Ants Among Elephants

by Sujatha Gidla

  There were systems of servitude in every part of India, but none was as ruthless as the vetti system in Telangana, the heartland of the Nizam’s kingdom of the Deccan. Just as the mention of the castle of Dracula made the villagers of Transylvania tremble, the dora’s gadi struck terror in the hearts of Telangana peasants. It was a symbol of tyranny, slavery, and cruelty, a place of torture, rape, and murder. No one wanted to go anywhere near the dora’s gadi if he or she could help it.

  It wasn’t just untouchables who were subjected to inhuman treatment under the rule of the doras. Every caste suffered. Under the system of vetti, everyone was forced to provide goods and services to the dora on demand and without compensation.

  The potters had to make pots for the dora’s household. The weavers had to make clothes for him and all the members of his family and their retinue of servants and slaves. The cobblers had to make them shoes. The carpenters had to fashion and repair the tools of the dora’s fields and make improvements on his houses. The toddy tappers, who distill palm sap into country liquor, had to keep the dora’s glasses full.

  The villagers who did not have anything to give the dora had to provide him free services. The barbers had to cut the hair, shave the faces, and bathe and massage with oil the bodies of all the male members of the dora’s family. The washer people had to wash clothes for the dora’s household and rub his feet until he fell asleep. The diggers had to build embankments on the dora’s lands. Those who had no special skill had to labor in the dora’s fields, to carry things for him, to do any work he gave them.

  When the dora and his family had to go somewhere, they often traveled in palanquins. The men of the besta (fisherman) and boya (stonecutter) castes were forced to bear the dora’s palanquin on their shoulders, carrying the dora from village to village. Other times the dora might travel by horse or bullock cart. When he did, a man of the washerman caste would have to run before the horse as a path clearer and another behind as an escort.

  These lowly service castes weren’t the only ones who suffered under the vetti system. Brahmins had to perform ritual services for the dora. Grocers had to keep him supplied with provisions. If an item was out of stock, a merchant was expected to procure it specially for the dora—all for free.

  The whole village was the dora’s, along with everything in it. If anyone so much as picked up a twig from the ground for his hearth, he could be fined and beaten.

  All the women in the village belonged to the dora, too. If he called them while they were eating, they had to leave the food on their plates and come to his bed. Untouchable girls were chosen at a young age to live in the house of the dora, where they served as concubines for him and his relatives and guests. When the dora’s daughter got married and went to live in her husband’s village, these slave girls went with her as part of her dowry like pots, pans, and other chattel.

  At the head of the doras stood the Nizam. His regime was their regime. Wealth from the dora’s estates flowed into the treasury of the Nizam’s government in the form of taxes. Some doras received their lands from the Nizam in exchange for maintaining his troops.

  The Nizam himself was not merely the doras’ overlord, he was the greatest dora of all. Ten thousand square miles of land spread throughout his realm were set aside to meet his personal expenses.

  The impoverishment of his subjects was the source of the Nizam’s riches. The splendor of his court had its corresponding cost in human blood and human dignity. The gardens and monuments, the learning and fine arts, the banquets and moonlit dances—all that delighted the senses and elevated the spirits of the Nizam and his court—required the suffering and degradation of millions of human beings.

  *

  EVEN THE WEALTHY MIDDLE CLASSES in Telangana were oppressed under the Nizam’s regime. The rich peasants were squeezed by competition with the doras for land and labor. The merchants didn’t like having to supply things for free. Educated professionals, in particular, resented the lack of basic democratic rights, especially the right to use their own language and to practice their religion freely. For while the Nizam was Muslim and spoke Urdu—the language of Muslims in India—the great majority of his subjects in Telangana were Hindus who spoke Telugu.

  Under the Nizam’s rule, Urdu was the only medium of instruction allowed in schools and universities. Urdu and English were the official languages of the court and public administration. Only those literate in Urdu were able to get government jobs or conduct official business, while the use of Telugu was suppressed.

  Under these conditions, some adventurous Hindu youths—brahmins and reddys, the sons of merchants and rich peasants, who had some means but no future in the kingdom of the Nizam—turned to an organization that came to be known as the Andhra Maha Sabha (AMS)—the Andhra Society. Founded by urban, middle-class professionals, the AMS stood for the promotion of Telugu culture. They wanted to win civil liberties for Telugu speakers under the rule of the Nizam.

  Their demands were small. They wanted the right to print newspapers and books in their own language. The right to speak Telugu in public, to organize Telugu literary associations, to celebrate Hindu festivals freely.

  But the Nizam would not relax his iron fist. And the direct agents of the British crown were no more sympathetic. In a meeting with Sir Richard Chenevix Trench, a British army officer and high official in the Nizam’s executive council, and J. E. Armstrong, the Hyderabad police commissioner, some AMS leaders tried to explain that their organization was not a political organization. They merely wanted to spread knowledge by establishing libraries. And who could object to the spread of knowledge?

  Mr. Armstrong replied, “Sir, I know from my experience in Bengal what a library movement means. It is nothing but a revolutionary movement.”

  British demands to maximize revenues were the source of Telangana’s misery. These demands could only be satisfied by the cultivation of cash crops. But the sandy soil of Telangana had never been fit for anything but subsistence farming. To grow tobacco and cotton required large-scale irrigation. It required the eviction of small peasants from their family plots to assemble vast tracts of land. It required gangs of servile labor to work these plantations.

  So under a series of so-called land reforms encouraged by the British, a class of great landlords, or doras, was created. These doras were made owners of lands so vast they commonly spread out over several villages, lands that had formerly been cultivated by hundreds or thousands of individual families. The small peasants and low-caste artisans evicted from these lands were turned into dependent laborers. And the untouchable laborers were enslaved. Although based on traditional caste hierarchies, the vetti system was not a traditional system. However antiquated it appeared, it was unknown before the end of the nineteenth century. Like chattel slavery in the Americas, it was a modern product of the capitalist world market.

  The British supported the Nizam in his suppression of Telugu libraries and any other measure he found necessary to maintain his autocratic rule. His rule was their rule, too. Long ago, in recognition of the Nizam’s dynasty’s help in crushing the great native uprising of 1857, the British had conferred upon the Nizams yet another title to add to the already long list they bore:

  F.A.B.G.

  Faithful Ally of the British Government

  *

  THE MILITANT EDUCATED YOUTH WHO joined the AMS had a different outlook from that of the older, city-dwelling members. For one thing, they had grown up in the villages as the sons of rich peasants. They knew the conditions in the countryside. For another thing, many had traveled outside Hyderabad and seen the nationalist movement firsthand. They knew that a tiny association of middle-class professionals such as the AMS, however noble and enlightened its positions, could not achieve reforms on its own. That required mass support.

  The younger members therefore called on the AMS to take up social questions of concern to the surrounding rural population. They wanted the AMS to agitate for a ban on child marriage, for compulsory
primary education, for a lower tax rate on the peasantry. The older membership of the AMS didn’t disapprove of such causes, but the tone of the younger members and some of the tactics they proposed were not at all to their liking.

  Soon the younger members found an ideology that suited their appetites. They made contact with the Andhra Communists. Communists could not organize openly in the Nizam’s autocracy, where even meetings of literary discussion groups had to be cleared in advance with the police.

  The younger members within the AMS gave the Communists political cover to operate in Hyderabad. Meanwhile, the Communists gave their supporters in the AMS more than ideas. They sent personnel and material support. The Communists built the AMS into a Hyderabad unit of the party in all but name.

  With the help of the Communists, the AMS was transformed into a different kind of organization. Membership fees were reduced from one rupee to one anna, a sum all but the poorest could afford to part with. A membership drive in the countryside recruited 100,000 new members. Thousands of them flocked to the 1944 AMS conference. They decisively outnumbered the supporters of the old, moderate leadership, who walked out in revulsion. The new mass party championed social reforms such as the abolition of vetti, ownership rights for peasant proprietors, and the lowering of agrarian taxes.

  The demands of the AMS were radical, but not too radical. They did not include a call to abolish the Nizam’s tyranny. In time, that would change.

  And certainly nothing in their program called for seizing the doras’ vast landholdings and distributing them to peasant cultivators.

  But that, too, would change.

  The new Communist leaders of the AMS had swollen its membership rolls through mass recruitment of poor peasants. But they did not set out to do anything with the AMS branches they’d founded except spread propaganda. They had no plan to organize mass actions to fight for the reforms they talked about.

  But the tens of thousands of poor, illiterate peasants had had a different idea when they handed over their hard-earned membership fee. They thought they were buying their freedom with one anna. They thought the little paper receipt they got in return for this fee was a passport out of vetti servitude.

  Acting on this conception, they soon put the AMS—and the Communist Party, for by now there was no practical distinction between the two—to the test. The masses called their leaders’ bluff. Starting with a poor peasant woman named Ailamma.

  Ailamma and her family, washer-caste people, were vetti slaves of one of the cruelest doras in Telangana. Only after they performed their vetti duties in the dora’s household and his fields were they allowed to work on their own meager two acres of land.

  When a sangham (local chapter) of the AMS was set up in their village, Ailamma’s husband and son were among the first to join. But the dora sent his goondas to round up the sangham leaders and drag them to his gadi, where they were tortured. Ailamma’s husband and son were imprisoned there.

  Meanwhile, Ailamma’s harvest came to hand. She had no one to help her bring it in. She knew that once she reaped the crop, the dora’s men would come and loot it.

  So Ailamma went to the sangham leaders to ask for men to stand guard while she reaped. The leaders—poor peasants and vetti slaves like Ailamma herself—had never thought of using such tactics. Their activity was limited to signing up new members and submitting petitions. But they listened to Ailamma’s plea. Inspired by her courage, twenty-eight youths volunteered to form a cordon around her as she reaped. When the dora’s men arrived, they saw the sangham youths armed with slings and sticks. Not being used to resistance, they turned away. Ailamma reaped her crop and the youths helped her carry it home safely.

  The dora could not let this go. His rule was based on fear. If one woman could defy him, what was to stop the others? He sent his men to throw stones at the sangham leaders’ houses, knowing this would provoke a protest march to his gadi. There his goondas, from hiding, opened fire. One sangham member, a cattle herder named Doddi Komurayya, was hit in the stomach. He fell to the ground, dead.

  But the sangham members did not run in fear. They raised a cry: “Blood for blood!” The goondas fled for safety behind the gadi’s high, fortresslike walls. The people of the village surrounded the gadi, chanting, “Blood for blood!”

  As the news spread to other villages, a crowd of two thousand gathered on the spot. They fought off a troop of two hundred goondas sent to disperse them.

  The next day, not one tree remained in the dora’s mango grove. And not one wall was left standing in the courthouse where the sangham leaders had been tortured.

  This was the beginning. The struggle spread from village to village. In village after village the dora was forced to flee and his lands were divided up among the villagers. Within weeks as many as four hundred villages had been liberated by peasant governing committees.

  These peasant governing committees formed village defense forces. It wasn’t just men who joined. Children twelve years or older were allowed to fight, and women also. Women, those slaves of slaves, who had never had a say in anything. Small, frail, weak, voiceless, inferior women. They, more than men, were eager to take up weapons.

  The Communist Party had planned none of this. It took them by surprise.

  The peasants themselves, not the party, embarked on the path of mass struggle. When that struggle broke out, they asked the Communists for leadership. The Communists were content to organize these militants into defensive formations wielding sticks and stones against their enemies. To these weapons the peasants added spades and hammers, sickles and axes, large pestles used for pounding grain. At home they kept reserves of chili powder on hand and cauldrons of boiling oil or water to throw in the face of invaders. These primitive methods had surprising success against the doras’ goondas, who were ill trained, poorly armed, and cowardly.

  But they were useless in fighting off the Nizam’s police and army. When these forces moved in over the following months, even the heroism of the peasant militants could not make up the difference. The doras returned. The uprising was practically extinguished.

  The will to fight and die was not enough. To survive, to advance, the struggle needed leadership. It needed coordination. It needed training. More than anything, it needed guns.

  It was only a year after the struggle started that the Communist Party began to provide these things. They regrouped the scattered remnants of the peasant resistance and began to recruit offensive guerrilla units at the district and regional level. Only then, after much hesitation, did the Communists allow the fighters to seize guns and train them to use them.

  The Communists, finding themselves at the head of a mass struggle, finally agreed to lead it. But to do so, they had to adopt the movement’s basic aim.

  What the peasants had wanted from the beginning, when they’d first come together to defend Ailamma’s crop, and had been acting on ever since, at their own initiative, was to seize control over their own means of life. They wanted land. They forced the Communists to take up this fight, to raise the slogan “Land to the tiller!”

  By the time the Communists came around, it wasn’t only the police and the army they had to fight. The Nizam had let loose an even dirtier force—the genocidal Razakars.

  The Razakars were a Muslim-chauvinist, pro-Nizam militia. With India’s independence on the agenda, the Nizam feared that the new government would invade and hold a referendum to force him to cede power. Hindus made up 90 percent of his subjects. The purpose of the Razakars was to slaughter and terrorize as many Hindus as possible before a vote was taken. They were recruited from among the poorest Muslims under the slogan “We are the rulers.”

  Trained as paramilitary shock troops, these Razakars, or “volunteers,” unleashed systematic violence upon Hindus as well as secular-minded Muslims, subjecting whole villages to orgies of murder, torture, looting, arson, and rape. They especially liked to stab a man in the rectum with a long sword, twist it around inside him, and pull it out wi
th such force that his guts fell out in a heap. They wrapped people in dry hay and set fire to them, watching them roast alive. They spread-eagled babies and nailed them to walls.

  And so the Deccan came under the spell of demons. Under the three-pronged attack of the police, the army, and the Razakars, Telangana became a death camp, a cemetery, a ghost land.

  But the poor peasants kept fighting.

  They wanted freedom from bondage. They wanted land. They wanted dignity.

  The touchables and the untouchables. The Hindus and the Muslims. The men and the women. The young and the old.

  With their sticks and slings and chili pots and as many rifles as they could steal, they fought on. By August 1948, their revolt had spread to more than three thousand villages.

  A red dragon was making its way across the kingdom of the Nizam.

  *

  PITCHAYYA, SATYAM SOON REALIZED, WAS a Communist Party member. Being a student was only a cover for his party work, which included recruiting new members and sympathizers from the college. Pitchayya introduced Satyam to two men who, like him, had been inspired by Pitchayya’s accounts of the Telangana Armed Struggle. These were Manikya Rao and Hanumayya, two young lecturers at the college.

  Meeting these men made Satyam feel lucky to have chosen to go to A.C. College after all. Had he gone to Hindu College, he would have had no dearth of friends—his old high school friends had all ended up there—and plenty of opportunity for political activity as a leader in the Youth Congress. But the new friends he made at A.C. College were worth more than his old ones. He looked up to them, and they opened a new world for him.

  Hanumayya came from the low vaddera caste. He was a brilliant philosophy lecturer, and like Satyam he had a great love for Telugu literature, especially poetry.

  Manikya Rao was an untouchable Christian from Guntur, one of the “traditional Christians” the town was known for. His father was a reverend, not a two-bit pastor like the ones Satyam had known in his childhood who preached in makeshift churches with no furniture or toured the villages, collecting eggs, vegetables, and dung cakes for their services. Manikya Rao’s family was highly educated, highly cultured, and well-off compared to other untouchables. At the age of twenty-three, Manikya Rao had read the Bible, both Old and New Testaments, from cover to cover twenty-three times. Now that he was a Communist, he would never look at that book again. Handsome and well built, he was as good a volleyball player as he was a mathematics lecturer.