The four studies on the Maoist move­ment in India under review here bring together different perspectives on the enigmatic movement that has puzzled the Indian state from the 1940s (the Telangana armed struggle) and more particu­larly since the Naxalbari uprising in West Bengal in1966–67. In fact, analysing the Telangana movement in this continuum is fair and gives an interesting perspective of an armed Marxist-Leninist movement begin­ning in a region in the south during the Brit­ish rule governed by the Nizam of Hyderabad and continuing even after India is partitioned and freed of the colonial yoke. The move­ment that successfully checked the brutally repressive regime of the doras and the deshmukhs and tackled landlessness amongst the peasants was withdrawn in 1951. The Indian state transitioning at that point of time from the colonial to an independent nation, naturally used force, in both its for­mat, yet simultaneously creating moral pres­sure following the launch of the bhoodan (benefaction of land) movement by Vinoba Bhave, which weakened the movement. Fi­nally, Stalin advised a visiting delegation of the Communist Party of India (CPI) in 1951 that the Party gave parliamentary democracy in India a chance; the first general election was round the corner. Significantly, it em­phasized the importance of introducing a ju­dicious redistribution of land in India and bring to an end the exploitation of the marginalized by the deeply entrenched structures of dominance. That it could af­flict other States too became clear in a de­cade and a half with the outbreak of the Naxalbari movment in West Bengal and land, along with other common property resources, continued to remain a central ques­tion in any part of the country the Maoist movement surfaced. The Telangana move­ment is also significant because Andhra Pradesh (Srikakulam) and Telangana became the centre of re-emergence of the Maoist movement since 1969, the period when it was being crushed in West Bengal. Transformed into a parliamentary party, the CPI faced an ideological split in 1965 that moved a more radical section of the newly created China-leaning Communist Party of India (Marxist) or the CPM to north­ern West Bengal to transform the stirrings amongst the peasants there into a revolution­ary armed insurrection that came to be known as Naxalism after village Naxalbari lit the spark in March 1967, is well-recorded. That the CPM too would split in 1969 as the CPM-in-power and ...