BOOKS
THE INCARCERATIONS
A Financial Times ‘Book To Read’ in 2024.
The Incarcerations pulls back the curtain on Indian democracy through the story of the arrests and ongoing trial of 16 human rights defenders - professors, lawyers, journalists, poets. An essential, urgent, and chilling, investigation into Indian fascism, cyber warfare and tech surveillance versus minority activism and resistance, with ramifications for democracy globally.
NIGHTMARCH
Finalist for the 2018 Orwell Prize for Political Writing 2018 and the New India Book Foundation Prize. Winner of the 2020 Association for Political and Legal Anthropology Book Prize.
How do people from very different backgrounds come together to take up arms to change the world for a more egalitarian future and why do they fall apart? Alpa Shah lives amidst forested tribal villages in the guerrilla strongholds of a Mao- Marx- and Lenin-inspired armed revolutionary struggle to tell the story of this more than 50-year-old Naxalite insurgency through five key characters and a seven night journey with a guerrilla platoon marching 250 kilometres from one Indian state to the next.
GROUND DOWN BY GROWTH
A Hindu top ten non-fiction Book of 2018
Ground Down by Growth shows how capitalism in India has generated huge inequalities and thrived on social discrimination based on caste and tribe. Through deep rooted field research across five different sites in the country, Ground Down By Growth shows the struggle for land and labour rights for India’s indigenous and untouchable populations who make up one in twenty-five people in the world and remain at the bottom of India’s economic and social hierarchy despite astonishing economic growth in the country.
IN THE SHADOWS OF THE STATE
Living deep in the forests of the Eastern Indian state of Jharkhand, amidst India’s indigenous or tribal populations, Alpa Shah warns against an identity based politics that doesn’t take into account material concerns of livelihoods. In the Shadows of the State considers indigenous people’s relationship with state, development programmes and corruption, conservation and environmental initiatives, seasonal migration and insurgency.