“Bandenaka Bandi Katti” is an iconic revolutionary song in Goutham Ghose’s classic film ‘Maa Bhoomi’, a brilliant work of parallel cinema documenting the Telangana People’s Armed Struggle (1946–51). Composed by the Communist poet Bandi Yadagiri—who was himself a peasant poet and a participant in the armed struggle—the lyrics poignantly capture the mood of the toiling peasantry in 1940s Telangana. The lyrics are a scathing attack on the feudal government of the Nizam, Mir Osman Ali Khan—who represented the medieval autocratic regime of the Asaf Jahi dynasty—as well as his subordinate feudal lords (Dorallu) and his private militia, the Razakars.

​During my student days in Hyderabad, I had the opportunity to listen to this song rendered by friends hailing from the families of agricultural workers and poor and middle peasants in the epicenter of the Telangana agrarian revolt. The lyrics were so searing that I could immediately relate them to certain observations documented by Mao Zedong in his classic, “Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan.” Reacting to the right wing of the Kuomintang, who branded the movement in Hunan as a “movement of the riffraff,” Mao described how a revolutionary upsurge can turn things upside down in the countryside. He observed that “all those whom the gentry had despised, those whom they had trodden into the dirt, people with no place in society, people with no right to speak, have now audaciously lifted up their heads.”

The song which punctured the feudal divinity of the Nizam by calling him using a disrespectful slang— “koduku” (boy)— was a realistic representation of the accumulated anger and emerging militant class consciousness of the rural working people. In fact, it was a particular line in the song which compared the brutalities inflicted by the Nizam government and Razakars on peasants with Nazi-like violence that captured my political interest in the history of the Telangana revolt as well as its chief architect, P Sundarayya. Studying about Telangana made me understand why Communists in my homeland in Malabar were passionately sloganeering “EMS, AKG, Sundarayya Zindabad”. It was because, as pointed out by M Basavapunnaiah, Telangana “pushed the issue of the agrarian revolution to the forefront”.

With the Hindutva neo-fascists launching massive propaganda about Telangana—exemplified by the Sangh Parivar’s promotion of the highly communally coloured movie ‘Razakar: The Silent Genocide of Hyderabad’—it is important to reiterate the class and secular character of the Telangana revolt.

Brutal Feudal Oppression under Nizam and Landlords

At the time of the revolt, the Nizam’s Hyderabad state was a subsidiary feudatory of the British, consisting of eight Telugu-speaking districts (including Hyderabad city), five Marathi-speaking districts in the Marathwada region, and three Kannada-speaking districts. The Telangana region comprised 50% of the total area, and Telugu-speaking people constituted 50% of the total population. The vast majority of the people of Hyderabad state were Hindus.

Being a vassal of British imperialism, the Nizam and his elite Mullahs propagated the theory that “Muslims were the ruling class” with the clear intention of dividing and ruling. It is a fact that Hindu communal groups were gaining some traction in the Marathi- and Kannada-speaking regions of the state. However, a close scrutiny of the records reveals that the Nizam did not differentiate on the basis of religion when it came to the exploitation of working people. A significant chunk of feudal lords and tax collectors loyal to the Nizam were also caste Hindus.

The feudal oppression under the Nizam was notoriously brutal and exploitative. The governmental land revenue system (Diwani) covered about 60% of the total land area (53,000,000 acres) in the state. The Jagirdari system covered 30% (15,000,000 acres) of the total area, and this area had various feudal oppressors like “paigas, samsthanam, jagirdars, ijardars, banjardars, agraharams,” etc. It is documented that “in Jagir areas, the land taxes on irrigated lands used to be 10 times more than those collected in Diwani (government) areas, amounting to Rs 150 per acre or 20-30 mounds of paddy per acre.” The remaining 10% of the total land area was classified as the Nizam’s own direct estate, known as “Sarf Khas.” It was estimated that the Nizam used to earn Rs 20,000,000 annually from his estate. This would denote the extent of loot unleashed on the peasantry in the 1940s.

The Great Depression in the interwar period severely ruined the socio-economic life of the Telangana peasantry, and the landlords took advantage of it to annex their land. For instance, when the revolt started, a feudal lord named Jannareddy Pratap Reddy in Suryapet taluk, Nalgonda district, owned 150,000 acres of land. Visunur Deshmukh, a landlord of 40 villages in Jangaon taluk, Nalgonda, controlled 40,000 acres, and Kalluru Deshmukh in Madhira taluk, Khammam district, owned 100,000 acres. There were many Deshmukhs in the Telangana districts who owned more than 10,000 acres each.

In his classic book “Telangana People’s Struggle and Its Lessons”, P. Sundarayya has described how in Telangana, the “Vetti System” (forced labour and exactions) “was an all-pervasive social phenomenon affecting all classes of people in varying degrees.” All Dalit families were forced to send one person to the landlord’s house to do vetti. All other backward-caste people tied to their traditional occupations were compelled to give free service to the landlords under humiliating conditions. Construction of the landlords’ mansions and their marriage ceremonies demanded vetti from the working people. The acclaimed Telugu novel “Prajala Manishi” has vivid details of this exploitative system.

Spark that Set Afire the Revolt

In the 1930s, the Andhra Mahasabha (AMS)—formed in 1928—emerged as a liberal nationalist association of Telugu-speaking people fighting against the autocratic rule of the Nizam. By the early 1940s, Communists, militant youth, and democratic elements of the Nizam’s state joined the AMS in massive numbers; they were frustrated with the Congress policy of “non-interference” in native states. The AMS was later affiliated to the All India Kisan Sabha (AIKS).

​The young Communists succeeded in transforming the AMS from a liberal organization into an anti-Nizam, united mass militant organization—a united front against the Nizam. The AMS gained a large following among peasants, workers, youth, the middle-class intelligentsia, and traders. By 1944, the Communist-controlled AMS succeeded in organizing militant class struggles against Zamindars and Deshmukhs in several parts of Telangana. These were massive class actions against vetti (forced labour) and the illegal eviction of peasants.

In this general context of upsurge, there was a “spark that set afire the Telangana agrarian revolt” in 1946. The hated Deshmukh of Jangaon taluk, Visnur Ramachandra Reddy, tried to forcibly occupy the land of Ailamma, a washerwoman. Peasant militants in the AMS valiantly resisted the Deshmukh’s aggression. The landlord bribed the police, and peasant activists were arrested and tortured severely: “their heads were thrust into ovens, chilli powder was thrust into their anuses, and urine was poured into their mouths.”

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However, the Deshmukh failed to seize Ailamma’s harvest or land. Furious, he attempted to further humiliate the peasantry. At the height of the landlord’s aggression, the peasants decided to organize a procession armed with red flags, lathis, and slings, while raising revolutionary slogans. The Deshmukh’s goondas fired on the crowd, and Doddi Komarayya, the militant peasant leader, was shot dead on 4 July 1946. As P. Sundarayya wrote, “Komarayya’s death and martyrdom set ablaze the pent-up fury of the Telangana peasantry.”

Massive Resistance, Savage Repression by Union Government

 The peasantry in several parts of Telangana started organising public meetings with the slogan: “Sangham is organised here. No more Vetti, no more illegal exactions, no evictions.” In response, the Nizam government resorted to mass arrests and police terror. Armed police raided villages. The AMS and the undivided CPI began providing volunteer training to the peasants. Initially, the training was given with lathis. The Nizam regime intensified its terror. The brutalities of the Razakars were particularly severe. The Nizam regime developed rape as a political weapon; women peasants and agricultural workers were raped. The revolutionary movement decided to go for armed resistance. Arms and ammunition were collected using various contacts. Some elementary military training was given to the guerrilla squads, using the expertise of communist ex-servicemen who had fought in the Second World War. The legendary leader Major Jaipal Singh was prominent among them. The special feature of the Telangana revolt was that women also took up arms. The story of Mallu Swarajyam and hundreds of other women is very inspiring.   

When the agrarian revolt was spreading to new areas with fierce revolutionary energy, the Union Government of the Congress led by Jawaharlal Nehru launched a “police action” on September 13, 1948. The Nizam, who initially refused to join the Indian Union, succumbed within five days of the “police action.” The militant peasants seized this opportunity and intensified their attacks on the Nizam’s regime and feudal lords. It was during this phase that around 5,000 peasants gathered and demolished the huge mansion of the hated landlord Jannareddi Pratap Reddy in Suryapet. Once the agrarian militancy accelerated, the Union Government’s armies started to rescue the Deshmukhs and the Razakar leader Kazim Rizvi, “who were responsible for setting fire to village after village and for killing hundreds of people.” Nehru’s military also targeted peasant and working-class Muslims who stood against the Nizam.

The bourgeois-landlord government of Nehru came to a clear political understanding that the success of the Telangana movement would have clear national-level revolutionary ramifications. The then Governor-General, Rajaji, proudly proclaimed that one of the main objectives of the military intervention was to eliminate the agrarian movement. The military rule of General J. N. Choudhuri witnessed clinical targeting of the movement. A massive offensive was launched against the people of Telangana by the military. By this time, Congress committees had been successfully transformed into ‘Deshmukh committees.’ Virtually none of the Nizam’s senior officials faced any legal consequences for the heinous crimes they committed. Mass arrest, mass beating, and mass torture became a common feature in hundreds of villages. Over 4,000 peasant activists were martyred in the Telangana struggle, and tens of thousands jailed and tortured.

The Congress leaders actively collaborated with the military to unleash brutal repression. There used to be Congress offices near military camps. With the aid of the military and Congress leaders, landlords recaptured lands in several areas. Sundarayya documents that ‘the peasants much more easily gave up the surplus lands they had been cultivating, but till the end, fought doggedly to retain those restored lands of their own.’

What the Telangana Struggle Achieved

The valiant Telangana struggle forced the Congress Government to adopt the Hyderabad Tenancy Act—”the most radical piece of legislation till then”, as pointed out by P. Sundarayya. The armed resistance helped the movement spread to around one-third of the total Telangana area, to 3,000 villages mainly in the three districts of Khammam, Nalgonda, and Warangal. This historic struggle lasted for five years from 1946 to 1951.    

The village administration was carried out by democratically elected Gram Raj committees. Gram Raj committees were simultaneously “organs of struggle” as well as “organs of power.” With hitherto suppressed women, poor peasants, and Dalit agricultural workers holding power, the hated landlords and the Nizam’s officials had to flee.

P. Sundarayya records that the Telangana revolt succeeded in distributing land “to the extent of a million acres, along with the necessary cattle and agricultural implements.” This was an unprecedented victory for the peasantry in struggle. Fair wages for agricultural workers were also fixed. Peasants were liberated from “Vetti” and other illegal exactions, and evictions. “People used to say that for the first time in their lives, they could have two full meals a day.”

At the All India level, the Telangana people’s struggle, along with other peasant struggles led by the AIKS in other states in the country, pushed the issue of agrarian revolution and land reforms to the forefront of the national agenda. Whatever land reforms were enacted in the country after independence, however imperfect, were the result of these iconic peasant struggles in the 1940s.