Against Dora and Nizam

This work illuminates the 1940s people’s movement of Telangana. The author is personally familiar with the families and villages participated in families and village participated in the Telangana struggle. The author’s familiarity in the region’s people’s issues and personal knowledge of protest culture brought originality in narration and analysis. It sets out with the manner in which the traditional lords transformation into modern type landlords called doras armed with social and economic power not available to their forefathers. But their triumph was challenged by the rural poor with self-generated realization derived from memory of landlord paternalism and social responsibility and staged a violent uprising. The author made a crucial contribution in terms of discovering and marshalling material of a type, hitherto ignored or not adequately taken into account. An attempts is made to present the perspectives and views of the participants, which provided excellent, detailed, portrait of various categories of struggles, various forms of struggles, different types of organizations which were evolved culminating finally in the armed resistance. It presents a picture of participation of various rural stratum with differing objective and aspirations by carefully making the list of villages and local participants whose contributions are not taken into account earlier. The Telangan movement, as per this presentation, stands strikingly different from the other movements of the country in terms of cast / class participation and forms of struggle. It locates the pitched battles fought in and around the streams surrounded by thick bushes on the hillocks and the plains, in the fields, groves and the forests.