Review of Shantanu Sharma’s ‘Rebel Bastar’

Shantanu Sharma has spent the better part of two decades as one of the most dedicated Bastar-watchers among India's journalists. While covering the Maoist conflict in the region as a feature writer for his newspaper, he was quietly building something more ambitious: a meticulously researched historical account of the many rebellions that have shaped this corner of Central India over the last two centuries. That project has now become a book, Rebel Bastar: History, Maoism and the Search for Answers in India's Heartland, which arrives at a striking moment—just as Bastar is emerging from its latest, and perhaps final, conflict with the Maoists.

The British made their first attempt to enter Bastar in 1795 and failed. From then on, colonial administrators documented their dealings with the princely state with almost obsessive thoroughness. Sharma has gone back into those records in painstaking detail and the result is Rebel Bastar—a book dense with material that even long-time observers of the region, myself included, have rarely encountered before.

There is a pleasing symmetry running through the book. Long before the Maoists, most of whom came into Bastar from Andhra Pradesh, the region's earlier rulers—the Kakatiya kings of Warangal—had arrived from precisely the same direction, in 1324, and went on to govern Bastar until its merger with the Indian union in 1948. Sharma is alert to these echoes across centuries, and they give the book a narrative shape that most straight histories lack.

What sets Rebel Bastar apart is not the sources themselves—many of these British-era documents have already been mined by historians and PhD scholars—but the sensibility Sharma brings to them. He writes with a journalist's instinct for the telling detail and a historian's patience for the archive, and the combination makes for a book that reads far more easily than most history-driven accounts of the region typically do.

Nowhere is this more evident than in his handling of the subject of human sacrifice in Bastar—something the British were determined to prove but never quite managed to document conclusively. Sharma, working the archive as a journalist rather than a colonial official with a point to prove, unearths a reference in the 1965 Census handbook that describes instances of human sacrifice in post-Independence Bastar—succeeding, in effect, where two centuries of British investigation had failed.

I have lived in Dandakaranya for over 20 years and have tried to read everything of substance written on the region. Even so, Sharma's book surfaces details I had not come across before. He writes, for instance, about Tata securing a license in 1916 to explore Bastar's iron ore—a hundred years before the same company was effectively driven out of the region in 2016 when it tried, this time in earnest, to enter it. He also notes that Tata had obtained a prospecting license for Chanda in neighbouring Maharashtra as early as 1902, and for the Dalli Rajhara mines that would later feed the Bhilai Steel Plant. Now, with the Maoists gone from the area, Tata is returning to those Maharashtra mines after a gap of 125 years.

The book is full of such granular finds: a Persian historian writing during Emperor Akbar's reign who described Bastar as a Hindu principality; the 1901 Census, which recorded 271 Europeans working as missionaries in the region. Sharma also draws on his reporting background in Assam to trace how the militant group United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA) helped bring the Communist Party of India (Maoist) together—a connection not widely known. He revisits a parliamentary question raised by Assam MP Hem Barua about a reported meeting between a Chinese diplomat and Naxalbari leader Kanu Sanyal, which the government of the time denied ever took place. Elsewhere, he recounts how the Indian revolutionary Mohit Sen received training in China, though he never went on to join the Maoist movement in India. On the colonial side, Sharma documents the scorched-earth tactics the British used to crush the 1910 Bhumkal rebellion, including the burning of villages, and examines the contested role some missionaries played during that uprising, drawing on British records to do so.

At 300 pages and priced at Rs 799, the book sits at the higher end for its category. Given how valuable it will likely prove as a reference work, a proper index in future editions would considerably increase its utility for researchers.

The final two chapters, evidently written under time pressure, carry a few factual slips. The closing chapter, for instance, describes the arrest of Sujatha alias Kalpana, the last woman to have served on the Maoist Central Committee and wife of the late Maoist leader Kishanji. In fact, Sujatha surrendered in 2026, alongside Devji (real name Thippiri Tirupathi)—she was not arrested.

Minor errors aside, Rebel Bastar is likely to remain one of the essential texts on the region for years to come—arriving, fittingly, just as Bastar begins to write its next chapter.

(Shubhranshu Choudhary is a practitioner of democratic media. He has been a journalist with the BBC and is also a part of The New Peace Process in Chhattisgarh. He is the author of Let's Call Him Vasu: With Maoists in Chhattisgarh.)