THE STATUE OF CHITYALA AILAMMA is a recent addition at the Krishna Kanth Park junction, close to my working-class neighbourhood in Hyderabad. The arrival of the towering statue, with her hand holding up a baton, emphasises the mainstreaming of Telangana icons following the bifurcation of Andhra Pradesh. In the 1940s, Ailamma’s fight for her land became the tipping point for the Telangana People’s Struggle against the Nizam. Long before the appearance of such statues, however, the legend of Ailamma rolled off the tongues of people in the region through songs and stories told by women. Her remarkable story presents one of the rare acknowledgements of Bahujan women in the movement.
Public meetings held by sangham members—as people associated with the communist-dominated Andhra Mahasabha were referred to at the time—typically included songs and performances modelled after the region’s folk culture. These became the cultural medium for the people’s struggle:
Tiragabaddanadu uyyalo, undura ee doralu
uyyalo
Oorelli povuduru uyyalo, ee bhumi manadamma
uyyalo
The day we revolt, o’ cradle, will these landlords
be around, o’ cradle?
They will flee the village, o’ cradle, this land is
ours, o’ cradle
In April 1944, various sangham members and residents of the Jangaon taluk, in Nalgonda district, gathered at the inauguration of a public library at Palakurthi. The atmosphere was tense because they were anticipating a backlash from feudal landlords and the police. Mallu Swarajyam, a young communist leader, sang at the event before it was disrupted by goons sent by Visnur Ramachandra Reddy, a landlord who owned around a hundred and sixty square kilometres of land across Jangaon. The event resulted in violence and the eventual arrests of 12 people, including Ailamma’s husband and sons, and Swarajyam’s brother.
The attack was an attempt to intimidate Ailamma and stop her from cultivating land. She had leased farmland from a neighbouring landlord. Swarajyam recollected in a 2015 interview that this had enraged Reddy: “How can a Chakali cultivate land?” Chakali was a reference to her caste—she was often called Chakali Ailamma—whose traditional occupation was washing clothes.
When Reddy threatened her, Ailamma stood her ground and cursed him. “I have the sangham chitti”—membership slip—“in my kongu”—hem. “If you shoot me, my four sons will cultivate my four acres of land. You have thousands of acres of land and only one son. The sangham will distribute this land, and you and your son will flee this fort.”
In the 1940s, feudalism in Telangana was signified by the practice of vetti-chakiri—forced labour. Under vetti, peasants were expected to labour in the landlords’ fields before they worked on their own, and were compelled to share a part of their crop with the landlord. The exploitation was not limited to agricultural production alone. Members of Bahujan communities were expected to perform unpaid or poorly-paid labour at the landlord’s house. They were expected to declare, “Nee banchenu dora, nee kaalmokkuta”—I am your slave, I will touch your feet. As a general rule, the village was bound to the landlord, whose ownership extended to property, as well as people and their labour. Ailamma’s refusal to perform vetti had angered Reddy as well.
In her memoir Naa Maate Thupaki Toota—My Words Are Bullets—Swarajyam describes how, after her husband and sons were arrested, Ailamma packed a bundle of cold rice and left for Hyderabad to meet the prominent communist leader Ravi Na rayan Reddy. There, she “spoke to all the leaders, put it in papers, prepared petitions, got our people together at the police station to enquire into the harassment, made arrangements for their bail and so on.” Back in Palakurthi, sangham members camped at Ailamma’s house for months to protect her harvest from the landlord’s goons.
In the 1940s, feudalism in Telangana
