The Death Script: Dreams and Delusions in Naxal Country

From 2011 to 2015, Ashutosh Bhardwaj lived in the Red Corridor, and made several trips thereafter, reporting on the Maoists, on police and governmental 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 mutltiple 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, love and obsession, 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.