Windows Into a Revolution: Ethnographies of Maoism in India and Nepal
Alpa Shah and Judith Pettigrew
Price
695
ISBN
9788187358497
Language
English
Pages
352
Format
Hardback
Dimensions
140 x 216 mm
Year of Publishing
2011
Territorial Rights
Restricted
Imprint
Social Science Press

Out Of Stock

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.

Alpa Shah is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her research focuses on social inequality and efforts to address it and she has commented on indigeneity, environmentalism, migration, development, corruption, democracy, citizenship and the state. She is co-editor (with Tobias Kelly) of A Double Edged Sword: Protection and State Violence(2006) and author of In the Shadows of the State: Indigenous Politics, Environmentalism and Insurgency, Jharkhand (2010).

Judith Pettigrew is Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Education and Health Sciences at the University of Limerick, Ireland. She has conducted long-term anthropological research in Nepal since 1990 and has published widely on Nepal’s Maoist movement. Her research on the everyday impacts of violence on rural people examines the interrelationships between space, emotional life, violence and psychosocial wellbeing. Her forthcoming monograph is titled, Ethnography and Everyday Life in Nepal's Civil War.

  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 with 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
‘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