This plateau was not British Indian territory, so there was no colonial administration here to agitate against and none of the Madras Presidency's Congress machinery. What organised itself instead was civic and cultural, and it ran on its own dates. A reading-room movement began in 1901 with the Sri Krishnadevaraya Andhra Bhasha Nilayam in Hyderabad and spread through the Telugu districts as libraries, presses and adult classes. The Andhra Jana Sangham of 1921 became the Andhra Mahasabha in 1930, giving the Telugu-speaking districts a standing annual forum whose early resolutions were on child marriage, widow remarriage and schooling. A parallel campaign led from the Hyderabad suburbs worked against untouchability and the jogini dedication. In the Godavari forest the grievance was land and forest law rather than politics, and it produced the plateau's two documented risings. Several people born in Hyderabad were prominent in the national movement, but they were prominent outside the state. This entry stops in 1947.
Ramji Gond's resistance in the Godavari forestc. 1857–1860
A Gond chief of the Nirmal, Utnoor, Chennur and Asifabad tracts resisted the extension of outside revenue and forest authority into the northern forest during and after the disturbances of 1857.
परिणाम: He was captured and hanged on 9 April 1860. A mass hanging at a banyan tree near Nirmal is attached to the same suppression in local tradition; it is not established by record.
The library and reading-room movement (Grandhalayodyamam)from 1901
Beginning with the Sri Krishnadevaraya Andhra Bhasha Nilayam at Hyderabad in 1901, Telugu reading rooms, lending libraries and small presses were opened across the districts, often attached to adult literacy classes and to the printing of Telugu textbooks and reference works.
परिणाम: The libraries became the physical network on which the later language and social reform associations were built; several district Mahasabha sessions were organised out of them.
The Andhra Jana Sangham and the Andhra Mahasabha1921–1946
Formed in Hyderabad in November 1921 after a resolution in Telugu was refused a hearing at a social reform conference, the Andhra Jana Sangham became the Andhra Mahasabha, whose first session met at Jogipet in 1930 under Suravaram Pratapareddy and passed resolutions on child marriage and widow remarriage. Later sessions took up schooling in the mother tongue, tenancy and vetti, the unpaid labour owed by villagers to local officers.
परिणाम: Thirteen sessions were held before 1946, and the Mahasabha gave the Telugu-speaking districts of the state their first standing public forum.
The Adilabad forest agitation1928–1940
Gond cultivators in the Asifabad and Jodeghat tracts pressed for recognition of their podu clearings and against eviction by forest officers and jagirdars, under the leadership of Kumram Bheem. The campaign ran as an intermittent forest agitation over more than a decade.
परिणाम: Bheem and fifteen others were killed in an encounter with armed police under the taluqdar of Asifabad in 1940; the date is given variously as April and October. The state then commissioned the anthropologist Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf to inquire into conditions in the forest, and the Hyderabad Tribal Areas Regulation was enacted in 1946.