Viyyukka: The Morning Star is a rare and compelling anthology of stories written in Telugu over four decades by nearly fifty Maoist women revolutionaries in India. The title, Viyyukka, is a Gondi word meaning morning star. This collection is unique because these narratives are not traditional fiction; they are “lived experiences written from within the movement” while the authors served as guerrilla soldiers, often under extreme duress.

The stories offer a vital glimpse into the human dimensions of armed struggle, highlighting the agency, resilience, and moral consciousness of the women participants. The authors, active in India’s ongoing revolutionary conflict, document everything from tactical and ideological engagements to intimate realities such as love, loss, and camaraderie within their squads.

At its core, the Morning Star series centers on the fierce struggle for survival: of people, forests, rivers, and a way of life. The narratives capture how local struggles against exploitation and dispossession evolved into a wider movement challenging the “Iron Heel of the Indian State” and global capital.

Geographically rooted in Central Indian regions like Dandakaranya, the book vividly portrays the Adivasi (indigenous) resistance for the defense of jal, jangal, and jameen (water, forest, and land). The resistance documented in these pages, particularly against corporate mining and state repression, shares a “common thread” with the struggles of indigenous communities across the globe, positioning this collective testimony as a crucial document of resistance against colonial and capitalist forces.

This is a powerful and timely book. Reading Viyyukka is to encounter history in its most urgent form: not as abstract doctrine, but as the lived, written, and too-often silenced testimony of women for whom the pen was as vital as the gun. This anthology does not simply add voices to a historical record; it fundamentally questions the record itself. By foregrounding the female guerrilla imaginary—with its profound complexities of comradeship, grief, motherhood, and even the critique of revolutionary justice—these stories exceed the boundaries of political propaganda to become essential documents of human endurance and creativity. In a time when their politics is declared defeated, the women of Viyyukka remind us that some struggles are not measured by victory alone, but by the indestructible insistence on bearing witness. — Sharmila Purkayastha, independent researcher, New Delhi