‘A Peal of Spring Thunder’ takes its title from the phrase adopted by the Chinese People’s Daily to describe the onset of peasant revolution in India in 1967. It is a project on social life and the environment in a politically contested region of Chattisgarh. The project visualises the ‘conflict’ as a series of encounters with the social and ecological landscapes that have been shaped by the Adivasis who reside there and the Maoist soldiers as they negotiate the inhabited, forested and barren tracts of land scarred by commercial and political prospectors.
 
The politics of control and resource extraction, which has shaped the history of Chhattisgarh since the colonial period, led the region’s Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities to mobilise against the state to protect their land rights and resist exploitation. In recent years, this struggle has intensified into a war that affects millions of Adivasis. Local support for the Maoists grows apace under circumstances where the state perceives the ethnic homelands of the Adivasis as economic resource and favours the interests of large companies over those of its own Indigenous citizen-subjects.
 
So far, my project has sought to bear witness to the ebbs and flows of life that Adivasis and Maoists experience through the manner in which they work and live in the forest and villages, interact with their surrounding urban environs as well as the ways in which they create a sense of home and place in a deeply fissured space.