Telugu cinema’s portrayal of the Telangana rebellion often oversimplifies complex historical narratives, resorting to a simplistic Hindu-Muslim binary. This reductionist approach neglects the intricate interplay of caste dynamics, potentially distorting the depiction of what is commonly perceived as communal violence into a more nuanced understanding.
Ahead of the Telangana 2023 Assembly elections, a ‘historical film’ on Hyderabad was officially announced after months of buzz around it. The poster launch event of Razakar – Silent Genocide of Hyderabad held on July 14 was attended by bigwigs of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) such as national general secretary and then Telangana head of the party Bandi Sanjay Kumar. It is bankrolled by another BJP leader from Telangana, Gudur Narayana Reddy, making no secret of the party’s backing for the project.
Starting from the 1990s, organisations of the Hindu Right have dubbed September 17 as a day of Hyderabad state’s ‘liberation’ from the atrocities of ‘Muslim’ Razakars (a paramilitary volunteer force under the Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen) and a ‘tyrant Muslim Nizam’ on Hindus. Most recently, Amit Shah said that Telangana Chief Minister K Chandrashekar Rao had betrayed the aspirations of those who sacrificed their lives to achieve statehood by working alongside ‘Razakars’ such as All India Majlis-E-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM) president Asaduddin Owaisi. This sort of loose usage of the term allows the right wing to term any Muslim as a ‘Razakar’, and thereby, ‘anti-Hindu’ and ‘anti-India’. Films like Razakar are part of a larger project of rewriting history, propagating myths, and stoking murky fears by keeping these myths in constant circulation.
But Silent Genocide will only be the latest in a series of popular cultural productions on the idea of Razakars. There have been quite a few films which have referenced the history of Hyderabad state and its annexation on September 17, 1948. These films date as far back as 1979, the year Maa Bhoomi was released. Directed by Goutam Ghose, Maa Bhoomi was one of the first films to present a narrative of the Telangana armed rebellion which happened between 1946 and 1951. It was co-produced by B Narsing Rao, a communist filmmaker who wanted to document the history of the Telangana movement in cinema. The film portrays the 1948 annexation of Hyderabad state from the perspective of the peasants and labourers of Telangana.
Maa Bhoomi
depicts the atrocities of Doras (dominant caste landlords) in the villages of Telangana, and how the ‘sanghams’ (village-level communist organisations) mobilised peasants and farm workers against them. In Maa Bhoomi, we see Muslims as comrades and associates of the peasants and labourers. The film resists making a simplistic association of Razakars with Muslims. Instead, we see that even after the annexation of Hyderabad into the Indian Union, the peasants are forced to continue their armed rebellion as the Doras who once worked under the Nizam now don Congress caps. In fact, the peasants are shown dying at the hands of the Indian Army. The final act of the film illustrates how feudalism continued in Telangana even after the annexation of Hyderabad state. Three decades after Maa Bhoomi came R Narayana Murthy’s
Veera Telangana (2010).
With a resurgence of the Telangana statehood movement in the 2000s, there was an increased interest in the Telangana rebellion and other events of the 1940s. Made by R Narayana Murthy, a filmmaker known for the communist themes in his works, Veera Telangana’s narrative of the Telangana peasant rebellion was very similar to Maa Bhoomi.
The film focussed on real-life stories of prominent historical figures who played key roles in the Telangana rebellion such as Sheikh Bandagi (a Muslim peasant murdered for challenging the injustices of the dominant caste landlord Visnoor Rama Chandra Reddy), Makhdoom Mohiuddin (an Urdu Marxist poet and a prominent leader of the movement), Shoebullah Khan (the editor of an Urdu daily murdered for writing against the Nizam and Razakars), Chakali Ailamma (another key leader of the movement who also revolted against Visnoor Rama Chandra Reddy), Doddi Komarayya and Tanu Naik (also peasants who were martyred in the struggle). It also portrays the role of the Communist Party of India and the Andhra Mahasabha in the movement, as well as that of Congress.
However, unlike Maa Bhoomi, Veera Telangana makes an explicit connection between Islam and Razakars by showing that the Nizam was picking out Muslim men from outside of Hyderabad state to get them enrolled in the force. The Razakar violence is thus presented as just religious violence, despite the fact that it was peasants who were victimised by the atrocities, committed at the behest of dominant caste landlords.
A year later, at the height of the Telangana statehood agitation came the Nagarjuna-starrer
Rajanna (2011),
written and directed by V Vijayendra Prasad who is now a Rajya Sabha MP. Vijayendra Prasad is filmmaker SS Rajamouli’s father and has written the story for many blockbuster films including RRR. He is now working on a film and web series glorifying the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the ideological parent of the BJP.
Rajanna is a lot more explicit in presenting a mythologised narrative championed by the Hindu Right. The protagonist Rajanna (Nagarjuna) is a ‘freedom fighter’ who comes to Telangana from Maharashtra after participating in the Indian independence struggle. He is moved by the plight of the peasants and Adivasis in Telangana, specifically in Nelakondapalli village of Adilabad district, at the hands of the feudal Doras and Dorasanis (dominant caste landlords and landladies). His singing inspires the peasants to rebel against them.
While portraying the atrocities of the Doras and the ‘Muslim’ rulers, Rajanna shows that they imposed a breast tax on women. This was a system of taxation once imposed in Kerala, where women belonging to backward castes and Dalits had to pay a tax if they wanted to cover their breasts. There is no historical evidence that any such tax was imposed by the Hyderabad state. Yet, the film uses this element in its ‘historical’ portrayal of the Doras and Razakars.
The film shows Rajanna eventually being killed by a Dora with the help of the Razakars. A few years later, we see his eight-year-old daughter Mallamma take up the baton of freeing the village from the Dorasanis’ atrocities by visiting Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru in Delhi and requesting him to abolish their rule.
The completely fictional tale of Rajanna tactically eliminates the role of mass organisation by the ‘sanghams’ and the Communist Party of India, turning the Telangana rebellion — a story of a collective — into an individual’s story, that of a vermillion-donning Rajanna. As detailed by historians AG Noorani and Sunil Purushottam, in the 1940s, the Marathwada region and the areas surrounding it had high activity of Hindu Right organisations whose members attacked properties and infrastructure belonging to Hyderabad state. Rajanna’s character might have been drawn from these so-called ‘freedom fighters’. While the Hindu Right or its ‘freedom fighters’ did not have any role to play in the Telangana rebellion, this kind of ambiguous, mythologised representation of history serves to blur out actual historical facts.
Except for a token ‘good Muslim’ character of a ‘freedom fighter’, all other Muslims in Rajanna are shown committing atrocities on peasants and women. The film shows the Razakar violence as primarily the oppression of Hindus by Muslims, again, obfuscating the other dynamics of the violence, including caste dynamics. In Rajanna, Nehru’s ‘intervention’ is requested by a young girl, representing the people of Telangana. The film thus underlines that it was the ‘universal’ desire of the people of Telangana to join the Indian Union.
More recently, seven years after the formation of Telangana,
A historical fiction drama web series Unheard
was released on Disney+ Hotstar. The series begins in the 1920s, and from the outset, it keeps referring to a man named Anwar who is killing Congress volunteers. The Razakar force itself only came into existence in the late 1930s, and the Hyderabad State Congress was also formed only in 1938. The series strangely communalises the history of Hyderabad state in an anachronistic manner.
Further, we see an extremist Badri (played by Priyadarshi Pulikonda), who wants to achieve independence from colonial rule through violence, sentenced to death in Hyderabad state. There are recurring parallels drawn between this character and freedom fighter Bhagat Singh. However, the political and social conditions of Punjab and Hyderabad had very little in common at the time, and the death penalty was abolished in Hyderabad state in the late 19th century. Like Rajanna, this historical drama too distorts and dislocates history with such inaccuracies.
Nationalism is the driving theme of the series, and while Gandhi and Nehru are elaborately discussed, the Telangana rebellion only gets a passing mention. The details of Hyderabad state hence are dwarfed and made insignificant in front of the nation. While mentioning the destruction of Hyderabad during the Police Action of 1948, Unheard squarely places the blame on Hyderabadis. The pre- and post-annexation violence in Hyderabad is completely attributed to the Razakars, with no mention of the communal violence perpetuated by the Indian Army and the killings of thousands of Muslims. It also inaccurately portrays the Police Action as a retaliation to an attack by the Nizam’s forces on an Indian police station. It emphasises that Hyderabad could have been saved from the violence of Police Action if the Nizam had simply joined the Indian Union.
There are some commonalities in all of these works depicting Razakars, which have specific contemporary political implications.
All of these films show the Razakar wearing a Rumi topi and a sherwani, often speaking in Urdu. Urdu was a state language and hence people across religions used it, though opposition against it surfaced towards the end of the Nizam’s rule. Even Telugu poet Dasaradhi Rangacharya, who was staunchly opposed to the Nizam rule, wrote in his memoirs about his love for the language and asserted that no communal colour should be imposed on it. However, such sartorial representations conflate the Muslim with the Razakar.
Another similarity is that all the above cultural productions are silent on the violence against Muslims by the Indian Army and militant Hindus, following the Police Action. According to the Sunderlal Committee report, conservative estimates put the number of lives lost due to this violence between 27000 and 40000, most of them Muslims. There is no mourning for Muslim deaths in Telugu films, presumably because they imagine a predominantly Hindu universe with token Muslim characters, and do not engage with the Muslim story.
The history of the 1940s has become important for Telangana’s identity, with the demand and subsequent formation of the Telangana state. To gain political mileage, all parties irrespective of their ideologies, or even their existence in the 1940s, are attempting to claim the lineage of the Telangana peasant rebellion. The BJP, which has had nothing to do with any sort of rebellion or on-ground movement in Telangana, also wants to claim that history today. Some films such as Rajanna, which dehistoricise the Telangana armed rebellion and mythologise it, lay down the path for such claims. Once a movement is dehistoricised, it can easily be manipulated by anyone for political gains.
None of the above-discussed representations foreground the caste question. On the contrary, Rajanna dislocates the breast tax system from Kerala – where it was imposed by the dominant caste ruling elite of Travancore on lowered caste communities – and thereby uses a historically documented caste atrocity to aid in the deliberate misrepresentation of the Muslim as lascivious and the Hindu as the perpetual victim.
By refraining from addressing caste inequalities, these narratives present a simplistic Hindu-Muslim binary. Talking about caste would mean acknowledging that many of those who are now trying to stake claims on the Telangana armed struggle draw direct lineage from the oppressive Doras. It means moving away from the singular story of the ‘tyrannical Muslim Razakar,’ and talking about the multiple identities within the Razakars and the oppressed peasants. When caste is foregrounded, what is often coloured as Hindu-Muslim violence might take on a new identity of caste violence. #hydkhabar
