We were aware of these dangers. But they did not frighten us. We knew they were part of a revolutionary’s life. In fact, we dreamed of how heroic it would be to face repression without betraying the party or losing our revolutionary zeal.
Then I myself faced it.
When I was nineteen, I left home to enroll in a master’s program at the Regional Engineering College in Warangal. It was the same REC where my uncle did political work while teaching at nearby St. Gabriel. Thanks to him, by the time I got there student life was dominated by the Radicals, and many faculty were Naxalite sympathizers.
When I was in second year, it was brought to our attention that an uppercaste professor in the electronics engineering department was passing all the students of his own caste with high marks and failing his low-caste students. We warned the professor to stop this practice, but he did not listen. Then we took the matter to the principal. To our surprise, the principal, who never used to disagree with us, sided with the professor. So we called a strike. All the students left except those leading the strike. Not being on the strike committee, I went home.
A few days later, a large police van stopped in front of my house, and a number of police got out. The sub-inspector came inside and told my parents he was arresting me and transporting me to Warangal. Then he took me away.
I was one of dozens of students and workers (including the physician at the campus medical center) to be thrown in jail in retaliation for the strike. I was the only girl among them. The police made it impossible for our families to find us by continually moving us from one precinct to another. We were deprived of food and water and sanitary facilities for long periods and tortured. They beat us with sticks, with ropes. I heard a deputy superintendent of police tell two female cops, “Beat her until I can see the welts on her.” They stuck pins under our nails. We did not know how long this was going to go on. Weeks went by.
Not knowing where I was or even what the charges against me were, my mother went to the state capital of Hyderabad to find a famous civil rights lawyer named Kannabiran and ask him to file a habeas corpus.
In response, the police finally moved me to the Central Jail—the same one where my uncle had spent some time. My parents had to fight hard to get me out on bail. I’d been locked up for three months. During this time, I contracted tuberculosis.
Although no charges had been filed, the police issued a warning that if I wanted them to leave me alone, I must get out of Warangal and never return. I had no particular reaction—since the day I’d been arrested my mind had gone blank and I’d just let things happen to me—but my parents were upset that I wouldn’t be allowed to finish my master’s program. They got an appointment with the assistant superintendent of police to make a special plea to let me finish. The ASP was reluctant. He made my parents promise that I would not talk to anyone—anyone at all—while I finished my degree, and that once I did, I would leave. The principal, professors, students, administrative staff, and campus workers were all warned not to talk to me.
I lost one year. When I went back to school, I was still recovering from tuberculosis. My father came to stay with me for five months, taking care of me and himself contracting the disease. Under close surveillance and constant harassment by the Warangal police, I finished my master of science in technology and left Warangal.
My arrest had an indelible effect on my family. We were socially ostracized. Christians, especially, avoided us. There was little chance anyone would want to marry me or my siblings. Even those who sympathized with us kept away for fear of police harassment. Of all of us, my sister, Anitha, a twenty-year-old first-year medical student at the time, suffered most. But none in the family, including my beloved grandmother, reproached me for my radical activities or my mother for having steered me in that direction.
All the Radicals had been arrested. Because I was held in women’s jails, I did not know what had happened to my friends, but my mother found out while she was running around from precinct to precinct searching for me. Ashok, Johnayya, Satyam, and others from impoverished untouchable families with illiterate parents were not so lucky as me. They spent even more time in police custody, where they continued to be subjected to torture. They had no one to file habeas corpus or post bail on their behalf. Later I heard that one of them had a heart attack and died soon after his release and another hanged himself. Worse still was the fate of some young tribal dishwashers in the REC messes who were friendly with the Radicals. They were arrested at the same time as us, but not taken to any jail. They were never heard from again, and it was presumed they had been shot dead.
The party stayed away from me while I was under surveillance, but after I graduated and came back home, the district organizers started coming by my house again to talk to me. My parents told them they didn’t think it was a good idea, but they ignored them. Once when my parents were not around, one party representative asked me, “Now that you’ve finished your education, what about going full-time?” This would have meant going underground to become a full-time party worker. Once a person goes underground, he or she will be wanted by the police.
Before my arrest, I would have accepted immediately. But after all my parents had been through, I said I wanted to think about it.
The party representative took me to a house in a nearby town where a man was waiting for me in a small room. The representative left me with this man, who introduced himself by his party name, Exiled Sun. I could tell he was a top underground leader. He sat with me for eight hours continuously and explained how ennobling it was to dedicate one’s life to the revolution. I just listened and said nothing. It became clear to Exiled Sun that I wasn’t interested. The party representative returned to take me home.
Shortly after this episode, the same party representative came to our house one evening when everyone was home. He told us in a quiet voice that he had some important news: the party had expelled SM.
The news was shocking because to everyone I knew, SM was the party. He was the one who drew intellectuals and students to PWG politics and, with his slogans and poems and songs and the people’s theater troupe he inspired, invested the party’s program with a romantic aura. It would be no exaggeration to say that because of him the PWG had become the most successful guerrilla party in the subcontinent, except perhaps for the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka.
He was expelled, we were told, because he had turned traitor and tried to divide the party. I instantly spat out, “That traitor!” Despite my decision not to go underground, I was still staunchly loyal to the party. I made sure to be firm in my denunciation to show I was not swayed by the family relation. My mother, on the other hand, wanted to know exactly what he had done. They could only say that things would become clearer in time. When my mother asked if there were any documents, they said they would try to get her some.
Soon after, I got a job as a research assistant in the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Madras. There was no RSU or PWG in Madras, but that didn’t matter to me. I was twenty-two years old. I wasn’t thinking of revolution or even of my own future. I made new friends and went out in the city with them. We went shopping or to movies, restaurants, the beach. I had boyfriends and loved to stay up late either in the Precision Engineering and Instrumentation Lab with Hegde as he did his M.S. or in the Holography Lab with Masalkar as he did his Ph.D. I listened to Western music and read novels.
After I had been in Madras for a year, the attendant at the hostel announced one Sunday that I had a visitor. This man, in his late twenties, introduced himself as Usa and told me in a whisper, “I’m a friend of your uncle’s.” SM had sent him to explain why he had been expelled, Usa said, so that I could tell the world.
In 1984, KS had been arrested while waiting for a train and thrown in prison. During that time SM, who had been second-in-command, took over as general secretary of the PWG. Seizing the opportunity, a group of young untouchable members approached him and complained of casteist practices in the underground functionin
g of the party. They pointed out that when members were recruited, they were assigned duties according to their caste. Barber-caste members were told to shave their comrades’ chins, and washer-caste members to wash their comrades’ clothes. Untouchables, of course, were made to sweep and mop the floors and clean the lavatories.
Talk of caste feeling inside the party had always been taboo. But the political climate had changed in the wake of a shocking massacre that year in the village of Karamchedu, where an entire madiga settlement was brutally attacked by a mob of two thousand kamma men, killing eleven, after a madiga woman complained that the kammas were washing their buffaloes in the madiga drinking-water tank. Awareness of casteism as a political question was spreading among untouchables. The college-educated young untouchable members who spoke to SM had joined the party precisely because they saw it as the best way to fight against the system that bred such injustices. When they joined, they were not given a gun. Instead they were handed a broom and told to sweep the floors. They called on SM to raise this question.
SM himself had received his share of casteist insults from uppercaste members who were close to him. They were known to leave small amounts of money in the bathroom to see if he would pocket it. He had brushed this behavior aside as the product of backward social attitudes that had inevitably seeped into the party from outside and would surely wither away as it grew in strength. But now he could no longer close his eyes.
After KS escaped in an ambush organized by SM, he returned as party leader. Once he was back, SM called a Central Committee meeting to discuss the complaints the young members had aired. SM barely had a chance to finish presenting his document. The reaction of the other leaders was swift and ruthless. He was expelled on the spot for “conspiring to divide the party.”
After his expulsion SM and his companion, a young woman named Parvathi, went on the run. Their lives were in danger from both the police and the PWG.
I didn’t know what to do with this information and didn’t take the mission I was given seriously. But when I went home on vacation some time later, I learned my mother, too, had been contacted and told the same thing. She showed me a letter she had written to the widely read daily newspaper Udayam, exposing, first, that SM had been expelled from the PWG, and, second, the real story behind his expulsion. But she was not sure what good it would do or who would care.
I insisted that we take the letter in person to the Udayam office. There we met with a subeditor named Vasanta Lakshmi, who took it upon herself to see that it was printed. When the letter came out, it sent shock waves through Andhra.
A few months later Vasanta Lakshmi’s lover, a young journalist named Tripuraneni Srinivas, managed to contact my uncle and conduct a series of interviews with him, which, when they were published in Udayam, gave wide publicity to the casteism inside a so-called communist party. Until that time, the general public had not been aware that SM was an untouchable. He was known only as a founder and leader of the PWG and a great poet.
As this drama was unfolding, I was preparing to take the GRE, as everyone in every IIT does in his or her final year. I was accepted into a graduate program in America and came here to enroll, leaving everything behind.
After four years on the run with a price on his head, SM made a bold move and appeared unexpectedly in front of thousands of people in a public meeting held by the Revolutionary Writers’ Association as part of their annual conference. The organizers were stunned when he climbed up onstage, took the microphone, and began addressing everyone present, including reporters and police. He announced that he was unarmed, that he had been expelled from the PWG, and that he was surrendering to the police. He made clear he was surrendering only legally, not politically. With this statement, he bound the hands of the police because they could no longer claim he was killed in an encounter. He explained why he had been expelled. Some PWG members present then tried to remove him from the podium by force, but several young untouchables in the audience rose silently in his defense, rolling up their sleeves. The support he attracted from untouchables was to save his life. The PWG could not harm him without alienating the largest section of their base. And despite his surrender, he was never arrested.
My uncle’s expulsion came at a time of sharpening conflict between the landed castes and landless untouchables. Due to economic changes over the previous decades, untouchable laborers had started seeing themselves as wage workers rather than servants of the landlord. The landlords reacted with murderous violence. In 1991, six years after Karamchedu, eight malas were massacred by reddy landlords in the village of Tsundur. The bodies were chopped up and tossed into an irrigation canal.
SM went and settled in that village, leading the agitation from there. With the help of several civil rights lawyers, including a young brahmin named Chandra Sekhar, SM conducted an investigation of the incident. While other untouchable leaders were calling solely for legal recourse against the accused, SM sought to organize untouchables in self-defense. Fifty-six men were charged with murder. SM did not live to see the end of the case, but through his participation in this struggle he established himself as a leader of the untouchable masses of Andhra.
Two years later, he started an agitation to commute the death sentences of two untouchable youths who were waiting to be hanged. Although there had been movements worldwide against capital punishment, the cause was not popular in India. When the youths were spared, SM became a legend in the districts of Guntur and Ongole.
All throughout his career in the Communist movement, my uncle had avoided talking too much about caste. He shared the view that the toilers should only be organized to fight for the demands of the whole class, not for those of particular groups. After his expulsion, he took the opposite position. He decided that uppercaste peasants and toilers couldn’t be won to a truly revolutionary program. He tried to organize untouchable and low-caste peasants on a caste basis as a revolutionary vanguard. Others would be allowed to join but not to serve as leaders. To the end of his life, when he was barely able to walk and had to rely on his supporters to carry him on their backs through the jungles, he was trying to start such a party.
On April 17, 2012, two days after I finished writing the introduction at the start of this book, I woke to find my uncle’s death was national news in India. Thousands thronged to get a last glimpse of him. Even his worst political rivals showed up. For days all the TV channels in Andhra ran nothing but programs on his life and legacy. The newspapers were full of his poetry. Processions in his memory went on for weeks afterward in cities, towns, and villages across the state. It all came as a great surprise to his family. We never realized he was loved by so many, and so much.
I still look forward to a day when there are no poor people in the world, and I agree with my uncle that it will take a revolution to achieve this. But I disagree with the programs and tactics he espoused both before his expulsion and afterward, including his different views on the strategic role of the struggle against caste oppression.
In 1928, a major strike wave in the textile mills in Bombay under the leadership of the Communist Party threatened to turn into a general strike against colonial rule. But the strike failed because the workers were divided in several ways, including on caste lines. For many years, the caste workers organized by the Communists refused to work alongside untouchables in the weaving department, demanding that untouchables be confined to the lowest-paid jobs, in the spinning department. During the strike, at the urging of their leader Ambedkar, who argued that they had the most to lose and nothing to gain, the untouchable workers crossed picket lines. When finally toward the end of the strike, as the workers were already starving, the union agreed to include a demand to open the weaving department to untouchable workers, the management said that if keeping them out was an injustice, it was entirely the doing of the caste workers themselves. Had the union fought for the rights of untouchable workers from the start, the struggle might have turned out differently.
ACKNOWLEDGM
ENTS
The author would like to thank Alan Horn, Laird Gallagher, Ken Alper, Professor Kontham Purushotham, Gita Ramaswamy, and Stephany Evans.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sujatha Gidla was born an untouchable in Andhra Pradesh, India. She studied physics at the Regional Engineering College, Warangal. Her writing has appeared in The Oxford India Anthology of Telugu Dalit Writing. She lives in New York and works as a conductor on the subway. You can sign up for email updates here.
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Introduction
Prelude
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Afterword
Acknowledgments
A Note About the Author
Copyright
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011
Copyright © 2017 by Sujatha Gidla
All rights reserved
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