Before Telangana fought, it woke. In November 1921, at a public meeting in Hyderabad, a respected advocate rose to speak in Telugu, and was shouted down. From that single humiliation grew a half-century of quiet construction: libraries, a Mahasabha, schools for the untouchable poor, satyagrahas against a king. The rebellions took the headlines. This is the awakening that made them possible.
In November 1921, the Nizam State Social Reformation Conference met at the Vivekavardhini school in Hyderabad. Speakers addressed the gathering in Urdu, in Marathi, in Kannada and in English. Then Alampalli Venkata Rama Rao, a prominent Hyderabad advocate, rose to speak in Telugu, the language of the majority of the state's people, and the Marathi and Kannada attendees opposed him. The humiliated Telugu men of the city gathered at Tekumalla Ranga Rao's house on 12 November 1921 and founded the Nizam Rashtra Andhra Jana Sangam, with Madapati Hanumantha Rao playing the key role. A people had discovered, in a single evening, that even in their own capital their tongue could be silenced. They decided to organise.
What followed was not an agitation. It was something slower and more radical: the deliberate construction of a public life for a people who had been denied one. The Sangam collected palm-leaf manuscripts, researched the history of the Telugu people, established libraries, and published pamphlets against the systems that ground the poor down: against Vetti, the forced unpaid labour; against the Sirbarahi system of forced free supplies to touring officials; against the Mohturpha tax on weavers' looms. In 1930 it became the Nizam Rashtra Andhra Mahasabha, Telangana's first political organisation.
The Library Was the First Weapon
Suravaram Pratap Reddy called the library movement "the first movement in Telangana," and he meant it precisely. Its father was Komarraju Lakshmana Rao, who in 1901 established the Sri Krishna Devaraya Andhra Bhasha Nilayam at Sultan Bazar, Hyderabad, the first library of the movement, set up in Raavi Chettu Ranga Rao's own house. In a state where political meetings were banned by the Nizam's Gasthi Nishan-53 ordinance, a reading room was a parliament. Libraries spread through the towns of Telangana carrying books, literacy and the dangerous idea that the Telugu people of the Nizam's dominion had a history worth knowing.
The Mahasabha: Thirteen Sessions That Built a People
From 1930 to 1946, thirteen sessions of the Andhra Mahasabha assembled the political consciousness of Telangana, with parallel Andhra Mahila Sabhas for women, organised through the efforts of Durgabai Deshmukh. The first session, at Jogipet in March 1930, was presided over by Suravaram Pratap Reddy himself. Its resolutions read like a charter for a society being born: abolition of the ordinance banning public meetings, compulsory primary education, regional languages in the state's libraries, discouragement of child marriage, encouragement of widow remarriage, and, moved by Bhagya Reddy Varma, the abolition of untouchability.
The sessions moved through the small towns of Telangana: Devarakonda, Khammam, Sircilla, Shadnagar, Nizamabad. Each one was presided over by the men and women who would lead the next thirty years: Burgula Ramakrishna Rao at Devarakonda in 1931, Madapati Hanumantha Rao at Sircilla in 1935, Konda Venkata Ranga Reddy at Shadnagar in 1936, Raavi Narayana Reddy at Chilkur in 1941. In 1944 at Bhuvanagiri the Mahasabha split into its communist-leaning extremists and its moderates; after 1946 the extremists carried their organising into the Communist Party and the Armed Struggle, and the moderates into the Hyderabad State Congress. The Mahasabha's work was done: it had trained both.
The Awakening of the Oppressed
The deepest awakening of all was led by a man born into a Mala family in 1888. Bhagya Reddy Varma, the father of the Telangana Dalit movement, founded the Jagan Mitra Mandali in 1906 and opened his first school at Islamia Bazar in 1910, growing it into a network of Adi-Hindu schools so effective that from 1934 the Nizam's government itself took over the running of twenty-six of them. At the first Adi-Andhra conference at Vijayawada in 1917, he gave Dalits a name of their own choosing (Adi-Hindus, the original Hindus) and through his persistent efforts the derogatory old labels were removed from government records, with the Nizam's administration recording untouchables as Adi-Hindus in the 1931 census. He fought the Devadasi and Jogini systems, wrote the first Dalit story in Telugu literature, and at the All India Adi-Hindu Conference at Lucknow in 1930 presided over the gathering that unanimously chose Dr. B.R. Ambedkar as the representative of nine crore Adi-Hindus. Gandhi visited his school in 1929. He died in February 1939, thirty years too early to see any of it bear fruit.
The Organisations of the Awakening
- 1901: Sri Krishna Devaraya Andhra Bhasha Nilayam, Sultan Bazar, the first library of the Telangana library movement, founded by Komarraju Lakshmana Rao.
- 1906: Jagan Mitra Mandali, Bhagya Reddy Varma's first organisation for Dalit awareness, education and unity.
- 12 November 1921: Nizam Rashtra Andhra Jana Sangam, born from the humiliation at the Vivekavardhini meeting.
- 1930: Nizam Rashtra Andhra Mahasabha, Telangana's first political organisation; thirteen sessions from 1930 to 1946.
- 1892 onwards: Arya Samaj's Hyderabad branch at Sultan Bazar, the reform movement whose 1938–39 satyagraha filled the Nizam's jails.
- 1938: the Hyderabad State Congress, founded through the efforts of Swami Ramananda Tirtha, banned by the Nizam the same year.
Satyagraha Against a King
In 1938 the awakening turned to open defiance. The Hyderabad State Congress was announced in January 1938 by Burgula Ramakrishna Rao, Madapati Hanumantha Rao and others, and revived that July through the efforts of Swami Ramananda Tirtha. The Nizam banned it on 8 September 1938, the day before its first planned general body meeting. The reply was satyagraha: from 24 October to 24 December 1938, eighteen successive groups of satyagrahis, each led by a designated "dictator", courted arrest, beginning with Swami Ramananda Tirtha himself; the campaign was suspended only on Mahatma Gandhi's own instruction. In the same season the Arya Samaj and the Hindu Civil Liberties Union ran their own satyagraha against the Nizam's government. Pandit Narendraji was sent to Mannanur jail in the Nallamala forests, remembered as Telangana's Kalapani, and a seventeen-year-old boy who kept chanting Vande Mataram as police beat him carried the name Vandemataram Ramachandra Rao for the rest of his life.
The ban on the State Congress lasted until 1 July 1946. A year later, with independence coming to India and the Nizam refusing to join it, the awakening's last act began: the Join India movement. On 7 August 1947 Swami Ramananda Tirtha launched the Join Indian Union satyagraha and was arrested; on 15 August, Motilal Mantri hoisted the Indian tricolour at Sultan Bazar, a flag Nehru had given to Ramananda Tirtha. On Flag Day, 2 September 1947, when the State Congress called for the national flag to be hoisted across the state, Razakars and police shot dead Bathini Mogilaiah Goud and Rama Swamy Goud at Hanumakonda fort. The awakening had its first flag martyrs. Within a year, the Indian Union would settle the question by force.
The awakening did not demand a state. It demanded something prior to a state: the right of a people to speak their language, read their books, school their children and gather in public. But everything the later movements would need (the organisations, the leaders, the martyrs' example and the habit of defiance) was built here, between one humiliation in 1921 and one flag raised over Sultan Bazar in 1947. The rebellions of the same era are the other half of this story.
