For Telangana's freedom fighters, it was a dual struggle – against the British Raj and the Nizam's feudalism.
Hyderabad: Nearly eight decades ago, when India was formally declared an independent sovereign nation, Hyderabad was cautiously silent. Not that independence did not matter to Hyderabadis. It was that freedom had not arrived here.
When the British left, they left the last Nizam, Mir Osman Ali Khan, as they did the rulers of other princely states, with a choice: join India, join Pakistan or attempt to stand alone. The Nizam chose his own independence. It lasted a little over a year, at the end of which the state was annexed.
In retrospect, for the freedom fighters of Telangana, it was a dual struggle – against the British Raj on one side, and on the other, the feudalism of the princely state, an order that existed under the Nizams and had been in place from even before they arrived. Their defiance of the British and of the state made them a symbol of anti-colonial resistance in the Deccan.
There were many in Hyderabad who wanted the state to remain independent, who viewed it as an entity unto itself. There were just as many who were fiercely anti-British, despite the Nizams having signed an alliance and ruled alongside the colonisers from 1798, under the Treaty of Subsidiary Alliance, an arrangement that would hold for 150 years. The anti-colonial struggle here, in fact, began almost a century before 1947 with the revolt against the British Raj in 1857.
On July 17, 1857, after the Friday prayers at which Maulvi Syed Alauddin had preached open revolt, around 500 men marched from Mecca Masjid in the Old City to the British Residency, the building that today houses the Osmania University College for Women in Koti, and launched an attack on it. Some accounts put the crowd in the thousands.
The march was led by Turrebaz Khan, a Rohilla, and the Maulvi himself, and the immediate aim was to free Cheeda Khan, a jamedar held inside. The rebels fought through the night. By morning, the Residency walls were pockmarked and the lanes of Sultan Bazaar were strewn with bodies.
Neither man stayed free for long. Turrebaz Khan was picked up within days and sentenced to transportation for life. Alauddin went underground, sheltered by friends for a year and a half, and was finally arrested and shipped off to Kala Pani, the penal settlement in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, in June 1859.
He spent roughly 25 years there in conditions that destroyed his health. His right hand had been paralysed by a gunshot wound taken at the Residency; his repeated pleas for release on grounds of ill health were turned down and Hyderabad’s own prime minister, Salar Jung I, is recorded as having opposed them. Most accounts place his death in 1884, though documents later traced in the state archives by the historian and archivist Syed Dawood Ashraf indicate he reached Port Blair in 1860 and survived until 1889.
Khan met a darker fate. He broke out of jail in January 1859, before he could be transported, and the British put a Rs 5,000 bounty on his head, dead or alive. He was betrayed within the week and shot dead near Toopran. His body was carried back to the city and strung up in chains in public at Sultan Bazaar, as an “example” which the British intended to create amongst those who dared to rebel.
But little did they know, they had created the Deccan’s earliest martyrs.
Eight decades on, the voices of rebels rose from the dense forests of Jodeghat. Komaram Bheem, a name popularised by Junior NTR in SS Rajamouli’s “RRR,” was a living nightmare for the Nizam’s administration. He was one of Telangana’s revolutionary tribal leaders and the man who immortalised the “Jal, Jungle, Jameen” slogan still used today.
He ferociously opposed feudal oppression through guerrilla attacks, using bows and arrows and spears, ambushing police and forest officials – one of the earliest instances of organised attack tactics in the region.
Bheem was born in 1901 into a Gond family in Sankepally village, in what is now Komaram Bheem Asifabad district. He raised his voice against Siddiqui, an official of the Nizam’s establishment who had come with a local zamindar’s men to seize the community’s harvest at the height of the season.
The confrontation turned fatal. Siddiqui was killed and Bheem was forced to flee, first to Chanda, where a printing press owner running an anti-British, anti-Nizam magazine took him in, and then to Assam. He spent the next five years there working the tea plantations, learning to read and write and picking up an education in labour organising and tribal rights.
He returned in 1928, around the same time as the Nizam’s government was formalising forest boundaries, a stroke of administration that turned Adivasi land into state property overnight. Bheem led attack after attack on the Nizam’s police and forest officials, evading arrest for over a decade and drawing some 300 men from surrounding hamlets into his ranks.
His journey came to an end with a friend’s betrayal. Warned by an informer from within his own ranks, the state sent a police party into the hills. Women of Jodeghat spotted the armed men first and got word to Bheem, who understood that death was certain even in surrender. He was gunned down on October 27, 1940, along with 12 of his followers, though some accounts put the number at 15.
Adivasis mark his death anniversary by the lunar calendar, on Aswayuja Pournami, and gather at Jodeghat every year.
While Bheem fought in the forests, Telangana’s rural lanes were not far behind.
In 1930, when Mahatma Gandhi launched the Dandi March, a young Sangam Laxmi Bai joined the Salt Satyagraha. It landed her in jail for a year.
The daughter of D Ramaiah, Sangam was born in 1911 in Ghatkesar, in present-day Medchal. She was married as a child to Durga Prasad Yadav and widowed young, before she had finished being a child herself.
She chose to educate herself rather than remain in the shackles of patriarchy. She studied at Karve University and at Sharada Niketan and took her degree at the College of Arts in Madras. She had already entered politics as a student by joining the boycott of the Simon Commission.
She then turned that education into a weapon to awaken political consciousness in Telangana’s rural lanes, travelling from mandal to mandal and village to village, working mainly with women, explaining to them what the zamindari system and the Nizam’s feudalism were actually taking from them. She would go on to the Hyderabad State Assembly in 1952, serve as deputy minister for education, and represent Medak in the Lok Sabha for three terms.
Around the same time, Telangana produced its fiercest symbol in Chakali Ailamma, also known as Chityala Ailamma, a woman from an oppressed caste who brought a ruthless landlord to his knees. It may be noted that her resistance, along with that of other peasants, was directed at the feudal system and ran parallel to the freedom struggle.
Known as the Telangana Armed Struggle, this was a Communist Party of India-led rebellion against landlords that began in July 1946, a year before the British left, and was formally called off in 1951.
In late 1945, Visnoor Deshmukh Ramachandra Reddy, the most feared landlord in Jangaon taluk and the holder of tens of thousands of acres in Warangal, moved to take away the four acres Ailamma cultivated on lease. He could not stand the thought of a Bahujan woman – Ailamma belonged to the Rajaka or washerman community, known in Telugu as chakali – farming on her own terms and refusing vetti, the bonded labour owed to the landowning castes.
She refused to bow down. With a few dozen volunteers from the village, she held off a far larger force of the Deshmukh’s men, armed with slings, stones, chilli powder and sticks, and got her grain into her house. The communist leader, P Sundarayya, who chronicled the rebellion, described the episode as the spark that set the Telangana agrarian revolt alight.
She paid a heavy price for it. Her house was burnt and looted, her grain and livestock taken, her husband and sons jailed and she herself beaten until she bled. Accounts of the reprisal record that her younger daughter was raped; her husband and younger son did not survive the violence of those years.
Yet she did not yield. She became part of the larger Telangana Armed Struggle, proving that rural working-class women were at the very heart of the anti-Nizam movement.
Meanwhile, Swami Ramananda Tirtha, a staunch opponent of Mir Osman Ali Khan, was building a larger movement out of Hyderabad city.
Born Venkatesh Bhagwanrao Khedgikar in 1903 in Sindagi, in present-day Vijayapura district of Karnataka, he too, like Sangam Laxmi Bai, was deeply influenced by Gandhian ideals. At just 17, he took part in the Non-Cooperation Movement in 1920. At 29, he embraced vidwat sanyasa and adopted the name by which Hyderabad would come to know him.
Tirtha was an excellent political strategist. He was the moving force behind the founding of the Hyderabad State Congress in 1938, which the Nizam banned within days of its birth. During the 1942 Quit India Movement, he spearheaded satyagrahas across the state in defiance of that ban, calling for the complete abolition of the Nizam’s autocratic rule in the princely state. He was arrested repeatedly for it.
Throughout his life, he stood firmly by his principles of sacrifice, courage, commitment and public service. He died in Hyderabad in 1972.
Telangana also bore another brave son in Abid Hasan Safrani. Born Zain-ul-Abidin Hasan in 1911 into a family of Gandhians, with his mother, Fakhrul Hajia Hasan, herself a nationalist of some standing, he came to believe instead in the principles of Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose and that armed revolution was the only way to a free nation.
He was an engineering student in Germany when he abandoned his course to follow Bose, eventually becoming his trusted secretary and a military officer in the Azad Hind Fauj, or the Indian National Army. In 1943, when Netaji made the crossing from Germany to Southeast Asia by submarine, Hasan was the one Indian who went with him.
He preferred to be known simply as Abid Hasan. He added Safrani after observing that Hindu and Muslim soldiers were often at loggerheads over what colour the Indian flag should be – saffron or green. When the Hindu soldiers gave up their claim, he took the word for saffron into his own name as a symbol of communal harmony.
In 1941, at the Free India Centre in Berlin, he handed India its most electric, immortal rallying cry. Bose had asked for a single greeting his soldiers could use, one that cut across region and religion. Hasan offered him “Jai Hind.”
He also worked on the Hindustani translation of Rabindranath Tagore‘s “Bharoto Bhagyo Bidhata” for the INA, alongside fellow officer Mumtaz Hussain, set to music by Captain Ram Singh Thakuri and adopted as “Shubh Sukh Chain,” the anthem of the Provisional Government of Free India. The first stanza of Tagore’s original composition would later become India’s national anthem, “Jana Gana Mana.”
By the late 1940s, as the Nizam’s regime clamped down on civil liberties and unleashed the armed Razakar militia, the frontline of resistance shifted to literature. Enter Telangana’s contemporary literary icons – Makhdoom Mohiuddin in Urdu, Kaloji Narayana Rao and Daasarathi Krishnamacharyulu in Telugu.
Makhdoom Mohiuddin was born in 1908 in Andole in Medak. He was Hyderabad’s most influential Urdu poet, a communist leader and trade unionist, and one of the men at the head of the Telangana Rebellion. He was jailed in 1941 and again in 1944. From 1946, with a bounty on his head from the Nizam, he wrote revolutionary verse while leading underground resistance against the state machinery.
Then came the giant, Kaloji Narayana Rao. Born in 1914, he is regarded as a genius by many historians.
Known as the “Praja Kavi” or people’s poet, he turned his sharp, humorous, colloquial Telugu against authoritarianism of every kind – the Nizam’s and later independent India’s. Between 1939 and 1947 he was imprisoned multiple times. His legacy remains so towering that his birthday, September 9, is celebrated today as Telangana Language Day.
And then there was Daasarathi Krishnamacharyulu.
Born in 1925 in Mahabubabad, Krishnamacharyulu was a gifted student who walked away from his studies to join the movement instead. Highly inspired by Mahatma Gandhi, Kandukuri Veeresalingam and Karl Marx, he became a volunteer with the Andhra Mahasabha, the Left-aligned group fighting the Nizam’s feudal regime, and travelled village to village to organise.
Arrested in 1947, the young poet was thrown into the dark cells of Warangal and, later, Nizamabad jail. When his guards withheld paper and pens to silence him, Krishnamacharyulu refused to stop. He composed his verses orally, scrawled them onto the concrete walls with charcoal and taught them to his fellow inmates.
His first collection of poetry, “Agnidhara,” was born behind those prison bars.
He was well-versed in Sanskrit, Telugu, Tamil, Hindi, Urdu, Persian and English, and would often say that Urdu and Telugu were his two eyes, with which he read every other language.
But he is best remembered for a single line – Naa Telangana, Koti Ratanaala Veena (my Telangana is a veena studded with millions of jewels) – which, decades after he wrote it, became the anthem of the movement for a separate Telangana.
This post was last modified on August 15, 2026 11:06 am