Communism in India: Events, Processes and Ideologies

In Communism in India, Bidyut Chakrabarty, an expert on contemporary Indian political economy and social movements, presents a sweeping analysis of the changing nature of communist ideology over the past century in India. India's left movements are notable, when placed in comparative historical perspective with similar movements elsewhere, as the country is the home of two co-existing strands of modern communism: the parliamentary Communist Party of India (the first democratically elected Marxist government) and the extra-parliamentary revolutionary Maoist movement. Drawing on ethnographic field work conducted in Orissa, Chhattisgarh and West Bengal, Chakrabarty provides a contextual account of the rise, consolidation, and relative decline of these two types of left radicalism. He looks at how it is that left ideology has co-existed with free-market-oriented economic policies as well as the contexts in which more militant strands have more recently taken root, particularly among the young in the poorer districts.