Everyday Life of Political Struggles
Series editor Alpa Shah

WINDOWS INTO A REVOLUTION

Ethnographies of Maoism in India and Nepal

Edited by Alpa Shah and Judith Pettigrew

352 pp 215x140 mm  Hardback 11 illustrations

Published price Rs 695

ISBN  978-81-87358-49-7

SOCIOLOGY, POLITICS, HISTORY

Pub date October 2011

Read the book review in The Hindu at
http://www.thehindu.com/arts/books/article3371529.ece

‘Lines of fear and conflict cross what is already a changing and disrupted social life. By revealing how people live, every day, with violence and fear of both sides in a civil war, the authors show how they suffer and also how they create their own new relations, sharing suspicions, fears and pleasures. This is a new kind of political writing. Out of intensive local fieldwork in difficult and often dangerous circumstances, this writing has an authority that none of the others, including those of the state and of its enemies, do because it is so much better informed and never loses its loyalty to the local people.’

Professor Stephan Feuchtwang

London School of Economics and Political Science

‘What is it like to live through a revolution? This important collection brings together superb, hard-won anthropological insights from field sites all the way from Pashupati to Tirupati (from Nepal to Andhra Pradesh). It is essential reading for anyone who wants to know about Maoism in South Asia.’

Professor David N. Gellner

University of Oxford

‘In a context in which there is no end of misinformation and disinformation about the Maoist movements of South Asia, the articles in this collection - all based on rich ethnography - provide an invaluable resource, illuminating the complexities of the many different local experiences of Maoism in both India and Nepal. Windows into a Revolution is a vitally important contribution both to South Asian studies and to the comparative anthropological study of revolutionary politics.’

Professor John Harriss

Simon Fraser University, Vancouver

Everyday Life of Political Struggles reflects the subaltern experiences of political struggles, which are sometimes explosive but at other times silent, invisible and unnoticed by many commentators. The books in this series explore the tensions and constraints of class, race, gender, caste and religion within these struggles. They draw on fine-grained research, detailed description and rigorous analysis to bring clarity to the confusion of information emerging from various sources. The series draws on the works of historians, political scientists, anthropologists, sociologists, geographers, activists and journalists.

Windows into a Revolution, edited by Alpa Shah and Judith Pettigrew, the first book in the series offers glimpses into the spread of Maoism in India and Nepal by tracing some of its effects on the lives of ordinary people living amidst the revolutions. Weaving through the nostalgic reflections of former Bengali Naxalites; the resurgence of ancestral conflicts in the spread of the Maoists in the remote hills of western Nepal; the disillusionments of dalits of central Bihar in the policies of the cadres; to the complexities of the interrelationship between non-aligned civilians and insurgents in central Nepal, the book offers a series of windows into different stages of mobilization and transformation into what are, were or may become, revolutionary strongholds.

Contents

1. Windows in to a Revolution: Ethnographies of Maoism in India and Nepal - Alpa Shah and Judith Pettigrew

2. In Search of Certainty in Revolutionary India - Alpa Shah

3. The Formation of Political Consciousness in Rural Nepal - Sara Shneiderman

4. Smouldering Dalit Fires in Bihar - George Kunnath

5. Reflections of a One-time Maoist Activist - Sumanta Banerjee

6. Radical Masculinity: Morality, Sociality and Relationships through Recollections of Naxalite Activists - Henrike Donner

7. Women’s Empowerment and Rural Revolution: Rethinking “Failed Development” - Lauren G. Leve

8. From Ancestral Conflicts to Local Empowerment: Two Narratives from a Nep alese Community - Anne de Sales

9. Terror in a Maoist Model Village in Mid-western Nepal - Marie Lecomte -Tilouine

10. Fear and Everyday Life in Rural Nepal - Judith Pettigrew and Kamal Adhikari

11. Anti-‘anti-witchcraft’ and the Maoist Insurgency in Rural Maharashtra  - Amit Desai

12. The Purification Hunt: The Salwa Judum Counterinsurgency in Chhattisgarh -  Jason Miklian

13. The Social Fabric of the Jelbang Killings - Deepak Thapa, Kiyoko Ogura and Judith Pettigrew