Continuing our Deccan Series in collaboration with the Khidki Collective, this set of six articles presents alternative perspectives on the 1948 Police Action in Hyderabad. These perspectives challenge, modify, add nuance to the mainstream narrative of Hyderabad’s integration as ‘liberation’, a narrative currently used to further divisive politics.
September 17 has evoked strong emotions in the erstwhile state of Andhra Pradesh since 1998, when the Hindu Right launched it to memorialise the ‘brutalities of the Muslim Asaf Jahi rulers in the region’. The Asaf Jahi dynasty ruled the region from the 18th to the 20th century, the last king being Osman Ali Khan. In this context where the possibility of exploring the meanings and memories of police action other than as ‘Liberation’ opened up, I went back to my interviews with older Telangana women that I had done during 1997-1998, excavating their divergent experiences of ‘Operation Polo’ or the ‘police action’ by the Indian Union army to annex Hyderabad State. Born in the 1920s and 1930s, they were not involved in any politics or movements but brought up action/Razakars/bombs in the course of discussing their everyday experiences of violence in their families, as an exceptional and disruptive ‘event’. Nevertheless, we see these divergent experiences, ranging from years of living in the forest, months of disturbances and guarding the villages, murders and mayhem settling as ‘the memory of action.’ Words such as liberation or independence or freedom did not occur in their description of these times despite my prompting.
Streetcars fired guns, bombs went off
Women of Khila Warangal, adjacent to the Warangal town, one of the places where armed struggle was fierce, said that most of them stayed in and around the village during this period despite intimidation and terror, as they could not afford to leave.
Shantamma, a Madiga agricultural labourer, said that she stood her ground even though her co-workers ran away when they heard of the ‘blood sucking Razakars’ approaching. She told them that she cannot make ends meet if she does not work and was told to get lost. Eeramma, a Telaga agricultural worker said that no one from her village left as they depended on the work for their livelihood. She recalled being terrified when they saw ‘Turakollu’ (a colloquial term for Muslims, referring from their West Asian origins) approaching their houses for inspection but standing their ground. A lot of gun toting people lived in the hillocks nearby, she remembered. Strangely, she also mentioned that the only people who left the village were Muslims. It was only Poshamma, an Erukala woman, who said that the entire family escaped into the forest and returned to the village only after her two children were born, which may have been two to three years later. Most of them remembered the veedhi motarlu (street cars), gun firing and the sound of bombs going off but had no direct experience of violence and all of them remember it as a long period.
While the Razakar movement was active from 1947 to 1948, it primarily supplemented the Hyderabad police and army. Razakars attacked and killed villagers and activists of the Telangana peasant struggle led by the Communist Party of India. It aimed to supplement the Hyderabad army in the event of an impending battle with the Indian Union army. It ceased to exist on September 17, 1948, the day Hyderabad surrendered to the Indian Union army which, however, stayed on for a few years, detaining, arresting and killing scores of peasant activists in the Telangana villages. For the peasant women uninvolved in the Telangana peasant movement, ‘blood sucking’ Razakars, Nizam’s police, gun-toting Sangham people (activists of the peasant movement who organised the peasants) and the Indian soldiers merged into that seamless space and time when things were difficult and life got disrupted, marking a period of overall terror.
Razakars came in the day, ‘they’ came in the night
Iravati, a migrant from Guntur settled near Bodhan in a village bordering Maharashtra, kept talking about others from Maharashtra who looted several villages. In order to protect themselves, entire villages kept a vigil for six months. She recalled burying the valuables in the earth every day, after cooking, as ‘those’ people had guns and were known for their cruelty. She remembered a rich woman who was robbed, assaulted and killed in the neighbouring village. She repeatedly distinguished between these night people and the Razakars, saying that the Razakars came during the day. They who came during the day were not Muslims either. It was the ‘lower’ castes who wore the uniform for a monthly salary and went around asking for food in the village which was manageable.
But who were 'they' who came to raid the villages in the night? It was only a decade later, I understood that these were the ‘freedom fighters’ who had set up camps all around the Hyderabad State, conducting ‘guerilla attacks’ to liberate the state. While the Razakars sought to defend the autonomy of the Hyderabad State, the ‘Indian freedom fighters’ too sought to liberate the State, both creating mayhem in the process. The Indian government that came into place on August 15, 1947 had the task of establishing its territorial sovereignty over hundreds of ‘minor’ sovereigns known as ‘princely states’. These ‘freedom fighters’ that Iravati spoke of, emerged in this context, to force the Nizam to accede.
In Khanderao Kulkarni and P.A.Rama Rao’s accounts we learn how the ‘Congress activists’ aided by the new Indian State set up camps all around the Hyderabad State to create terror and havoc to make it ungovernable, even as the Standstill agreement was in place and the negotiations were going on between the two. It was this failure that the Indian government’s White Paper on Hyderabad issued in 1948 flagged and followed up with the ‘police action’ to restore order.
Iravati remembered that the attacks stopped as suddenly as they began on a particular day. On that day, she said, the Razakar uniforms, knives and guns could be found in heaps all around the villages. The army lined up a lot of Muslims and got them beaten up for their bad deeds. Soon after, they were flooded with the influx of Muslims running away from Nanded and settling into menial jobs and occupations. A fish seller, she specifically recalled, told her that he owned a mill that employed 60 people but was looted and driven away. There were so many Muslims, adults and children, who had lost their families.
‘Osman Ali Khan died, and my husband lost his job’
While the women from Khila Warangal spoke of action after prompting, the Muslim women from the Old City of Hyderabad started speaking of it as soon as they were asked about the problems that their families faced. Five of the ten women I spoke to had migrated to the city, rather, ran away to the city from Kalyan in Bidar district. Action was the biggest calamity of their life which plunged them into depths of misery.
Aysha Bi spoke of the killing spree where Muslim men were dragged out from the fields and killed. She lost her husband, brother-in-law and father in law. Their house, property, including mango trees were grabbed. Escaping to the city she took refuge in the Bahadur Yar Devdi and later found work as a beedi maker.
Ameena Bi, from a tailoring family had a similar account where her father-in-law’s brother was pulled out of the jowar fields, never to be found again. Her family too escaped to the city. Jareena Begum lost many male relatives in the mayhem. She ran away and found her husband after a few months in the city. Chand Bi, from an agricultural worker family too ran away to the city, after losing several male family members.
They did not discuss it as a riot situation where two communities are pitted against each other, but clearly described it as a one-sided attack on them by ‘Hindus’, as violence that struck without rhyme or reason. They could not identify their attackers except as ‘Hinduva’ nor could they comprehend their motives. They did not have any prior relationship or enmity. None of them knew the attackers, who chose to identify, burn, and kill only the Muslim families in the village. “We did not know who did this, we never knew why they did that, they came from other villages” was the refrain that was repeated in the conversations. Their memories were linked to intimate, familial, and private events – weddings, child birth or puberty – in the family, not with any public or political events.
But there is an unmistakable and clear link that they made between Indian military’s arrival and the – dhange (riots), jhagade panchanda (quarrels), gaddaar (betrayal), bhaagam bhaag (escaping, running away) - destruction that they experienced. For them, the Indian State was absent when they needed solace. They recall being housed in private devdis (houses of nobles) and mosques in Hyderabad for as much as a year, never being able to revisit their homes and villages and also linked their current poverty and misery to this catastrophe.
The chaos produced during this period had multiple actors. There were multiple ‘freedom fighters’: Razakars fought to defend the Hyderabad State and its landed gentry in the rural Telangana; the armed ‘Indian freedom fighters’ on the borders fought to ‘liberate’ the Hyderabad State from the ‘clutches of the Muslim monarch’; the violent thugs also exercised their new found freedom by wreaking destruction on Muslims to establish ‘Hindu’ power soon after the police action.
For ordinary women, police action was a disturbing, fearful, painful, and catastrophic event, depending on where they were placed in the gender-caste hierarchy. While Iravati recalled celebrating September 17, none of the other women did. The words freedom and independence were conspicuously absent from all their accounts. For the women of Khila Warangal, the action years were long and difficult. But for the women of Bidar, action was the definitive event that plunged their life in misery, poverty and destitution. While for the rural peasant women the memory was organised around ‘Razakars,’ for the upper caste migrant to Nizamabad, the memory was around self-protection till ‘our’ army came in. What stands in both is the ‘othering’ of the Muslims which the memories of the Muslim women corroborate when they share their experience of action as an incomprehensible, inexplicable, irrational violence.
A Suneetha is a researcher who works on the intersections of gender, minority, migration and sexuality. She is currently working on a manuscript on Muslim politics in the Telugu region. Views expressed are the author’s own.
The Khidki Collective is a network of scholars committed to building public dialogue on history, politics, and culture. This series has been curated by Yamini Krishna, Swathi Shivanand, and Pramod Mandade of the collective.