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A haunting ode to those who paid the ultimate price-through the prism of the Maoist insurgency, Ashutosh Bhardwaj meditates on larger questions of violence and betrayal, love and obsession, and what it means to live with and write about death. From 2011 to 2015, Ashutosh lived in the Red Corridor in India wherein the Ultra-Left Naxalites, taking inspiration from the Russian revolution and Mao's tactics, work to overthrow the Indian government by the barrel of the gun. He made several trips thereafter reporting on the insurgents, on police and governmental atrocities, and on the lives caught in the crossfire. Ashutosh chronicles his experiences and bears witness to the lives and deaths of the unforgettable men and women he meets from both sides of the struggle, bringing home the human cost of conflict with astonishing power. Narrated in multiple voices, the book is a creative biography of the region, Dandakaranya, that combines the rigour of journalism, the intimacy of a diary, the musings of a travelogue, and the craft of a novel. The Death Script is one of the most significant works of non-fiction to be published in recent times, bringing often overlooked perspectives and events to light with empathy. Praised by India's topmost scholars and critics, the book has already won various awards.

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9781910688861

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Ashutosh Bhardwaj is a bilingual journalist, fiction writer and literary critic. He experiments with prose in various forms and genres. As a journalist, he has traveled across Central India and documented the conditions of tribes caught in the conflict between the Maoist insurgents and the police. He has investigated encounter killings, cases of political corruption and electoral malpractices. He is the only journalist in India to have won the prestigious Ramnath Goenka Award for Excellence in Journalism for four consecutive years. In 2015, he was shortlisted for the Reuters' Kurt Schork Awards in International Journalism. He has published three books: a story collection, Jo Frame Men Na The; a book of essays on literature and cinema, Pitra Vadh; a creative biography of Dandakaranya, The Death Script; besides several other stories, diaries, travelogues and critical essays. Shortlisted for Tata Lit Fest 2020 award and Kamaladevi Chhattopadhyay award and winner of the Best Non-Fiction Book of the Year 2020 Atta Galatta award, The Death Script is appearing soon in several languages. Pitra Vadh has received the prestigious Devi Shankar Avasthi Samman for the year 2020 awarded to a work of literary criticism. He has received the Krishna Baldev Vaid Fellowship for his innovative fiction and was a writer-in-residence at the Sangam House in Bangalore, 2012-13. As a Fellow at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, 2017-19, he wrote a monograph, Women in Solitude, a study of solitary women in select novels and cinema. A volume he has co-edited with a French academic on the Indian perspective of the 19th century migrations from India is forthcoming with Routledge.

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