True Anon Truth Feed - [PREVIEW] Episode 111: Nightmarch Aired: 2020-10-26 Duration: 04:56 === Night March Phd (04:55) === [00:00:00] Hi, this is Rachel Jake. [00:00:02] No. [00:00:04] Hey, this is Brace Belden here. [00:00:07] No, fuck that. [00:00:08] I can't do this without Liz. [00:00:10] God, okay, I can do it. [00:00:11] I can do it. [00:00:12] I can do it. [00:00:12] Hey, it's Brace here. [00:00:14] I don't know why I said that so energetically. [00:00:17] Young Chopsy is laughing at me right now, and I'm humiliated. [00:00:20] Anyways, me and Liz have been pouring over the Ghelain Maxwell documents, this little deposition that came out with very large magnifying glasses and also little Sherlock Holmes checkerboard caps. [00:00:34] I've been doing it shirtless because I gained a lot of muscle mass lately. [00:00:38] But to tie you weirdos over, I am actually having a little conversation with Dr. Alpa Shah, who is the author of Night March, which is about her seven-night march with the Naxalites, the Communist Party of India, Maoist in 2008. [00:00:57] And sort of the, the book uses that as like a lens to really talk about the Adivasis in India, the Maoist movement, and just the modern India state. [00:01:08] Anyways, it was a fun conversation, and let's roll it, baby. [00:01:24] All right, welcome to the main event, ladies and gentlemen. [00:01:27] We have with us today Dr. Alpa Shah, an associate professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. [00:01:35] I got that entire intro right, patting myself on the back for that. [00:01:40] Dr. Shah, welcome. [00:01:42] Thank you. [00:01:42] Thanks for joining us. [00:01:44] Thanks for having me. [00:01:45] It's a real pleasure. [00:01:47] So I, so one thing I forgot to mention, actually, so should rescind that pat on the back is that you are the author of the book Night March, a book about your time with the Naxalite insurgency in India and your seven-day sort of night, well, actually seven night march with them. [00:02:10] I think maybe some of our listeners may have heard the term Naxalite, maybe heard the scene, the term urban Naxal, maybe written on the internet or something like that. [00:02:19] But just at the very basic level, like what is a Naxalite? [00:02:24] Well, it goes back to the 1960s when an armed rebellion took place in a village called Naxalbari in the state of West Bengal, when peasants basically decided to take up arms and demand the landlords to cancel all their debts and give the land back to them. [00:02:52] And then this kind of, this little rebellion sparked an idea of resistance and rebellion all across the country in India and various kinds of rebellions broke out in different parts of the country. [00:03:09] And this was spearheaded by a part of the Communist Party, which basically decided to go underground and fight for a Maoist-inspired, protracted people's war to take over the country, but from the countryside. [00:03:32] So the idea was that there was going to be this insurgency that was going to spread from the countryside to the cities, eventually take over the state and all for the ideal of building this kind of communist society, which nobody has seen yet. [00:03:49] And it was a time when such rebellions, such movements were taking place in a large part of the world. [00:03:59] There were so many Maoist-inspired armed rebellions in various countries across the world at that time. [00:04:10] But in India, whereas in most other parts of the world, these movements declined, in India, the Naxalite movement, as it became known popularly because of the roots in this village of Naxalbari, has sustained and is still around and has gained a kind of new salience in contemporary India. [00:04:34] And how did you first come into contact with them? [00:04:38] Oh, well, you know, I was a PhD student studying. [00:04:43] I happened to land in these forests of central and eastern India amongst India's indigenous people called its Adivasis. [00:04:53] And I was there for my PhD studies.