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.
Jayaseelan Raj Books






An armchair discovery tour of truly remarkable places, captured in SJ Axelby's inimitable watercolours. This follow-up volume to SJ Axelby's Interior Portraits transports the reader to bars, cafes, museums, shops, hotels, tearooms, restaurants, gardens, trains and more, around the world.
What does the collapse of India’s tea industry mean for Dalit workers who have lived, worked and died on the plantations since the colonial era? Plantation Crisis offers a complex understanding of how processes of social and political alienation unfold in moments of economic rupture. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in the Peermade and Munnar tea belts, Jayaseelan Raj – himself a product of the plantation system – offers a unique and richly detailed analysis of the profound, multi-dimensional sense of crisis felt by those who are at the bottom of global plantation capitalism and caste hierarchy.Tea production in India accounts for 25 per cent of global output. The colonial era plantation system – and its two million strong workforce – has, since the mid-1990s, faced a series of ruptures due to neoliberal economic globalisation. In the South Indian state of Kerala, otherwise known for its labour-centric development initiatives, the Tamil speaking Dalit workforce, whose ancestors were brought to the plantations in the 19th century, are at the forefront of this crisis, which has profound impacts on their social identity and economic wellbeing. Out of the colonial history of racial capitalism and indentured migration, Plantation Crisis opens our eyes to the collapse of the plantation system and the rupturing of Dalit lives in India's tea belt.
An artist's record of the homes of 89 leading creatives from interior designers to ceramicists, antiques dealers, florists and chefs.
For readers of books like Chris Miller’s Chip War, David Sanger’s Perfect Weapon, and Christian Brose’s Kill Chain, an insider’s account of the formation of a new unit at the Pentagon, the Defense Innovation Unit, which is introducing a warfare transformation as profound as the invention of gun powder or nuclear weapons.
'A gripping and rigorous crime story about the murder of a once thriving democracy, exposing an arsenal of lethal weapons, some wielded on the streets, others in the courts and press' NAOMI KLEIN ‘Essential reading' YANIS VAROUFAKIS