Read a review of Shantanu Nandan Sharma’s ‘Rebel Bastar’, exploring the deep-rooted history, indigenous resistance, and legacy of Maoism in India
Bhaskar Parichha
Book Name: Rebel Bastar: History, Maoism and the Search for Answers in India’s Heartland
Author: Shantanu Nandan Sharma
Publisher: Hachette India
When a government declares an insurgency defeated, the obvious question is whether the guns have fallen silent. The more difficult question is why the guns were raised in the first place. Rebel Bastar: History, Maoism and the Search for Answers in India’s Heartland ( Hachette India) by senior journalist Shantanu Nandan Sharma takes up precisely this uncomfortable question, looking beyond the familiar security narrative to explore the deeper history of Bastar and its long relationship with authority, resistance and mistrust.
Released at a moment when the Indian government has declared the Maoist insurgency effectively defeated, the book is especially timely. But Sharma does not treat Maoism simply as a contemporary security problem. He argues that the insurgency must be understood against a much longer history of political and administrative contestation in a region whose relationship with the state has often been uneasy.
Sharma’s engagement with Bastar began after demonetisation in 2016, when newly issued currency notes appeared deep inside territory then controlled by insurgents. What began as a journalistic curiosity developed into years of reporting and investigation. The result is a book that combines field experience with historical research, allowing Bastar to emerge not as an isolated “Red Corridor” but as a place with its own complex historical memory.
The journey reaches far back into the region’s past. Sharma writes about human sacrifice in Dantewada, the intervention of the British in Bastar’s forests and kingdoms, and the colonial appetite for teak, minerals, and other resources. He also revisits tribal resistance, including the uprising associated with a beloved but tragic prince. These episodes reveal a recurring pattern: outside power seeking resources and control, and indigenous communities resisting intrusion into their land and social order.
Against this background, Maoism appears less as an inexplicable foreign ideology imposed upon Bastar than as a later chapter in a much older history of alienation. Developmental failures, weak or mistrusted administration and social vulnerabilities created spaces in which the insurgency could establish itself and survive.
Yet Rebel Bastar is not simply an explanation of Maoism. It is also a warning against assuming that the disappearance of an armed movement automatically resolves the conditions that allowed it to flourish. Sharma asks whether the decline of Maoism is permanent or conditional—and whether the state has learnt the historical lessons of Bastar.
Rich in reportage and historical insight, the book makes an important contribution to understanding one of India’s most misunderstood regions. Its central message is deceptively simple: to understand the end of an insurgency, one must first understand the history that made rebellion possible.
(The author is a senior journalist and columnist. Views expressed are personal.)