Must Read : A celebration of being Telangana

AbdulMuqtadir Syed / Headlines / 10 Comments

This is election season in Telangana. The air rings with the sounds but this time it’s completely different. The 12 by-elections scheduled for July 27 are the result of pique. The incumbents resigned last Dece­mber when there was an upsu­rge of the movement for Telangana as a separate state. They had been in office barely eight months, but they quit to show that their hearts beat with the people — to show Delhi that Telangana basically needed an acknowledgment of identity, not incr­emental development.

Now, the 12 incumbents are all in the fray, confident that people will thus re-elect them. You don’t have to go far into Telangana to realise that this movement is as much about identity as it is about politics.

Siddipet is a short stop on the highway from Hyderabad to Karimnagar. Motorists halt to have a meal in the dhabas and check out the merchandise in the roadside shops. The dazzl­ing array of music available is unmistaka­ble — they are bestsellers. The singers are rock stars: Gaddar, Goreti Venkanna, Rasmayi Bal­kishan, K Vimala, Madhu Priya, Suddala Ashok…

You hear them everywhere you go. Your chauffeur plays it on his car stereo. Dhabas use it as mood music. In town, at the crossroads you hear them at every Telangana movement camp, political meeting, bypoll roadshow and in the workshops of tinkers and tailors.

“They took our water, they took our land and they took our jobs, and they make fun of our language,” sings Rasmayi Balkishen. Strongly reminiscent of Mother India, Gaddar sings of Telangana as a kind mother robbed of her dignity and yoked to a life of toil.

Telangana Rashtra Samithi chief K Chandrasekhara Rao, the movement’s political face, is a compelling speaker, but even his roadshows aren’t complete without a folk band’s performance. Wearing typical peasant costume — a gongali (a rough woollen blanket) thrown over a bare shoulder, a gochi tied round the torso, a bamboo staff in hand — these are austere shows, just voices in chorus, singing and dancing to a lone dolu. Punctuated by the jingle of the singer’s anklets, these are songs of anger, hunger, loss, deprivation and injustice.

It’s a theme that runs thro­ugh all of the Telangana singers, and all of the folk artistes who are in now colourful efflorescence across Telangana. The region is in an ecstasy of self-expression and reclaiming an inheritance. At the height of the movement in January, towns in the region saw women bringing out batukammas, a flower arrangement that is part of a fertility ritual during Das­ara, to the town centre, dancers performing the kola­tam, and girls drawing patterns of muggu (rangoli) on the main roads. These are assertions of identity. At political meetings women activists ask in the Telangana dialect the simple question: “Is our language not Telugu?”

This cultural upsurge has found an echo in mass media too. For long, the mass media were the authenticators of ‘acc­eptable’ cultural forms, and deniers of local, particularly Telangana, nuances. Not any more. Films, TV channels, new­spapers and products of coas­tal Andhra capital had laid out the grammar of public discourse, and excluded Telangana cultural forms. The fevered pitch of the movement has led them to bow to the storm. Early this year, after a popular boycott of Tollywood films in Telangana, producers bent over backwards to reingratiate themselves. They promised to stop demonising Telangana characters and allow full play to the dialect. Until rec­ently, Telangana characters spoke in coastal Andhra lingo; only buffoons or villains spoke the dialect. Today, on FM radio in Hyderabad, it is fashionable to speak the Telangana dialect. A recent film, King, had the heroine speaking it.

The cultural dimension of the movement has been a tactical device to bring people out into the streets. The batukamma displays, for instance, were a device to make women participate in the stir. The communal dining sahapankti on the highways by Telangana prota­gonists was an attempt to forge inter-communal unity. The peasant songs and dances try to enl­ist the underprivileged classes.

All these activities are carried out under the rubric of Dhoom Dhaam, a programme taken up by the movement’s leaders. Rasmayi Balkishen, its coiner, led minstrel bands to villages and town squares to perform to small audiences, driving home the message: they rob you of your enti­tlement, reap the fruits of your toil, they mock you. It pro­ved so popular that people come to political meetings only if there is a Dhoom Dhaam concert.

As Telangana ideologue M Kodandaram says, the cultural movement and the political asp­ect depend on each other. “It is very difficult to analyse them separately. Both help Telangana society protect their heritage and exhibit their lifestyle.”

The cultural dimension kept the stir alive in the years when it was nearly moribund. Starting in 1996, when the yearning for a Telangana identity was only a distant memory and KCR was still in the Telugu Desam Party, Prof Kodandaram and his acoly­tes organised street plays and village performances. The messages were simple: ‘‘Telangana’s water, land and toil are being tapped to somebody else’s advantage. It is yours to claim.’’ When an electric spark reignited the movement in last December, all those years of hard work suddenly bloomed.

It’s not just in art that Telangana is asserting itself. Food is a vital part of it. A five-day fete held at Nizam College in Hyder­abad earlier this year was a roaring hit with turnout in the lakhs, including non-Telanganites. Its organiser G Praveen Rao was astounded. “What we thought was that promoting Telangana food is as important as promoting its culture. The idea was well-received by those fighting for separate statehood and ordinary people alike.”

Thanks M V K Sastry for sharing.

You might be interested in :