Resistance here began as a quarrel over land tenure and only much later became a national one. The ryotwari settlement introduced after 1800 dissolved the palegar tenures that had run the uplands for two centuries, and the risings of the first half of the nineteenth century were led by the dispossessed holders of those tenures rather than by a peasantry. Congress politics arrived late and inland. There is no coast in Rayalaseema, so the salt campaign of 1930 had no object here and civil disobedience took the form of no-tax refusals, forest satyagraha and picketing across Kurnool, Kadapa and Anantapur. The region's most distinctive contribution was made in print and in reading rooms — a sedition conviction in 1908 over a Telugu weekly, a library movement in the Nandyal and Kadapa towns, and the 1928 resolution that replaced the region's administrative name with one of its own. The documentation of individual participants here is thinner than in the deltas, and this list is deliberately short rather than padded.
The disarming of the palegars1800–1805
After the cession of 1800 the Company required the fortified tenure-holders of the uplands to surrender their forts, disband their retainers and accept cash pensions. More than eighty holders were dealt with in the Ceded Districts; several resisted and were reduced by force.
परिणाम: The tenure was extinguished and the ryotwari assessment put in its place. The pensions, and their lapse, remained the region's principal political grievance for two generations.
The rising of Uyyalawada Narasimha Reddy1846–1847
Narasimha Reddy, grandson of the palegar of Nossam, raised an armed following in the Kurnool country after the government refused the family its share of a lapsed pension. His men attacked the Koilkuntla treasury in 1846 and killed several officers before the rising was pursued into the Nallamala hills.
परिणाम: He was captured with some ninety followers and executed at Koilkuntla in February 1847 before a large crowd; sources give the date as either the 22nd or the 23rd.
Non-cooperation and civil disobedience in the Ceded Districts1921–1932
An inland movement without a coast to march to. It took the form of no-tax and no-rent campaigns, forest satyagraha over grazing and fuel rights, picketing of liquor shops and foreign cloth, and the building of a network of reading rooms and national schools in Kurnool, Kadapa, Anantapur and Chittoor.
परिणाम: Repeated arrests and the closure of associations; the reading rooms and district conferences that survived carried the 1928 renaming resolution and the region's later public life.