In The Company of Violent Men, investigative journalist Siddharthya Roy takes us on an unflinching and deeply personal journey into reporting violent political conflicts in South Asia. From the Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh, where drugs and human trafficking run rampant, to the forests of Chhattisgarh, where Maoist rebels and the Indian State have waged a war for half a century, on to the enduring conflict zone of Kashmir, caught between India, Pakistan, Roy narrates the cycles of brutality, exploitation, and injustice in which everyday people are caught.
From a genocide survivor—a little girl—who asks for nothing more than a hot meal to an aspiring suicide bomber with cannabis-laden dreams of global destruction, Roy paints kaleidoscopic and haunting portraits of mercenaries and middlemen, refugees and insurgents—each complex and morally ambiguous. As he navigates the minds of others, Roy often turns the lens inward with uncompromising honesty, examining his own evolution as a journalist and the ethical dilemmas he faces.
This part memoir, part reportage, crackles with the urgency of war dispatches. And yet, pausing and meditating, it peels back hurried headlines, making readers bear witness to what the reporter saw when he ‘looked beyond the burqa and the beard, beyond the olive-green of one fighter and the camo fatigue of the other, and talked to the humans who wear these facades’.
