The Death Script : Dreams and Delusions in Naxal Country

By Ashutosh Bhardwaj

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About the book

Remarkable … closely reported, sharply insightful, richly readable — RAMACHANDRA GUHA From 2011 to 2015, Ashutosh Bhardwaj lived in India’s ‘red corridor’, and made several trips thereafter, reporting on the Maoists, on the state’s atrocities, and on lives caught in the crossfire. In The Death Script, he writes of his time there, of the various men and women he meets from both sides of the conflict, bringing home with astonishing power the human cost of such a battle. Narrated in multiple voices, the book is a creative biography of Dandakaranya that combines the rigour of journalism, the intimacy of a diary, the musings of a travelogue, and the craft of a novel. Through the prism of the Maoist insurgency, Bhardwaj meditates on larger questions of violence and betrayal, sin and redemption, and what it means to live through and write about such experiences — making The Death Script one of the most significant works of non-fiction to be published in recent times.

Pages: 280

Available in:

Language: English

Ashutosh Bhardwaj

Ashutosh Bhardwaj is a journalist, fiction writer and literary critic. He won the Ramnath Goenka Award for Excellence in Journalism for four consecutive years (2012-15). In 2015, he was shortlisted for the Reuters’ Kurt Schork Awards in International Journalism. He is the author of several novellas, a short story collection, and a book of essays on literature. He received the Krishna Baldev Vaid Fellowship for Fiction in 2012, was a writer in residence at Sangam House, Bangalore, in 2013, and a fellow at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla (2017-19). In 2022, he will be a writer in residence at Prague – City of Literature.

Remarkable … closely reported, sharply insightful, richly readable - RAMACHANDRA GUHA

This moving, troubling and indispensable book - HARISH TRIVEDI

Searing … The novelist and journalist in him have come together to create an essential document - ADOOR GOPALAKRISHNAN

Full of anecdotal and hard evidence, it forces the reader to rethink crime and punishment - MRINAL PANDE

The Death Script is a remarkable work of narrative non-fiction – closely reported, sharply insightful, richly readable. The landscape, dramatis personae, and social consequences of the civil war in Bastar come vividly alive in this moving, empathetic, always courageous and sometimes chilling book. The narrator himself is a never intrusive but always reliable presence in The Death Script – trusted by the reader for his moral compass, and admired for his literary skills. - RAMACHANDRA GUHA

Ashutosh Bharadwaj was for many years a reporter in the ‘red corridor’ of Central India, the Adivasi land where Naxals and police forces have been locked in deadly combat for decades. In this book, he steps back to take a long view of all that he witnessed, and to reflect with both clarity and feeling on the unavailing inexorability of it. Only he could have written this moving, troubling and indispensable book. - HARISH TRIVEDI

A searing account of his journeys through murky and treacherous fields … Ashutosh Bhardwaj has been assiduously impartial and has never given in to the temptation of becoming judgemental. The novelist and journalist in him have come together to create an essential document of an overlong struggle that urgently awaits a dignified and humane solution. - ADOOR GOPALAKRISHNAN

Dandakaranya is, literally, the forest of punishment. This is where, centuries ago, a palace intrigue is said to have banished Lord Rama on the eve of his coronation. The area, now the feared Naxal corridor, still remains primal: dark, full of whispers, unspoken treacheries, anger and a deep desire for justice. This young and gifted writer spent years here, exploring, connecting with the banished and hunted, and reporting on this irrepressible uprising in the heart of India. Readable, full of anecdotal and hard evidence, it forces the reader to rethink crime and punishment. - MRINAL PANDE

A powerful work of narrative non-fiction that examines the civil war in Bastar, The Death Script combines literary skill with sharp reportage. - Hindustan Times

Dwelling on his reportage of the conflict in Bastar, author Ashutosh Bhardwaj brings the discord alive as he weaves a human narrative in his book, The Death Script. - Financial Express

It’s a book that deserves to be read and considered seriously - Mumbai Mirror

Ashutosh Bhardwaj’s book is one of the most original works of non-fiction from India in recent times. - Hindu Business Line