Telangana · Deccan Inland Plateau
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.
Risings and revolts
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.
Outcome: 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.
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.
Outcome: 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.
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.
Outcome: Thirteen sessions were held before 1946, and the Mahasabha gave the Telugu-speaking districts of the state their first standing public forum.
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.
Outcome: 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.
People
| Name | Years | Movement | Known for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Komarraju Venkata Lakshmana RaoHyderabad | 1877–1923 | Library movement | Among the founders of the Sri Krishnadevaraya Andhra Bhasha Nilayam in Hyderabad in 1901 and of the Vignana Chandrika Mandali, which published Telugu works of history and science; began the first Telugu encyclopaedia project. |
| Madapati Hanumantha RaoHyderabad | 1885–1970 | Andhra Jana Sangham and Andhra Mahasabha | Secretary of the Andhra Jana Sangham from its first conference in 1922 and a principal organiser of the Andhra Mahasabha sessions; wrote the movement's own history and worked on girls' schooling in the city. |
| Suravaram PratapareddyMahbubnagar and Hyderabad | 1896–1953 | Andhra Mahasabha | Editor of the Telugu weekly Golconda Patrika from 1926 and president of the first Andhra Mahasabha at Jogipet in 1930. His social history of the Telugu people was written to answer the claim that the plateau's Telugu districts had no literature of their own. |
| Bhagya Reddy VarmaHyderabad | 1888–1939 | Adi-Hindu social reform | Founded the Jagan Mitra Mandali in 1906 and later the Adi-Hindu Social Service League, opened schools for Dalit children from 1910 and a girls' school in 1913, and campaigned against untouchability, child marriage and the dedication of girls as joginis. |
| Kumram BheemJodeghat, Adilabad | c. 1901–1940 | Adilabad forest agitation | Gond leader of the long agitation in the Asifabad tracts for recognition of podu cultivation and against eviction by forest officers and jagirdars.Killed with fifteen others in an encounter with armed police in 1940. |
| Ramji GondNirmal and Utnoor, Adilabad | died 1860 | Resistance in the Godavari forest | Gond chief who resisted the extension of outside revenue and forest authority into the northern forest around 1857.Captured and hanged on 9 April 1860. |
| Sarojini NaiduBorn and schooled in Hyderabad | 1879–1949 | Congress, Non-cooperation, Salt Satyagraha, Quit India | Poet in English and Congress organiser; presided over the Congress session of 1925 and took part in the salt campaign of 1930. Her political work was done outside Hyderabad state, in British India.Imprisoned in 1930, 1932 and again after Quit India in 1942. |
| Virendranath ChattopadhyayaBorn in Hyderabad | 1880–1937 | Revolutionary, abroad | Worked from London, Paris and Berlin; a leading figure in the India Independence Committee formed at Berlin in 1915, which sought German support for an armed rising in India.Died in the Soviet Union in 1937. |
People from Telangana who resisted colonial rule, and the regional risings and revolts that shaped that resistance. (12)