Nightmarch

A Journey into India's Naxal Heartlands

By: Alpa Shah

Narrated by: Nimisha Sirohi

In 2010, just as the Indian government was stepping up its counterinsurgency operations in the country's Naxal-affected areas, Alpa Shah set out on a seven-night march with a guerrilla platoon across 250 kilometres of the same territory. An anthropology professor, she wanted to understand why, against the backdrop of a shiny new India, the country's poor had shunned the world's largest democracy and united with revolutionary ideologues.

Dressed as a man in an olive-green guerrilla uniform, Alpa was the only woman and the only person not carrying a gun in the platoon. Her gritty journey reveals how and why people from very different backgrounds come together to take up arms to change the world but also what makes them fall apart.

Unfolding like a thriller and brought to life by Alpa's years of research and immersion into the daily lives of the tribal communities in a Naxal stronghold, Nightmarch is a reflection on economic growth, rising inequality, dispossession and conflict at the heart of contemporary India.

©2019 Alpa Shah (P)2020 Audible, Inc.

Good but overly academic

I really appreciate this book. I learned a lot about the Naxalite movement and what they are fighting for. The narrator was good but mispronounced many well known figures such as pronouncing “Guevara” as “Guerra”. The author, like many academics, tends to over intellectuallize things and doesn’t always take the participants of her study at face value. She also doesn’t truly understand what it means to be a revolutionary and why so many are attracted to creating positive change to what many see as terroristic means. Unless you are in the struggle yourself, people cannot see that the revolutionary is not violent in a vacuum. They are counter violent against the inherent violence and exploitation of Capitalism and the State. The author’s liberal idealism that all these people need is the warm embrace of a loving State blinds her to the reality that the Naxalites are only defending themselves against a structure that oppresses them.

Overall this is a good book. When the author sticks to documenting her experiences with the Maoist rebels and refrains from her conjectures and overly intellectual analysis, the book shines. It fails when she doesn’t take people at their word and gives ideas that she herself admits those she talked to wouldn’t agree with.