Literature on the leftist insurgency is a field where sociopolitical turmoil meets revolution. For the last fifty years, leftist insurgency entails a problematic premise in India. From the example of countries like the Soviet Union and China, India incorporated the idea of Communism in the 1970s. Communism in India found manifestation through two movements namely Naxalism and Maoism, with their basis in Marxist–Leninist ideology but with a subtle variance. This subtlety breaks open a crisis that has been understated often when the movements have been referred to as synonymous terms in media jargon and popular discourse. The policy of the “annihilation line” forms an ideological crisis in India; which is expansively reflected in select fiction from the country. Therefore, this article attempts at dissecting two pieces of fiction chosen from the whole repertoire of literature written on Naxalism and Maoism to elucidate this crisis. Neel Mukherjee's The Lives of Others (2014) is placed against Nilima Sinha's Red Blooms in the Forest (2013) in order to establish how parallel discourses from two different time periods of the movement facilitate a study of the trajectory of the Naxalite–Maoist insurgency.

Since the 1970s, belief in the importance of participatory empowerment has been constantly asserted through various mass-inclusive developmental strategies. The growing interest in theatre for generating socio-political capacity-building among people gave rise to the Theatre of the Oppressed, conceptualized and developed by Augusto Boal. This article provides a brief outline of the modus operandi of Boal’s practice, and focuses on investigating the theoretical and practical methodology of Jana Sanskriti, the West Bengal group of practitioners of Theatre of the Oppressed. The article investigates the dialogical relationship between actors and audience in the three phases of the group’s theatre-making process: pre-performance; during the performance; and after it. It proposes an illustrative model of Jana Sanskriti’s dialogical approach towards experiencing a developmental surge in society. Shubhra Ghoshal is a research scholar at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology (Indian School of Mines) in Dhanbad, India. Nirban Manna is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology (Indian School of Mines) in Dhanbad.

As a reaction against the institutionalized top-down developmental orientation, the theory and praxis of development as an inclusive process of socio-political collective transformation has been constantly realized. At this juncture, performative activities have become increasingly instrumental strategies in engaging people more intrinsically in their various personal and social development issues. The focus of this paper lies in studying Jana Sanskriti Centre for Theatre of the Oppressed, which despite being an apolitical organisation, offers significant contribution towards searching for viable socio-political possibilities in contemporary India. The paper delves into discussing some specific ground realities of rural West Bengal, deliberating on the endeavours of Jana Sanskriti in extending onstage representations to offstage reformation. This research investigates how sustainable changes, defined as both individual psychological transformation and groups’ socio-political consciousness are generated among spectators through participation in this theatrical process.

Left-Wing Extremism (LWE) in India was realized along the lines of Maoist ideology through the Naxalite insurgency in the 1960s. Novelists have attempted to grasp the mood of this decade of liberation through fiction. This article attempts to study two novels which document the formative years of the Naxalite movement in West Bengal. Translated works from Bengali, Mahasweta Devi’s Mother of 1084 (1974) and Bani Basu’s The Enemy Within (1991) foreground the necropolitical policies of the demonic state in eliminating these Naxal names. State and non-state actors obliterate the question of the Naxal’s identity (enmeshed with his mind and body), making it the focal point of the analysis. Drawing abundantly on concepts of homo sacer, necropolitics, McCarthyism, and democide, the analysis demonstrates that the protagonists are typical of what modern biopolitical states do to non-conformist subjects by creating death worlds. This article is an attempt at understanding the nuances of a sociopolitical movement through literature as social responsibility.

Sufism began as a movement in Indian literature during the medieval period. It was during this period that a number of Sufi poets began writing in the vernacular and a new genre known as the ‘Prema kahāni’ or love story was developed. This genre, written in Hindavi, was a major development in the field of Sufi romances and marks the beginning of a new movement in the literary and devotional culture of the regional language. One of the most important features of these romances is that they are replete with emotions of love and devotion towards God. Sufi writers express these emotions through what the Sanskritic theory refers to as rasa or bhāva. The present article aims to bring out the various rasas or emotions generated by the Sufi romance Mirigavati or The Magic Doe by Qutban Suhravardi in the minds of the readers as they read this romance.