DEVULAPALLY KOTESH | 1

Reception and Dissemination of Marx's Capital in Telugu:

Language Politics and the Communist Movement

It was not before nearly a hundred and twenty years had passed since the publication of Karl

Marx’s Capital Vol. 1 in German in 1867 that a decision was taken to translate the same to

Telugu. Commissioned by the Secretariat Board of the Communist Association, an organ of the of India (CPI), the task of translation of Capital into Telugu began in August 1984 and took more than a decade to finally come to print in the year 1996 as a joint publication by Progress Publication, Moscow and Vishalandhra Vignyana Samiti. i Despite several delays involving selection of translators, setting up of guidelines for translators, continuous comparisons of the Telugu translation with the English source text and cross- checking the same with the Hindi translation, as well as financial and other technological matters, the translation of Volume I to Telugu was almost ready by 1990. However, the untimely collapse of the Soviet Union delayed the translation project further, when the support of Progress

Publication was withdrawn. It was not until September 1996 that the task was completed with the effort of five translators and the support of A.P. Communist Samiti and Vishalandhra Vignyana

Samiti, and Capital Volume I came into Telugu from . The Telugu translations of the second and third volumes of Capital were also released in November 1998 and October 2000, respectively, as part of the same project. ii The three volumes were revised and reprinted in 2017 by Vishalandhra Vignyana Samiti, when 2000 copies of each volume were printed. iii This translation is considered as the standard Telugu translation of Capital by all the Left groups, including the (Marxist) (CPI(M)). It is ironic to consider how the entry of the Capital into Telugu public life coincides with the time of the deindustrialization and the gradual withering-away of communist parties in the region. DEVULAPALLY KOTESH | 2

It is to be noted that this is despite the fact that, as early as 1988, a group of translators associated with the CPI(M) had translated the first volume of Capital to Telugu and published it from Aravinda Publishers, Vijayawada. Although not officially ratified or commissioned by the party, this translation project released the first volume in March 1988, followed by the third volume in 1992 and the second volume in 1995. After the publication of the first impression of

Aravinda’s Telugu translation of Volume I, the translation drew flak from all quarters as inaccurate and was universally criticized. Eventually, the publishers were forced to discontinue the publication of this translation, and all the books were removed from the racks. Even the

CPI(M) party extended its patronage to the Vishalandhra publication and disassociated themselves with the Aravinda translation.

Prior to the publication of the two complete translations of Capital to Telugu, there were several attempts from various Marxist intellectuals to translate different portions of the Capital as well as other communist texts about the capitalist political economy in the 1970s. Significant among these translations is a translation of a collection of articles. edited by M. Ryndina and G.

Chernikov and translated to English by Diana Miller (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1974), iv titled, ‘The Political Economy of Capitalism’, which was translated into Telugu by Rachamallu

Ramachandra Reddy (henceforth Ra Ra) as Pettubadidari Arthashashtram and published by

Progress Publishers in 1978. In the 1970s, Ra Ra also translated an excerpt from Capital Volume

I, which dealt with the process of primitive accumulation. Released by Progress separately as an independent book, titled Pettupadi Sanchayanam (The Primitive Accumulation of Capital), this was a rough translation of Part VIII of Capital Volume I. This section on primitive accumulation was revised and later brought into the Vishalandhra translation of Capital Volume I. DEVULAPALLY KOTESH | 3

Working as official translators for the Foreign Language Press in Moscow, Ra Ra joined several others, like Giduturi Suryam, Jonnalagadda Satyanarayana Murthy, Uppala Laxmana

Rao, etc., who were recruited for the same cause before him. These translators brought several creative and critical Marxist writings from English and Russian to Telugu, including The

Communist Manifesto and The Wages System by Friedrich Engels. This translation project began in the 1950s and went on till the collapse of USSR. v They also translated a vast archive of

English and Russian literature for children, including Capital for Beginners , authored by David

Smith and Phil Evans. In Telugu, this Capital for children was edited by Chekuri Ramarao and released by Hyderabad Book Trust in 1985. vi

However, none of these translations found much popularity among the struggling masses of the Telangana region or among the common Telugu speakers of Andhra. In 1995, an English daily captured this problem in a quote by a student activist, “The…translations, by Marxist ideologues, are pedantic stuff. It is difficult to read and understand them.”vii The official translation of Capital Vol.1, whose first impression was published in 1996, had released only

1000 copies in the market. Despite being ratified and patronized by the various parliamentary

Left parties, the book did not undergo any reprint until 2017, when 2000 more copies were published. Given that we are dealing here with a region mired with Left struggles of different hues and shades during the intervening decades, it becomes imperative to investigate the reasons for the unpopularity of the text even among the leaders of the Left movement in Telangana. This paper attempts to chart out the language politics of the Left movement, which may have been responsible for the rejection of this iconic text in the Telangana region.

The Emergence of Telugu Communists in Hyderabad DEVULAPALLY KOTESH | 4

Indian national politics had not entered into the Hyderabad state in an organized fashion until 1938, as the Congress and the communist parties of India were not legally sanctioned to practice their politics in the erstwhile Nizam’s Hyderabad State. Till then, most of the activities of both the Congress and communist fractions within the political territory of Hyderabad were mostly social reformatory, related to citizenship rights and the development and flourishing of regional languages and literature, the problems of the coolie and ryots, and on questions of democratic and political rights. To realize these rights, Andhra Jana Sangham was found in 1921, which later became Andhra Mahasabha (AMS) in 1930. To understand the creation, dissemination, and reception of Marxist thought in the Telugu region, especially Telangana, we need to closely look into the language politics employed by AMS. This was an umbrella organization for both the Congress and the CPI (officially formed in 1936), with the Congress appealing to the ruling elite/landed classes and the CPI to the productive social groups, especially the peasants.

Before the Telangana armed struggle actualized in the form we know it today in

June 4, 1946 with the martyrdom of Doddi Komaraiah, sporadic incidents of revolts by the productive classes, comprising poor peasants, landless agrarian labourers, and artisan caste groups, against the landlords had already began in rural Telangana by 1930s. While the food crisis, a consequence of the two world wars, and famine, etc., emaciated the village populace, the vetti viii (bonded labour) and the atrocities by the landlords ignited their anger to wage their revolt against landlordism. These revolts soon attracted the educated intelligentsia (both the Andhra immigrants as well as natives) belonging to the peasant communities, who were already active in

AMS under the influence and leadership of the immigrant brahminical upper castes from Andhra and their counterparts in Telangana. The entry of the peasant and artisan groups into modern DEVULAPALLY KOTESH | 5 education had provided them with new knowledges of geography, history, politics and society.

The knowledge of Marxism and socialist societies in the wake of the global social revolutions

(French revolution, American revolution of the late 18 th century, and the contemporary Russian revolution (1917), Chinese revolution, apart from the two world wars) generated a new social consciousness that was germinal to the constitution of modern social subjectivity. The waves of the ‘spectre of communism’ had already wooed the conscience of the young urban-educated peasant groups of the early 20 th century; by 1930s, it spread across the literate and the illiterate alike, who began chanting the slogan of communism in Telangana and elsewhere. ix

The Advent of ‘Capital’ in Telugu Heartland

As early as late 1920s and early 1930s, these intellectuals of the Teluguland began engaging with Capital as a text. The famed Meerut Conspiracy case, which went on between

1929 and 1933, saw arrests of hundreds of youth in British India who were charged with hatching a conspiracy to overthrow British sovereignty and establish a branch of Comintern in

India, with aid from the Communist International. It was in the course of the four years of the duration of the Meerut conspiracy case that a wide range of people from all walks of life, who had been introduced to socialist ideas, came together under the same roof of a prison house. One of the charges listed in the Meerut Conspiracy Case was ‘reading Karl Marx’s Das Capital ’. x

The accused included not only people who had participated in the anti-colonial struggle from the

Madras Presidency regions of but also those studying in educational institutions in other parts of the country, like Benaras Hindu University and Kashi Vidhyapeeth, where they were introduced to Marxism through their association with North Indian communists, and especially those from Bengal in Eastern India. These young students founded the ‘Young

Communist League’ in BHU and formed the ‘Socialist Study Circle’ to read the writings of DEVULAPALLY KOTESH | 6

Marx, Engels, and Lenin. xi These students were instrumental in smuggling Marxist literature into the Andhra region. One of the first Telugu Marxist works came in the form of a abridgement of

Gorky’s ‘Mother’ as Matri Hrudayam , written by Tummala Venkatramaiah. xii The entire novel was translated as Amma by Krovvidi Lingaraju in 1932 while in jail; the book got published in

1934. xiii

Besides these students and nationalist leaders, throughout the decades of thirties and early forties, the arrested people included leaders of peasant movements, workers’ movements, literary movements, and study circles, as well as those who were arrested for their opposition to the Second World War. So, it was under the roof of the prison that socialist ideas penetrated the minds of Telugu youth and intelligentsia, who not only read Capital and other Marxist writings but also organized political study circles among themselves for reading Marxist literature.

Among the prisoners who had read Capital were Kambhampati Satyanarayana, Maheedhara

Jaganmohana Rao, Maheedhara Ramamohana Rao, K.B. Krishna, Chandra Rajeshwar Rao,

Puchhalapally Sundaraiyya, Maddukuri Chandrasekhara Rao, Kodavaganti Kutumba Rao, and

Nanduri Prasada Rao, among others. xiv While in prison, the young Marxists not only got influenced by Das Capital as a text, but also started engaging with the question of political economy in general. The political classes in the prison extensively depended on smuggled writings from Soviet Union, which were written by intellectual groups of Russia in the course of their study of Capital.

Knowledge in Practice: Appropriation of People’s Struggle

Now armed with this new knowledge of Marxism, the influence of the leftist faction of

AMS increased day by day, as they went into the villages and expressed their solidarity with the DEVULAPALLY KOTESH | 7 struggling masses in the Hyderabad State, who were already waging a war against the local landlords in the demand for the abolition of vetti and against rising taxes. They welcomed the intellectual insights of the AMS youth and accepted their leadership, resulting in the creation of a mass base for the AMS by 1942. As its mass base expanded among the farmers, the raitu -coolie

(agricultural labourer), and other artisanal productive social groups, the AMS divided after the

11 th conference of the organization in 1944 at Bhongir into two groups—the immigrant brahmins and the native landed elite on one hand (Congress group) and the landed peasant-caste groups

(both immigrant as well as native) on the other (CPI faction). With this, the abolition of vetti and

‘land to the tillers’ became the main programmes of the AMS (Left), which took the form of a militant raitu-coolie movement. The AMS (Right), however, continued to carry the agendas of the elite and organized counter activities in the villages. xv

However, even as we see the possibility of a class polarization in the two AMS factions, the native landed elite, who led the Congress group, and the landed peasants, the native as well as Andhra migrants and who led the CPI faction, belonged to the same caste groups

(Kamma, Reddy), neither of whom gave up their caste affiliations in any discernible manner.

Because of this caste affiliation, even after raising the economic issues of the productive class comprising of lower castes, the CPI faction could not, to this day, concretize the possibility of the creation of a singular class, which could have led the desired revolution. xvi So, despite the differences between these two factions of AMS pertaining to the political economic reforms of

Telangana, their cultural-historical positions remained common and deeply rooted in colonialism, orientalism and its protégé, Andhra ‘linguistic national’ identity and pan-Indian

Brahmanical nationalist cultures, buttressed by the aforementioned common class-caste interest. DEVULAPALLY KOTESH | 8

The Nationalist Discourses’ Entry into the Hyderabad State and its Relation to the Left

Movement

With the coming of the brahmanical social groups into leadership positions in the region and their growing consolidation with Indian nationalism and its vanguard leader, Indian National

Congress, the latter’s ideology with a specific form of anti-colonial rhetoric and the social organization that undergird it, got entrenched into the body politic of the presidencies. In the wake of the rising linguistic national movements, this ideological social formation got reorganized into different linguistic regions and rearticulated Indian nationalism in the respective linguistic discourses. By the thirties, regional organizations had become the main voices of

Indian nationalism.xvii They gradually expanded into the princely states as well, armed with the discourse of linguistic commonality, despite the fact that the propagated by these organizations headed by upper-castes was Sanskritized Andhram language, which had little resemblance with the Telugu spoken by the common masses of Telangana. By 1938, when the preparatory committee for setting up of the Hyderabad Committee of the Indian National

Congress was formed following the same linguistic lines, the leadership responsibilities were given to three upper-caste individuals to represent each of the three linguistic regions, namely,

Telugu, Maratha, and Kannada, to propagate the Sanskritized upper-caste tongue as the

‘standard’ language of these multi-vernacular people.xviii With this agenda, the Indian nationalist movement entered Telangana in 1939 through a political programme, the Vandemataram

Movement, and consolidated in the aforementioned ‘linguistic’ lines, thereby reorganizing

Hyderabad politics. xix

Marxism as an ideology and organization attracted the educated youth, who were already working for Indian nationalism in their respective linguistic regions, and helped transform the DEVULAPALLY KOTESH | 9 nationalist movement from bureaucratic negotiations to militant mobilization of the masses to aggressively ascertain the independence of India. However, what must also be noted that, instead of transforming the nationalists into Marxists, in order to prepare the grounds for communist revolution in India, the communists of the region transformed the nationalists into militant nationalists. It was this youth who found the All Hyderabad Students Association in 1939,xx culminating in their demand to include the Hyderabad State in the Indian Union. They hoisted the Indian flag on the day of the transfer of power. xxi The Andhra committee of the CPI, in coalition with the Congress, had played the vanguard role in the militant nationalist movement that expanded into the Hyderabad state and pitched Indian nationalism against the Telangana people’s democratic struggles, the class/caste struggles of the Hyderabad State, and abetted the

Indian union in the annexation of Hyderabad, recapturing the lands from the possession of the people. xxii

A Revolution Cut Short: The Politics of Replacing Urdu with Andhram

It was not that the Hyderabad intelligentsia was ignorant of Marxism and Marxist movements. The Urdu- and English-educated class of Hyderabad already grappled with the socio-cultural and politico-economic problems of Hyderabad through its intellectual-political engagements. They received new knowledge, read and translated Marxism into Urdu, found literary political association, and found magazines to propagate Marxism. xxiii Newspapers and magazines like Rayyat , Payam , Naigar , and Meejan etc. ignited democratic, secular, and socialist spirit among the Urdu-educated class in the early thirties, which got organized later in the form of in 1939. xxiv As early as 1942, Marx’s ‘Wage, Labour and Capital’ was translated to Urdu by Abid Ali Khan, who later founded of the Urdu Daily, Siasat .xxv It was the

Comrades Association, with its Urdu leadership, that engaged with issues specific to Telangana DEVULAPALLY KOTESH | 10 that attracted the Telangana educated class, who then went on to organize the Telangana armed struggle. The members of the Comrades Association, like Raj Bahadur Gour, Maqdoom

Moinuddin, etc., organized the Telangana communist leadership, comprising of figures like

Raavi Narayan Reddy, Baddamella Reddy, Devulapally Venkateshwara Rao, etc. These were the same people who organized the Telangana masses in their struggle against landlordism. This historic call-for-arms was given by Raj Bahadur Gour, Maqdoom Moinuddin, and Baddamella

Reddy in 1946. xxvi

But the AMS (Left), with its upper-caste Coastal Andhra immigrant peasant leadership, sidelined the leaders from Telangana of the armed peasant movement. At the discursive level, they replaced the ‘landlords’ as the enemy of the armed masses of Telangana with the Nizam as a colonizer akin to the British. With this, they also took up the tasks of ethno-religiously

‘cleansing’ the Hyderabad State with the ‘holy waters’ of Sanskrit-brahmanism, which has been

‘contaminated’ by the ‘external’ ethno-linguistic and religious influences of Anglo-Christian colonizers and Arabo-Persian-Islamic ‘barbarians’. This culminated in the annexation of the

Hyderabad State by the Indian Union on one hand, and the call for surrender of arms from the

Andhra leadership on the other. By marking ‘Urdu’ as the language of the religious ‘other’ and replacing Urdu education in the Hyderabad State with ‘standard’ Sanskritized Telugu, the vast production of Urdu Marxist knowledge was also untimely curtailed, replacing it with knowledge production in sanskritized Telugu, with the aid of the pan-Indian Hindi language, which was imposed on the region through and by the Marxists.

The Sanskritization of Indian languages and the consolidation of multiple ethno-linguistic regional societies under the ethno-religious Sanskrit-brahminism under the garb of Hindi as the sole political language of the modern Indian nation-State (hence the official language status, DEVULAPALLY KOTESH | 11 with the proviso of becoming the national language in the near future) had received massive resistance in South India, particularly from the land of the Tamils. Recognizing the political agenda of the brahminic social groups and their programme of ethno-religious cleansing of the

Indian languages as nothing other than capturing exclusive power in modern India and consolidation of brahminic hierarchy in Hindi-Hindu-Bharat, the Tamils from South India had called for the counter-purification of Tamil language and culture from Sanskrit-brahminic influences.xxvii The ethno-linguistic cultures of the Telugus in the Andhra region of the Madras presidency, who had initially also exerted their dissent, soon fell under the influence of brahminical forces, thereby pitting Telugu against Tamil and English in Madras presidency on the one hand, and against Urdu in the Hyderabad princely state. Despite continuous dissent from the productive social groups the upper-caste Telugu-speakers of Coastal Andhra region started expressing their linguistic identity and assertion in the Sanskritized Telugu language and

Brahminical literary aesthetics. xxviii

Sanskritized Telugu and its Pan-Indian Affiliation

Dravidian movement and its off shoot, pure-Tamil movement, which had spearheaded the move to isolate Tamil from Sanskrit influences succeeded both in principle and practice to a certain extent. But their confinement to the Tamil linguistic region resulted in self-exclusion from other linguistic regions of South India, instead of influencing them to join the cause of the exclusion of Sanskrit-brahminic influences in other languages as well. In this scenario, the more

Sanskritized Coastal Telugu region of the contemporary Andhra Pradesh pitted themselves against the de-brahminising Tamil territory of Madras presidency under the pretext of a separate

Telugu province for Telugus. DEVULAPALLY KOTESH | 12

Therefore the so-called separate Telugu province movement, marking its opposition to

Tamil, embraced a linguistic-cultural affinity to the Sanskrit-brahminic cultural traditions and craved for self-recognition in the emerging pan-Indian polity. In this attempt to Indianize the

Telugu region, Andhra was Sanskritized and called the Andhram. Contrary to the Tamil’s attempt to disassociate with the Indian polity and achieve de-brahminization by de-Sanskritizing

Tamil language and literature, in 1935, the foreword to the compiled collection of modern

Telugu poets with their select poems, titled Vaitalikulu (pioneers), constructed the Telugu literary history and time before ‘ Bharatandhreekarana ’ (Indianization of Andhra) as the Andha

Yugam (Dark Age)!xxix Their glorification of Indianization of Andhra as Navayugam (Modern

Age) indicated their desire for the revival of the glorious Purana Yugam and Prabhanda

Yugam. xxx The introduction of Telugu-transcribed Sanskrit poetry, with meanings to the Sanskrit vocabulary in Telugu in all the Telugu-language primers, which was believed to be for the propagation of Telugu literacy, showed that the real intent inherent to the dissemination of

Telugu was nothing other than the Sanskritization of the Telugu tongue.xxxi The Indianization of

Andhra in the pretext of its separation from the de-brahminizing Tamil is not only reflected in the alliance formed by Andhra Mahasabha (AMS) with the Indian National Congress (INC) and the Indian independence movement, but also in the resolutions of the annual conferences and the public announcements of the leaders of AMS, who declared that the people of the region were first Indians, then the ‘sons of Mother Andhra’. xxxii

By the time the 14 th Andhra state congress of the CPI was held in Guntur, CPI came up with the joint demands of declaring separate statehood for Telugus and demanded for developing

Hindi on the ground of recognizing Hindi as the national language of India.xxxiii Following this, all their frontal organizations also made the same resolutions. In propagation of Hindi as a DEVULAPALLY KOTESH | 13 national language, they even went to the extent of founding Hindi-medium schools in all the linguistic regions of India, establishing them in several villages and towns of Andhra. xxxiv

Renewal of Translation and the Politics of Dissemination of Marxist Knowledge

By the late 1970s, when the translation and production of Marxist thought was imbued with a new vigour, the compilation of modern Telugu anthologies, histories, dictionaries, grammars, language primers, etc. had already replaced Telugu with the aforementioned

Andhram, which had by then become the ‘standard’ Telugu language. The dependence on Hindi and Sanskrit had gained so much ground that, in the course of translating the Capital to Telugu, the translators had to cross-check with the Hindi translation of Capital Volume I xxxv in order to verify the translations of particular terminologies!xxxvi The linguistic snobbery of the translators also ensured the maintenance of a consistent hierarchy between the party ‘intellectuals’, who were almost always the ‘leaders’ of the movement, who would ‘translate’ and ‘transmit’ Marxist theory in the form of ‘programmes’, and the barely literate cadres, who could only implement the same. Thus, the brahminical caste hierarchy was also ensured and re-entrenched even within the communist parties and movements, where the so-called ‘theoretical’ knowledge of Marxism became the exclusive preserve of the upper-caste leaders, who had unhindered access to

Sankritized Andhram and the pan-Indian Hindi.

As a result, the intellectual insights of the struggling masses on ground was intentionally overlooked and in no way incorporated in the epistemology of ‘standard’ Telugu Marxist thought. These insights, however, kept the spirit of struggle for a modern egalitarian communist society alive among the masses in the form of songs, tatwa s, and other oral literatures.xxxvii The spirit of these oral literatures found its way into printed texts in the 1990s, with the rise of the DEVULAPALLY KOTESH | 14 lower social groups into some of the leadership positions in some of the Left parties. In the course of their intellectual engagement with the politics of egalitarianism, they redefined Telugu

Marxist epistemology through the socio-historical analysis of the Indian social reality. Invoking

Lenin, they inaugurated debates by raising questions like What is to be done in India? They also found magazines like Edureeta, Nalupu, Kula Nirmulana , etc. to debate and disseminate Marxist thoughts, and developed theoretical perspective specific to India in works like Kulanirmulana-

Marxist Dhrukpadam (Annihilation of Caste-Marxist Perspective). Marxist thought found dissemination among the larger Telugu society, therefore, not through direct translations of texts like Capital, but through the critical engagement of the struggling masses with Marxist movements and praxis.

However, what remains to be explored is the politics and ideology behind the selective dissemination of Marxist knowledge among the struggling masses of the Left movement. What is specific about Capital that makes it so ‘difficult’ to disseminate? While on the one hand, this reflects the purported unpopularity of the text among the masses, as discussed earlier, it is also reflexive of a possible concerted effort to keep the text unavailable among the masses, or even a dominant belief that the text is ‘not for the masses’. When compared to the other iconic Marxist text, The Communist Manifesto , one sees a distinct difference between the dissemination of the

Capital vis-à-vis the Manifesto . For all that matters, the Manifesto has been translated six times in Telugu by six different individuals starting in 1933 and has been widely published and circulated by every Marxist organization across the decades that followed. At the level of content, the dissemination of texts like The Communist Manifesto and non-dissemination of

Capital also shows a selective appropriation of Marx. One can begin by arguing that the Marx of

The Capital gave up on a lot of readymade categories (present in the Manifesto ) and began DEVULAPALLY KOTESH | 15

Marxist analysis from such radical depth (‘to begin from the beginning’, as Lenin would later term it) that deeply demystified a lot of things, including ascriptive social-cultural identities by foregrounding the primacy of the economic. Such analysis, if disseminated and inaugurated in the Telugu region, would have probably been much more destabilizing to the upper-caste leadership than a readily politically assimilable text like the Manifesto . Coming from this point- of-view, it is not just that the Capital as a text has been kept as the exclusive reserve of the leaders but it has also been excluded from entering the political itself. This not only prevented the scope of an intellectual engagement between the leaders and cadres, but also avoided the possible exposition of the social fault-lines that a text like Capital is capable of exposing. To date, the coming-together of the Marxist analytical methodology of the Capital with the grassroots insights of the struggling masses remains a neglected and un-thought-of project in the region, which may point to a deeper critique of the communist movement itself.

i For the details of the team of translators and editors, see Introduction Karl Marx Pettubadi: Modati Samputam (Karl Marx’s Capital Vol. 1). Trans. by Reddy, Rachamallu Ramchandra, Bitragunta Ramachandra Rao, G. Koteshwar Rao, A. Gandhi. Vijayawada: Visalandhra Vignyana Samiti. 1996. ii Karl Marx Pettubadi, Vols. 1, 2 & 3. iii Karl Marx Pettubadi, 2nd impression, Vishalandhra Vignyana Samiti.2017. iv Afanasyev, L, N. Andreyev, M. Ansenev, et al., The Political Economy of Capitalism . Ed. M. Ryndina and G. Chernikov; trans. Diana Miller (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1974). v Swethalana, Djent. Na Smritipadamlo Telugu Rachaitalu (My Memories on Telugu Writers). Communism . October 2014.p. 32. vi Smith, David and Phil Evans. Pillalakosam Pettubadi. Trans. From English to Telugu by Reddy, Rachamallu Ramachandra. Ed. Chekuri Ramarao. Hyderabad:Hyderabad Book Trust. 1985 vii Hindustan Times. May 28, 1995. p.1. viii Vetti, which was prevalent during later Nizam’s rule, denotes mandatory and forced unpaid labour to be provided by artisan castes to the local landlord. The social organization of vetti can be traced to the Hindu jajmani DEVULAPALLY KOTESH | 16

arrangement; for details, see Kolendra (1978), pp. 46-54; D. N. Dhanagare calls it a deformed version of the jajmani relationship, see Dhanagare, D. N (1983), p. 185. ix The guide book of the communist revolution, The Communist Manifesto, along with The Principles of Communism was already translated into Telugu by 1933 and circulated in cyclostyled form among the educated cadres; the people started organizing in small groups, Sangams, resisting the traditional powers at the village level. For the details of the translation of The Communist Manifesto into Telugu , see Prakash, K (2005), p. 138. A range of novels, short stories, plays and poetry has also been produced during this period which propagated the Marxist ideology. Some of the significant novels and short stories were written by Vattikota Alwarswami, Avula Pichhaiah (For details, see Rao, Varavara (1983) and poetry by Dasarathi Rangacharya, Dasharathi Krishnamacharya, Kaloji Narayan Rao etc.) x For more see Rao, Krishna Y. V. et al ed. (1996) and N. Venugopal. Karl Marx Capital Ku Nuta Yaabai Yellu -2, (150 Years of Karl Marx’s Capital). June 6, 2017. Veekshanam. p. 57 xi Narasaiah, I. Left and National Movements in the Madras Presidency 1930 to 47: A Study in Politics of Hegemony. An unpublished thesis submitted to the University of Hyderabad. 2009. xii Prasad, Yetukuri. Tummala Sahityam . Hyderabad: Andhra Pradesh Abhyudaya Rachayitala Sangham. 1990. p.131. xiii G.O.No.1180 Public (General) (Confidential), July 18, 1935. For more, see D.Anjaneyulu, Impact of Socialist Ideology on Telugu Literature between the Wars, 1919-1939 , pp.249-51. xiv Information gathered from individual autobiographies, biographies and memorial articles. xv The activities of the AMS (right) were recorded regularly in the magazines, Golkonda and Telangana ; while that of the AMS (left) were recorded in the magazine, Meejan ; for the details, see regular issues of these respective magazines from May 1942 to 1952. xvi These caste affiliations were reflected in cases of upper-caste communist leaders negotiating land disputes between the masses and the landlords in court where they would even make profit of huge land tracts from their caste-kins as commission. The caste affiliations got further entrenched due to the familial and marital relations between the upper-caste landlords and the communist leaderships. What looked like an anti-landlord movement, ended up in effect, being the moment of the rise of a specific rich peasant caste/class as the enduring ruling caste/class of the regions. xvii Andhra Mahasabha which emerged with an objective of reformation of the Andhra regional culture, literature, economy and politics in 1913 transforms into the main proponent of Indian nationalism by thirties; the same is the case with Malayali Mahasabha, Karnataka Parishat, Marathi Parishat etc. xviii As the activities of all the Indian national organizations were considered illegal by the Nizam state, the Indian Nationalist Congress worked under the banner, Hyderabad State National Conference, in Hyderabad; Ravi Narayana Reddy was the Telangana representative of that Congress Party committee, who later became the leader of CPI and leads Andhra Mahasabha; for his autobiographical account, see Reddy, R. N (1997), pp. 28-29. xix See AISF (1985), p. 12; also see Razvi, S. M. Jawad (1985), p. 63. xx AHSA has worked in close association with AISF and gradually merged with it in the course of annexation of Hyderabad by Indian Union; see AISF (1985), pp. 56-58. xxi AISF (1985), p. 65. xxii The formation of the CPI cells on linguistic lines provided an opportunity to the Andhra based intelligentsia to make their expansion into Telangana and by 1941-42 they set up party cells in almost all the districts of Telangana; see Rao, D. V (2014), p. 12. xxiii See Razvi, Jawad S.M. (1985), pp. 25-29. xxiv Alam Kundmeri, Syed Ibrahim, Manik Lal Gupta, Qutub A. Alam, Ehsaan Ali Meeras, S. Nagaraj, N.K. Rao are the first founders of the Comrades Association. Later, they were joined by Meeraj Hyder Hussain, Gulam Hyder, Dilwar Ali Khan, Raj Bahadur Gaur, Maqdoom Moinuddin, Jawad Razwi, Onkar Prasad, Hussain Shahid, Srinivasala Koti. For more, see Razvi, Jawad S.M. (1985), p.18. xxv Translated by Abid Ali Khan. Hyderabad: Maktaba Ibrahimiya, 1942 (500 copies) xxvi Venugopal N. “Vimochana Ante Charitra Navada?” Andhra Jyothi. September 16, 2008. DEVULAPALLY KOTESH | 17

xxvii One common ground among non-brahman movement, Dravidian discourse, pure Tamil movement, anti-Hindi agitation etc. is challenging of the exclusive monopoly of the Brahmins and the their Sanskrit-Brahmanic caste hierarchy; Pandita Iyothee Thassar has been the pioneering figures of early 20 th century Tamil region in asserting, articulating and organizing the anti-brahmanic movements, followed by Periyar E. V. Ramasamy’s continued consistent efforts and expressed throughout their writing and speeches; For details, see Aloysius (2015); Arooran (1980). xxviii The modern Telugu print cultures and the literary publications are deeply rooted in Sanskrit and Brahmanism; the first Telugu printing press, Hindu BhashaSanjeevini , was started in 1857 in Chennai by a Brahmin named Vavilla Ramaswamy Shastrulu and during his lifetime he published 50 books which were either brahmanical literature in Telugu and Sanskrit building complimentary relationship between Sanskrit and Telugu. The resolutions and minutes of all the Andhra Mahasabha Sabhas both in the Andhra region of Madras Presidency between 1913 and 1942 and Telangana region of the Hyderabad state between 1921 and 1946; for details see Jitendrababu (2009) vol. 1&2. xxix Purana Yugam, which means pre-modern period was used in the sense of the glorious Sanskrit classical past, while the Prabhandha Yugam , period of the origin and proliferation of the literary form, Prabhandham, in Telugu to indicate textual inauguration of the Sanskrit glory into Telugu; for details, see Muddukrishna ( 1935), p. vii. xxx This is described in details to the forward to Vaitalikulu, see, Muddukrishna (1937), pp. vi-vii; xxxi See, all the Telugu text books published by Telugu Academy for the classes 1 st to 10 th xxxii In the very first conference of AMS on May 20, 1913, at Bapatla, in his presidential address, Mr. B. N. Sharma made this appeal to the audience of the conference. See, the speech reproduced in Andhra Patrika, October 1, 1953. xxxiii see Krishna Rao, Y. V (1988), p. 496. xxxiv Between the years(1935-36) Communists of Andhra found Hindi schools and libraries with Hindi and Telugu literature in several villages such as Toleru, Navuduru, Korukallu, Vissakoduru, yandagandi etc. see Krishna Rao, Y. V (1988), pp. 110-113 xxxv Punji-I. Trans. Om Prakash Sangal. Moscow:Progress. 1965. xxxvi Introduction, Karl Marx Pettubadi: Modati Samputam . 1996. xxxvii A range of oral literature dealing with the vision of class struggle came up between 1940s-60s in the form of songs and tatwas etc. which were later brought to print during the 1990s (See Thirumal Rao (1994, 1998).