ ways. The author argues how most of these Adivasi youths joined the movement as an act of ‘rebellion’ in order to join a community they perceived as ‘accepting’ of them and free of the customary ways of their communities. This part of the book also discusses the reasons as to why and how the Maoist Naxalite movement was able to take root in these historically isolated Adivasi communities. The crucial fact is that the movement was able to nurture bonds of ‘emotional intimacy’ with the Adivasi communities because of the movement’s commitment to the ideal of egalitarianism – a future classless and casteless society – treating these Adivasis as ‘equal’ human beings. This ‘emotional intimacy’ also allowed the movement to penetrate the kinship structures of these Adivasi communities as Adivasi youth married into the movement and saw the movement as merely a “home away from home” that they could easily leave and come back to when the need arose.

Part five discusses the ‘Political Economy’ of the region by analysing the Maoist Naxalite movement’s disruption of the historically established “state-contractor” nexus and the movement’s entry into the “informal economy of black market resources”. However, while the movement used this ‘informal’ economy for financing itself it also rewrote the ‘rules of the game’ and ‘democratised’ the functioning of this economy by including local communities and its functionaries to ensure that the fruits of development didn’t elude these communities and for the continuity of their redistributive enterprises. However, entering this informal economy meant entering the socio-cultural networks of the ‘elites’ and without a strong counterculture in the movement, it was inevitable for the movement’s ‘new’ contractors to internalise the class and caste values of these elites and reproduce these inequalities within their communities.

Part six presents a contestation of the egalitarian claims of the movement from the vantage point of ‘gender’ by arguing that the movement has failed to question its own middle-class and upper-caste patriarchal assumptions about the notions of ‘gender’ and ‘womanhood’. Through brilliant ethnographic work, the author shows how in seeing ‘womanhood’ as a universal category and ignoring the pre-existing egalitarian gender relations in these Adivasi communities, the movement seeks to destroy the very ideals of egalitarianism that it claims to uphold. Part Seven serves as an epilogue to the journey that the author undertook with the revolutionary guerrillas throughout seven nights (hence explicating the title Nightmarch) detailing her personal experiences of living in this ‘underbelly’ of the nation and bringing out the contradictions of a movement involving a myriad of social groups for whom the movement evokes contrasting and sometimes even contradictory utopias.

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Md Azmatullah Sadiq is doing a Master’s in Political Science at the University of Delhi.