Seminar Questions:

1. How do the politics, social base and ideological orientation of the ‘extreme’ left in India diverge from those of the ‘mainstream’ left?
2. Why has Maoist politics, despite its revolutionary claims, been so restricted to the forest regions and populations of central India?

Seminar Readings:

1. Arundhati Roy, “Walking With The Comrades”, Outlook magazine, March 2010.
2. Jairus Banaji, “The Ironies of Indian Maoism”, International Socialism: A Quarterly Journal of Socialist Theory (128), 2010.
3. Nicolas Jaoul, “Manju Devi’s Martyrdom: Marxist-Leninist Politics And the Rural Poor in Bihar”, Contributions to Indian Sociology, 45:3 (2011), pp.343-371

Background Readings:

1. Sumanta Banerjee, India’s Simmering Revolution (London, 1972)
2. Arun Sinha, Against the Few: Struggles of India’s Rural Poor (London, 1991), pp.122-173
3. Chitralekha, “Committed, Opportunists, and Drifters: Revisiting the Naxalite Narrative in Jharkhand and Bihar”, Contributions to Indian Sociology, 44:3 (2010), pp.299-329
4. Manoranjan Mohanty, Revolutionary Violence: A Study of the Maoist Movement In India (Delhi, 1977)
5. Sudeep Chakravarti, Red Sun: Travels in Naxalite Country (Delhi, 2008)
6. K. Balagopal, Ear to the Ground: Writings on Caste And Class (Delhi, 2012)
7. Pankaj Mishra, Butter Chicken in Ludhiana: Travels in Small-Town India (Delhi, 1995)
8. Siddhartha Deb, The Beautiful and the Damned: A Portrait of the New India (2011)