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.
Class conflict
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’.
Between 1900 and 1920, Rampa comprised of about 230 villages and Gudem 411 villages, with their population being about 28,000 and 22,000 respectively. The population density was 40 per sq. km for Rampa and 30 per sq. km for Gudem.
This had given the rebels immense scope to strike and hide, without being detected for days and months.
While the first Gudem rebellion was witnessed between 1845 and 1848, the first Rampa rebellion was in 1840.
Setback for the Army
Both the rebellions had been against the British for placing the wife and daughter as the heir of the ‘Mansabs’ (a group of muttas come under a Mansab), after the death of the Mansabdars who lived in the plain areas.
The British had sent forces to quell it, but failed miserably, especially in Rampa, where the rebellion was led by Tamman Dora, a muttadar of Bondapalli mutta, in the Central Rampa region.
In one strike, he had killed 12 policemen and injured 20 others, an he became an hero overnight.
P.B. Smollet, the then agent (a sort of district collector) for Vizagapatam, and Lt. Col. J. Campbell of the Madras Army had attributed the failure to inclement climate, flood, forest and terrain, seasonal fevers and guerilla tactics of the tribal people.
They had noted that the enemy was hardly seen, as it struck and scooted off into the forest, and the Army could do little.
As information about military advances usually reached them in advance, the rebels used to vacate villages, hide foodgrains in the forest, and disperse cattle. As a result, empty villages used to greet the Army.
In the first phase, the rebellions at both the places lasted till 1862. In the second phase, the rebellion lasted from 1879 to 1916, until the final one headed by Alluri Sitarama Raju from 1922-24.
Violence
The second phase was more violent and had been against the British establishment directly. They were led by tribal leaders such as Chendrayya, Tagi Virayya Dora, Karam Tamman Dora (nephew of earlier Tamman Dora), and Konda Bhima Reddi.
During this period, a number of police stations had been attacked, looted and torched, and it spread from Rampa and Gudem to Malkangiri in Orissa.
The police stations at Addateegala, Konda Kamberu, Paderu, and Malkangiri had been attacked. Tamman Dora was feared by the British. After he was killed, his head was severed from his body and put on public display in Rajahmundry. Bhima Reddi of Rekapalle had gone to the extent of attacking and looting a military steamer, Shamrock, up the Godavari river.
Except for the one led by Alluri Sitarama Raju, the other rebellions were not a mass movement.
Being rebellious by nature, the tribal people were easy recruits for the CPI (Maoist) in the early phase of the movement from 1980s to about 2010.
Being averse to being subservient to outsiders, acceptance was an issue. This blew up into a leadership and area dominance tussle between the tribal and non-tribal leaders. And finally, the Maoists had to beat a hasty retreat.
As Thomas Munro (1823), Governor of Madras, had noted after the failure of military campaigns, “It is best to leave them alone.”
