Rampa Rebellion of 1922

The Rampa administrative area, situated in the hills of what are now the Godavari districts of Andhra Pradesh, comprised around 700 square miles (1,800 km²) and had a mostly tribal population of approximately 28,000. They had traditionally been able to support their food requirements through the use, in particular, of the podu system whereby each year some areas of jungle forest were burned to clear land for cultivation.[1]

The British Raj authorities had wanted to improve the economic usefulness of lands in Godavari Agency, an area that was noted for the prevalence of malaria and blackwater fever.[2] The traditional cultivation methods were greatly hindered when the authorities took control of the forests, mostly for commercial purposes such as produce for building railways and ships, without any regard for the needs of the tribal people. A 1923 government memorandum recorded one Agency Commissioner's opinion from June of the previous year that "the country had suffered from too severe restrictions on jungle clearance, that various restrictions had been overdone and much population and food grains lost for the sake of forests of doubtful value".[1]

The tribal people of the forested hills, who now faced starvation,[3] had long felt that the legal system favoured the zamindars (estate landowners) and merchants of the plains areas, which had also resulted in the earlier Rampa Rebellion of 1879. Now they objected also to the Raj laws and continued actions that hindered their economic position and meant they had to find alternate means of livelihood, such as working as coolies. In particular, they objected to attempts at that time to use them as forced labour in the construction of a road in the area.[4]

Simultaneously, there was discontent among the muttadars, who had been hereditary tax collectors and de facto rulers in the hills prior to the arrival of the British. They had acted on behalf of the rajas, the actual rulers who lived on the plains, and essentially had unlimited powers until the British subsumed them into the colonial administration, leaving them as bureaucrats with no substantive power at all and no automatic right of inherited position. Their economic status was now dictated entirely by British Raj policy, where previously they had enjoyed the flexibility to levy and to cream off tax income and to use the land of others as they saw fit. Where once the tribal hill people and muttadars would have been antagonists, they now shared a common foe.[3]

Raju was a charismatic, myth-building wandering sannyasin, believed by many tribal people to possess magical abilities and to have an almost messianic status. He saw the overthrow of colonial rule in terms similar to a millenarian event and he harnessed the discontent of the tribal people to support his anti-colonial zeal, whilst also accommodating the grievances of those muttadars who were sympathetic to his aim rather than merely narrow-minded in their pursuit of a revived status for themselves. This meant that his followers were mostly from the tribal communities but did include some significant people from the muttadar class that at one time had exploited them, although many muttadars were ambivalent about fighting for what Raju perceived to be the greater good.[3]

It was the prevalent diseases, to which the tribal people had acquired a tolerance, that hindered the Raj suppression of the rebellion. It broke out in August 1922 and took the form of guerilla warfare, ending in May 1924 with the capture and shooting of Raju.[2]

• Arnold, David (1982). "Rebellious Hillmen: the Gudem-Rampa Risings, 1839-1924". In Guha, R. (ed.). Subaltern Studies. Oxford University Press.
• Mukherjee, Mridula (2004). Peasants in India's Non-Violent Revolution: Practice and Theory. SAGE. ISBN 978-0-76199-686-6.
• Murali, Atlury (April 1985). "Manyam Rebellion: A Rejoinder". Social Scientist. 13 (4): 50–56. JSTOR 3517518.