A Peal of Spring Thunder
‘A Peal of Spring Thunder’ takes its title from the phrase adopted by the Chinese People’s Daily to describe the onset of the peasant revolution in India in 1967. It portrays social life and the environment in a politically contested region of Chhattisgarh in central India.
Over time, the insurgency has evolved into a war with significant environmental, humanitarian and economic consequences, in areas that are rich in natural resources but burdened by poverty and a lack of social development. It has spread across what is now known as the red corridor: an area spanning nine states from West Bengal and Orissa in the east, down to Maharashtra in the west.
This reservoir of natural wealth has been attractive to successive governments. Local support for the so-called ‘Maoists’ arises from a political system that appears to favour the interests of large companies and influential private players over those of ordinary people. In south Chhattisgarh – the current centre of the insurgency – the Maoists have focused their energies on a fundamental contradiction: on the one hand India claims to care for the development of the Adivasis, on the other, its security forces are deployed to clear their forested homesteads atop the country’s richest deposits of coal, iron and bauxite, and forcefully evict the Adivasis from their own land.
Indian photographer Ishan Tankha followed the Adivasis and Maoist soldiers as they negotiate these inhabited, forested and barren landscapes, profoundly affected by outside commercial and political prospectors.
