VOICES AND THE UNVOICED: WOMEN AND THE TELANGANA PEASANT INSURRECTION by Ananyo Chakrabarty

The Telangana armed rebellion (1946-51) can be rightfully termed as the most adventurous experiment of the militant peasantry in modern India. It was part of the two-cratered volcano, the other contemporaneous explosion being in Bengal in form of the Tebhaga Movement. Spanning five years, the movement in Telangana, though less widespread than the former, was the longest insurrection of its kind. The Communist Party of India (largely claimed to have) led the mobilized agrarian masses into land seizure and distribution, forming village soviets and later into a systematic guerrilla campaign, against the Nizams (hereditary monarchs of the princely state of Hyderabad) in the initial stage and then against the Indian Government which annexed the state in 1948 after the Indian liberation from colonial rule. The struggle necessarily won important victories for the peasants, with the abolition of the feudal land revenue system, and peasants (though not all-inclusively) given land ownership rights.

However, it is imperative to question whether a movement, referred to as one of the glorious precedents of organised armed resistance of the peasants aimed at bringing all-pervasive socio-politico-economic change, was really inclusive in terms of representing women’s needs and aspirations. The emergence of feminist movement in India in the past few decades compels us to examine the existing notions surrounding varied movements projected to have constituted forces of socio-political change in modern India. The insurrection in Telangana not only paved way for structural changes in the economic system of the state, but also inspired country-wide agitation for post-colonial linguistic reorganisation of provinces. We might also question whether the existing historical narratives on the movement do justice to the contribution of women in it. Finally, was the movement a tool of patriarchal institutions to fulfil objectives associating acquisition of power, appropriating women only to their advantage?

Oral sources and testimonies by women directly involved in the movement have been used as principal evidences in substantiating arguments in this essay. The over-reliance on oral sources is explained by the fact that neither the government records nor the Communist party records have sufficient documentations of the women’s voices in the Telangana uprising. A majority of feminist historians have argued in favour of oral history being the most liable methodology in this purpose.  They point out that the partial representation of credible and relevant facts in primary and secondary sources has been a result of a systematic suppression of women’s voices by structurally patriarchal institutions like the government or even traditional historical narratives. What could have been the possible motive behind a supposed suppression of relevant facts by Marxist historians and party leaders while writing narratives of the movement?

Addressing the first question, we delve into some of the root objectives of the Telangana movement. In the pre-1946 period, the movement emerged as an opposition to the economic depredation of the peasants through the feudalistic economy of the Nizam regime. A plethora of religious, linguistic and social differences too, surfaced. The Andhra Mahasabha was the organization working towards mobilising the peasants through Summer schools and peasant sanghams. The CPI united with the Mahasabha, organised resistance movements at the local levels. The key objectives of the movement at this stage, as documented in the official history of the Communist party, were to mobilise peasants to combat the exploitation by rich landowners and peasants (Doras), and to overthrow the Nizam administration through staging violent resistance movements and land distribution among peasants. Strikingly, the socio-economic culture complex of the Telangana region required women to work as independent peasants and agricultural workers on fields to support their families. Such women peasants were doubly marginalised; very few of them had ownership rights over lands and most of their produce had to be handed over to men as they were unrecognised as peasants by the government. Added to that, majority of their produce had to be given as revenue to the landlords and Nizam officials. It is safe to say that the women were merely looked on by men as mere tools of adding to the agricultural production and social reproduction. This was a primary reason of discontent among rural women and they reportedly aspired to achieve a system of equal rights for both men and women peasants. However, the party and the male peasant leaders did not seem keen to consider the voices of these marginalised women. The party failed to recognise the problems of women and seemed to look at them as mere liabilities of their men. This supposed stance of the party calls for criticism since it marked a complete rejection of women’s aspirations from the mainstream of the movement. After the withdrawal of the insurrection in 1951, no step was taken by the Indian government to secure these aspirations; neither did the CPI agitate for them.

To analyse the second and third question, we take a closer look at the contribution of women in the insurrection. It is widely regarded by both the Marxist historians and party leaders that the martyrdom of Doddi Komarayya, a communist peasant, in the hands of Razakars (private army of the Nizam), in 1946 marked the beginning of the insurrection. This view is partially correct, since the death of Komarayya was followed by a spontaneous mobilisation of rural masses into occupation and redistribution of Zamindari lands. However, projection of the aforementioned event as the only starting point of insurrection is rather incomplete. The contribution of Chakali Ilamma, a Bahujan (an outcaste) woman has been neglected by premier historians of the movement like D.N.Dhanagare, Kathleen Gough, P. Sundarayya and others. Ilamma resisted the Razakar volunteers from forcefully occupying her land leased from the landlord. She fought dauntlessly when the goons brutally murdered her husband; she protected her family and her fellow villagers from the Razakar by taking up arms. She was a prime force who not only opposed the feudal economic exploitation by refusing to work as slave, but also stood against the hyper-masculinity in the upper caste feudal domination. Her struggle marked a fight against masculinity in mechanisms of violence; she fought bands of Razakar men when they attempted to rape her. More importantly, she fought for women. She questioned the upper-caste landowning women for insisting to call them Dora (a sign of social superiority). It is safe to say that her fight was not only for gender equality, but also intersectional justice. Ilamma’s struggle marked the symbolic beginning of the Telangana insurrection, inspiring thousands of peasants, men and women alike, to follow her footsteps. However, her significant contribution to inspire the growth of a unified subaltern consciousness can be only be traced in oral sources compiled from various women directly involved in the movement. It is interesting to note that the party records and eminent historians of the Marxist tradition mentioned above do not essentially mention Ilamma’s contribution. Only in 1986, after her death, Ilamma’s role was recognised by the CPI and CPI (M) (its breakaway party) who hailed her as a crusader of women’s rights. One might criticise the communist political stance on Ilamma for its long-driven fulfilment and might question the attitude of the party leadership towards the women cadres.

Apart from Ilamma, the movement saw valuable active (and passive) participation of thousands of women from all sections of the Telangana rural society. According to Dhanagare, the party organised its women cadres into bands resisting the Nizam police and Razakars to enter their villages by throwing chilli powder at them. Thousands of women provided food and shelter to the CPI workers. However, it is to be noted that apart from these two facts about women’s contribution in the movement, nothing much has been mentioned in accounts by the eminent Marxist historians mentioned above.  However, oral accounts from women leaders like Ilamma, Manikonda Suryavarthy, Dudala Salamma testify that women too took up arms in large numbers to protect their lands and families. Women came out in thousands to participate in processions and giving speeches in platforms of the party. Even, when the movement went into its guerrilla phase, there were a considerable number of women guerrilla volunteers who left their families to fight the Indian army. One might argue that the mobilisation of the women was influenced by the elite party leadership. One might also argue that “home-centric” women might not have been able to come out in thousands without the approval of their men in a patriarchal society as that of Telangana. This argument can be considered partially. However, the principal reservation against this view might be that the women had continually reported to have been motivated by a wider consciousness. To qualify the nature of the consciousness, we can look at the oral accounts of numerous women leaders who thought themselves as a part of “a wider movement”, “a movement for a socialist order”. Principal ideas may have been propagated by the party at the elementary level of the movement. However, the aforesaid consciousness had been more unwavering and unified in women than in the male leaders. This is reflected from the rift between the male poor peasants and the rich peasants, while the latter lifted their support from the movement for their fear of being ultimately uprooted from their lands.  The inner contradictions within the male peasant class lead us to infer that self interests played a more divisive role in case of the male leaders than the women, the latter largely being unified.

Appropriation of women’s efforts has been done by the party and the historians mentioned above in different manners. The party in its official history has acknowledged women as “active participants”. The Marxist historians projected the movement as one in which women played a major role, yet only revealing discreet facts about women coming out in large numbers and forming bands.  This can be taken as an attempt to highlight women’s contributions half-heartedly to add upon the all-inclusive universal character of the movement. Presence of the aforementioned unified consciousness of women as subalterns and that of being part of a wider movement has been clearly neglected in these narratives. It is to be wondered whether the Marxist historians have tried to maintain a veil upon the fact that women were considered inferior and had been assigned their role or position in the movement by the male leadership of the party.  If this be, the attempt might have been to project the communist leadership as a liberal one, concerned deeply about gender equality in political mobilisation. However, from the oral sources, we get to know that the “Party tended to blame women for their infidelities, banned marriages, wavered about girls leaving their homes, assumed childcare was the women’s individual responsibility”. This political stance, if it had been, is bound to be criticised for its reluctance to recognise gender differences and demeaning the women’s voices inside and outside the party.

If we further look into the qualitative differences between the perception of defeat among the men and the women after the end of the insurrection, we find that both differed in emotional degree of attachment towards the cause of social change. The male leadership seemed more engaged in debating over the reasons for the movement’s failure, justifying their stances, meeting Joseph Stalin over the application of Marxist principals in India and evolving electoral strategies for the general elections of 1951. However, the women said their “dream had been crushed like an egg”. They had dreamt beyond electoral politics for a “better future”, “where women in families do not have to bend down to their men”. They dreamt of a classless society and gender equality and talked in undertones of pain and anguish. Nothing changed, and the women seemed more disheartened.

The essay is an elementary attempt to look at rural women as subalterns in Telangana insurrection and to point out how their voices have been suppressed for long by the patriarchal party leadership and the historians. Further insights into the nature and reason of such suppression can be obtained through more detailed study of the various historical sources of the movement.  

REFERENCES

1)      A.R. Desai (ed.), Peasant Struggles in India, Oxford University Press, New Delhi 1979.

2)      P. Sundarayya, Telangana People’s Struggle and its lessons, Communist Party of India (Marxist), Kolkata, December, 1972.

3)      D.N. Dhanagare, Social Origin-Peasant Insurrection in Telangana, Contributions to Indian Sociology (Journal), New Delhi, 1974.

4)      N.G. Ranga, Revolutionary Peasants, Amrit Book Co., New Delhi, 1949.

5)      Stree Shakti Sanghathana, We Were Making History: Life Stories of Women in the Telangana People’s Struggle, Zed Books, Telangana (in erstwhile Andhra Pradesh) 1989.

6)      Ranajit Guha, Partha Chatterjee (ed.), The Small Voice of History: Collected Essays, Permanent Black, India, 2009.

7)      Kathleen Gough and Hari P. Sharma (ed.), Imperialism and Revolution in South Asia, Monthly Review Press, New York.

8)      Harkishen Singh Surjeet, An outline history of the Communist movement in India, National Book Centre, 1993.

9)      Minocheher Rustom Masani, The Communist Party of India: A short history, Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, 1967.

10)  C. Rajeswara Rao, The Historic Telangana Struggle-Some Useful Lessons from its Rich Experience, Freedom Jubilee Series No.3, Communist Party Publication No.29, 1972.