In 2010, at the height of the Congress government’s counterinsurgency operation against India’s Maoists, Alpa Shah set off on a seven-night trek with a Naxalite guerrilla platoon, disguised as one of the men. Under cover of darkness, they traversed 250 kilometres from the uplands of Bihar to the forests of Jharkhand, picking their way through rocky gorges, fording rivers, crossing enemy zones under the starlit sky. Building on years of ethnographic fieldwork in Jharkhand’s tribal villages, Shah’s Nightmarch combines an account of that perilous journey with reflections on the puzzle of Indian Maoism: how has the Naxalite struggle managed to persist and renew itself, despite being vastly outnumbered by the security forces mobilized against it? And how, relatedly, did the Naxalites manage to implant themselves among the Adivasi of the forests, indigenous people famously wary of outsiders? As Shah trains herself to follow in the footsteps of the young Adivasi boy in front of her, the endless march becomes a metaphor for the endurance of one of the world’s longest armed struggles, while Maoism itself seems a symptom of Indian society.
Nightmarch is a work of literary non-fiction, vividly evocative, weaving descriptions of the journey with five character-portraits, to some extent archetypes, that help to illuminate Shah’s thoughtful and nuanced discussion of the uprising’s social and cultural background. Somwari, the independent-minded Adivasi woman whose mud home Shah shares, is a touchstone. Gyanji, a ‘professional revolutionary’ with sad eyes and soft feet, is the moral and intellectual leader of the Maoist group she’s with, whom Shah engages in ceaseless critical debate. Prashant, a young guerrilla to whom she feels particularly drawn, had as a 10-year-old run away from his cow-herding family to join a Maoist cultural troupe, learning to read and write with them. When Shah arrived ill at her initial rendezvous with the guerrillas, Prashant was ready with a salt-and-sugar solution to rehydrate her, one of many instances of the Maoists’ small kindnesses to her. In sharp contrast, the swaggering Vikas is apparently getting rich from the ‘taxes’ the guerrillas extract from companies operating in the area. Gentle Kohli, aged 16, is the son of a teashop owner and joined the Maoists after a tiff with his parents; part of the narrative—and ethical—tension of Nightmarch lies in the uncertainty as to whose path Kohli will follow: that of Vikas, or that of Prashant?
Underlying Shah’s account of the Maoists is her prior study of Adivasi communities. Kenyan-born and British-educated, she was drawn into working on poverty programmes and international aid after a degree from Cambridge. She first arrived in the region in 1999, staying in an Adivasi village of a hundred mud huts, to engage in a Malinowski-style participant-observer study of how aid money was siphoned off by middlemen before it reached the poor—fieldwork for her doctorate at the lse, where she currently teaches. Shah learned two of the local Adivasi languages and, as a diasporic Indian, could more or less embed herself as a local. That research informed her first book, In the Shadows of the State (2010), on the class interests and politics of indigenous rights and development. Naxalites were beginning to make connections in the area, not through poor labourers, but by extorting protection money from local contractors vying for state projects. From this, she concluded that the Maoists were just another racket.
But Shah’s questions grew as the Congress government ramped up the repression—in 2006, Manmohan Singh declared the Maoists a terrorist threat that was deterring international investment in the resource-rich forest zones, and sent 100,000 troops, backed by helicopters and special forces, for their elimination—yet the Naxalite presence amongst Adivasi communities continued to grow. Why were the villagers joining the Maoists? Her damascene Nightmarch originated in a further round of fieldwork in Jharkhand, where she lived for eighteen months between 2008 and 2010 in a region she calls Lalgaon that turned out to be the Maoists’ ‘Red Capital’. A thickly forested plateau composed of Deccan lava, with a population of 40,000 Adivasis dispersed in some thirty villages, Lalgaon was bounded by broad rivers to the north and south, and dissected by many smaller streams and rivulets; during monsoons, it was completely cut off from the plains. Socially as well as geographically, this was ideal guerrilla territory. The Adivasi inhabitants of the forests mainly lived by subsistence farming; some were still hunter-gatherers.
Nightmarch sketches the historical contours of the region. The British Raj had imported Hindu and Muslim traders from the plains, to manage extraction from the forests (teak, tigerskins, ebony), leaving behind a legacy of internal settler-colonial relations. The Adivasis had risen in protest against their exactions; the famous Santhal Rising of 1855 was brutally crushed. Backed by missionaries, they eventually won some legal protection for their lands from the Raj, which was then enshrined in the Fifth and Sixth Schedules of the 1949 Constitution of India. Scheduled land is owned collectively, requiring the agreement of 80 per cent of local people in a sale, and cannot be transferred to non-Adivasis. But the region is rich in mineral resources—coal, iron ore, bauxite, copper, manganese—and these legal protections were frequently circumvented by global mining companies, with state support. Claiming to reduce poverty through development, they have often displaced the original inhabitants and brought in migrant labour from other states.
In Shah’s account, the Adivasis reacted by moving deeper into the forest, preserving their way of life. To some extent she is following in the footsteps of anthropologists like Pierre Clastres, in the Amazon, and James C. Scott, in Southeast Asia’s uplands, in discerning a greater degree of egalitarianism and collectivity among the ‘jungle people’ than can be found on India’s densely populated and caste-divided plains: ‘The closer you got to the forests, the less the influence of interdependency and hierarchy between groups that mark caste society in the plains, and the greater the autonomy people had over their own lives.’ The Adivasi communities, who had fought to keep higher-caste outsiders at bay, could survive off the land. This did not mean autarchy: capitalist development had long been making inroads; Adivasis would trek to the brick kilns as migrant labour, or gather kendu leaves from the forest for hand-rolled cigarettes and sell them to traders. But Shah provides many instances of co-operative, egalitarian relations. Collective labour—collaborating to build a home or harvest a crop—was part of the Adivasi way of life, rewarded with communal celebrations: rice and spinach broth, home-brewed rice beer, drums and dancing. Shah stresses that egalitarianism extended to gender relations: men took part in washing clothes and preparing meals; women drank and danced. On the day of the weekly market, ‘it was the women who usually went to sell their household wares, who enjoyed rice beer at the haat with their male and female friends, and who came home rather merry to husbands who had stayed back and cooked.’ Unlike the marital customs of the plains, women like Shah’s friend Somwari chose their husbands, and took the initiative in changing partners if things did not work out.
How did the Naxalites penetrate these communities? Shah’s study signals different modalities of power, with consent and corruption, of various sorts, generally predominating over coercion. According to Kohli’s father, the teashop owner, it was ‘the little things’: an attitude of respect towards local people, removing their shoes before they entered people’s homes, sitting on the floor as the villagers did, paying attention. There were other factors: the Maoist cultural troupes would go round the villages with songs, drums and speeches, attracting large audiences among the youth. With money gleaned from businessmen and contractors, they ran free health centres, attended by hundreds from the surrounding districts, organized vast football tournaments and undertook sustained cultural projects, such as creating a written script for the indigenous Gondi language. The guerrilla squads targeted local ‘oppressors’, blowing up a Forestry Service lodge and raising remuneration rates for kendu leaves and other forest products. Rather than marauding, their travelling platoons would request just one plate of rice from each household in the village. At the same time, the Maoist ‘mass fronts’ organized political rallies and road blocks, calling for the nrega social-welfare system to be extended, protesting against displacements, burning Congress ministers in effigy. According to the father of one guerrilla, few of the villagers knew of the ministers’ existence before the Maoists’ arrival: ‘The Naxalites educated us on what was due to us from the state; in fact, on what the state was supposed to be.’