Dalit Activism and Inauguration of Labour Politics: Emergence of Adi-Andhra

Movement in Early Twentieth Century South India

Chandra Bhanu, Nalamala

Ph.D. candidate
Centre for Modern Indian Studies
University of Goettingen

Abstract:

It is a common understanding that Dalit movements are struggles against untouchability

and seek political representation for Dalits. At the same time, there is another common notion

in existing scholarship that agricultural labourers were politically mobilized for the first time

by Communist or Socialist parties in late colonial India. I will argue that both these widespread

presuppositions cannot account for the political landscape of earlier 20th century Andhra. As I

will demonstrate, Dalits, primarily landless agricultural labourers in Telugu society, were

mobilized by in the name of the Adi-Andhra (aboriginal Andhra) movement beginning in the

second decade of the twentieth century. But this movement centred as much on agricultural

labour as on issues of eradicating untouchability or acquiring political power. Indeed, between

1917 and 1935, the Adi-Andhra movement is best understood as a labour movement, and

seriously raising questions concerning agrarian political economy was its primary mandate.

Adi-Andhra intellectuals as well as non-Dalit supporters of this movement, furthermore,

consistently represented Dalits first and foremost as agricultural labourers in their literary and

political writings. Although this history remains unknown, the Adi-Andhra movement in fact

inaugurated rural labour politics in the region--working with a markedly different

understanding of class politics from that later advocated by the Communist Party of India (CPI)

which is widely credited with introducing left politics to Andhra. The Adi-Andhra movement

must be understood, therefore, as paving the ground for the subsequent formation of the Andhra

branch of the CPI and Andhra Agricultural Labour Association in the late 1930s, whose cadres

including a significant proportion of Dalits.