In May 2004, a center-left coalition, led by the Indian National Congress, came to power in India. The Congress is the storied party of Indian nationalism, the world’s oldest political party. In the southern state of Andhra Pradesh, its unexpected victory over Chandrababu Naidu, ally of the Hindu right, flush with cash from Hyderabad’s business process outsourcing (BPO) industries—the Guardian’s George Monbiot called him the “West’sfavoriteIndian”—owedsignificantly to brewing agrarian discontent, behind which lay a long-festering, decades-old Maoist armed insurgency. Recognizing this contribution behind its patently unearned success, the Congress government in Delhi magnanimously declared a ceasefire with the Maoists. On October 11, the upper eche- lons of the Maoist People’s War Group (PWG) surfaced from their underground bivouacs, AK-47s slung over shoulders, in the Nalla- mallai forest area in Andhra Pradesh. Stash- ing their weapons, the leaders convened a mass rally in Hyderabad, the capital city, and65,000supportersattendedthemeet- ing. On the way, the Maoist leaders unveiled a “martyrs’ memorial” in Guttikondabilam village in Guntur district. (Guttikondabilam is the venue of a historic secret meeting between Naxalite founder-member Charu Mazumdar and Andhra Pradesh Maoist lead- ers in 1969, a flashpoint of the Srikakulam peasant insurgency of the 1970s.)

Previous to this, the mainstream newspaper Indian Express, quite out of keeping with its pro-liberalization tilt, carried a sympathetic Sunday magazine article on the Maoists.1 The article was accompanied by a picture of what it described as the me- morial to “People’s War martyrs” at Indravelli, the site of the police massacre and secret burial of some sixty Gond tribals who had assembled for a Maoist-organized meeting on April 20, 1981. The small, low-resolution image showed a square column on a pedes- tal, crowned by a pyramid-shaped capital. The structure, the article said, was inspired by the Monument to the People’s Heroes (Renmin Yinxiong Jinian Bei) in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.

My current research centers on the monuments of agrarian accumulation in the eighteenth century: the pleasure gardens, follies, and ha-has by which the Whig sensibility viewed the expansion of land under cultivation in Britain, America, and Bengal—the effect of Britain’s “finan- cial revolution”—through the devices of the aesthetic. Peering into the grainy image of the Indravelli monument, I was struck with an uncanny resemblance. The follies of Britain were “fakes” instantiating a political ideal; the rotundas, obelisks, Gothic temples of eighteenth-century English gardens were fragments of an exogenous, imagined, Virgilian culture, strewn around the land- scape in order to ratify—to institute as the work of the imagination—a transformed political economy. Somewhat in the strain of French philosopher Quentin Meillassoux, I have called this kind of displaced memo- ry—the recuperation of an archaic past that you cannot have had experienced as your own “history”—“ancestrality.”2 The incongruous memory of Mao in the jungles of northern Andhra Pradesh, I thought, was perhaps a comparable kind of asserted ancestrality, something that could be useful to think through the critique of political economy that I was attempting to outline in my study of architecture. I decided to investigate.