Table Of ContentWINDOWS INTO A REVOLUTION
WINDOWS INTO A
REVOLUTION
ETHNOGRAPHIES OF MAOISM
IN INDIA AND NEPAL
Edited by
Alpa Shah
and
Judith Pettigrew
Firstpublished2018
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CONTENTS
Acknowledgements vii
Biographical notes ix
1. Windows into a Revolution: Ethnographies of
Maoism in India and Nepal
ALPA SHAH AND JUDITH PETTIGREW 1
2.In Search of Certainty in Revolutionary India
ALPA SHAH 39
3.The Formation of Political Consciousness in Rural Nepal
SARA SHNEIDERMAN 60
4. Smouldering Dalit Fires in Bihar
GEORGE J. KUNNATH 89
5. Reflections of a One-time Maoist Activist
SUMANTA BANERJEE 113
6. Radical Masculinity: Morality, Sociality and Relationships
through Recollections of Naxalite Activists
HENRIKE DONNER 136
vi Contents
7.Women’s Empowerment and Rural Revolution: Rethinking
“Failed Development”
LAUREN G. LEVE 160
8. From Ancestral Conflicts to Local Empowerment:
Two Narratives from a Nepalese Community
ANNE DE SALES 185
9.Terror in a Maoist Model Village in Mid-western Nepal
MARIE LECOMTE-TILOUINE 207
10. Fear and Everyday Life in Rural Nepal
JUDITH PETTIGREW AND KAMAL ADHIKARI 233
11. Anti-“anti-witchcraft” and the Maoist Insurgency
in Rural Maharashtra
AMIT DESAI 259
12.The Purification Hunt: The Salwa Judum
Counterinsurgency in Chhattisgarh
JASON MIKLIAN 282
13.The Social Fabric of the Jelbang Killings
DEEPAK THAPA, KIYOKO OGURA AND JUDITH PETTIGREW 309
Index 334
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book has its genesis in a conference panel on ‘The Everyday
Life of Revolutionary Movements’ organized by us at the
European Association of Social Anthropologists meeting in Bristol
in 2006. Here, we established the need for a more focussed comparative
exploration between the everyday experiences of the Indian Maoists and
the Nepal Maoists. The British Academy kindly funded a subsequent
workshop to discuss ‘Everyday Life with Maoism in India and Nepal:
Anthropological Comparisons’.
We would like to thank all those who presented papers at this workshop
held in Lancashire in 2007 and Stephan Feuchtwang, David Gellner
and John Hutnyk for acting as discussants and subsequently providing
very helpful comments. Most of the papers for that workshop were revised
for this book and a few others were additionally commissioned. We would
like to thank all the contributors for the hard work they have put into
their chapters as well as their more general support throughout the
development of our collected works. We would also like to thank Ritisha
Maharjan for her work on the index.
The volume first appeared as a special double guest edition of
Dialectical Anthropology. This book would not have been possible without
viii Acknowledgements
the help of the editors of Dialectical Anthropology, Kirk Dombrowski
and Anthony Marcus, at City University New York. They went out of
their way to free up the copyrights for the original typescript from
Springer so that the articles could be reworked for a book to be published
in India to make the research more easily accessible to a South Asian
audience. The editorial and production work here is entirely independent
from what appeared in Dialectical Anthropology and anonymous reviewers
at Social Science Press gave helpful comments. We especially thank Esha
Béteille for all the work that Social Science Press in Delhi has put into
this book.
November 2010 ALPA SHAH and
JUDITH PETTIGREW
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
EDITORS
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.
