URBAN NAXALS (HINDI)

Vivek Agnihotri made a film called Buddha in a Traffic Jam. No one in the Bollywood establishment wanted to fund it; he was effectively cut off from the industry for making it. When distribution through conventional cinemas appeared impossible, he decided to screen the film himself at universities and technical institutions across India. What followed were multiple physical attacks on him, coordinated attempts to shut down screenings, and opposition from within academic institutions that he argues went beyond ordinary protest.

Urban Naxals is the account of that experience — not just the making and suppression of a single film, but what the filmmaker discovered in the process about the networks operating inside India's cultural and educational institutions. The Hindi edition brings Agnihotri's firsthand account to a wider readership, tracing the journey from a film that mainstream India tried to silence to the exposure of what he calls "urban naxals": activists embedded in media, academia, and civil society who, he argues, pursue a systematic ideological agenda.

The book reads as both personal testimony and political investigation, written by someone who claims to have been a target of the forces he is describing.