Andhra Pradesh: Rising in rebellion against the British then and showing Maoists their place now
The Hindu
The Rampa and Gudem uprisings against the colonial regime and the leadership tussle in CPI(Maoist) later show that the hill tribes are averse to being subservient to outsiders
On flipping through the pages of history, one finds that the peasants have always been at the receiving end. Almost everyone — right from the kings, or ‘mansabdars’ (local zamindar), or government officials, or, for that matter, the contractors, traders, upper caste migrants and even the police — have found them to be easy targets for harassment.
During the British regime, the plight of the tribal peasants from the Gudem and Rampa areas was no different.
Located in a remote corner of the Eastern Ghats, the two regions, basically inhabited by the Koya and Konda Reddi tribes, spanning over 20,000 square miles, were once a part of the Greater Visakhapatnam district.
Now, the two regions come under the newly carved out Alluri Sitarama Raju (ASR) district.
The innocent tribal people had been subjected to oppression by outsiders such as the British administrators, members of the Indian troops, the police, and Telugu traders and contractors from the plain areas.
The administration under the colonial rulers, in its attempt to drive a wedge between the tribal communities, had promoted the local elite and fostered class identity and class conflict, which sowed the seed of the numerous rebellions, or ‘fituris’, the regions had seen, the last being led by Alluri Sitarama Raju from 1922 to 1924.
In 1880, the British had implemented the administration system followed by the Golconda kings and divided Rampa into 30 ‘muttas’ (or modern-day mandals) and Gudem into 14 muttas, with each mutta under a ‘muttadar’.