Between print and protest independent publishing in repressive times

This co-authored piece emerges from a six-year-long collaboration between Madhuresh Kumar, a senior AFSEE Fellow and Sanjay, a cultural activist and publisher. While not an academic–practitioner collaboration (AcPrac) in the conventional sense, we believe this contribution aligns closely with the spirit of AcPrac projects (Ishkanian et al, 2025); our work brings together two practitioners, an activist-researcher-writer and an independent Hindilanguage publisher at the intersection of social movements, knowledge production, and cultural resistance. We collaborated on publishing three Hindi-language books: a two-volume life history of the activists of the Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA), one of India’s longest and most iconic anti-dam and environmental justice movements; and a Hindi translation of The Arab Uprisings: A Decade of Struggles, a critical reflection on popular uprisings across North Africa and West Asia (Ojas et al., 2022, Forthcoming 2026; Hamouchene and Aouragh, 2022).