Gaddar, who passed away recently was perhaps the most popular revolutionary poet, singer, and performer in any language in post-independent India. He was the only activist performer who was known across the regions and languages, from Kerala in the south to Bihar and Haryana in the north among the right activists. Though he will survive in songs and memories, it is difficult to believe we will not see him dancing again. His death is a major loss for the civil society movement, rights activists, the revolutionary movement, Ambedkarite and anti-caste politics.
Gaddar, whose real name was Gummadi Vittal Rao was born in Toopran village in the erstwhile Medak district of Andhra Pradesh. While there has been an attempt to see his journey from revolutionary politics to identity politics — from a deep jungle to democracy and from a Maoist ideologue to an Ambedkarite, it would be difficult to reduce him to one identity or struggle over the others. Beyond his identity as a Naxal or a Dalit or a Telangana activist, his real influences are much wider and deeper which we will only realise in the future. He not only inspired generations of youths through his evocative songs, but he also marked his strong imprints on art and literature. His rich repertoire of 50 years in which he sang and stands for almost all the oppressed communities needs to be fully studied. From style of poetry to style of singing, to the notion of popular culture, to his intervention in folk art, Gaddar has changed the cultural landscape of Telugu-speaking regions in radical ways. Needless to say that the period between 1972-2005 can be read as the age of the people's poet Gaddar in Telugu language.
In the 1970s, when Gummadi Vittal Rao, a young bard from the Telugu region in India left his name to become Gaddar (inspired by the Ghadar movement of Punjab) he would not have thought that he would be possessed and consumed by the spirit of the rebellion itself. Nobody would have thought that the act of naming will erase the differences between a person and a cultural phenomenon. Gaddar did not see a comeback after that, even though many times he wanted to. It is like you light the fire and get engulfed by it. As Kesava Kumar has described, Gaddar was a cultural phenomenon – Gaddar’s phenomenon.
How would you introduce a person who left his name to become something else? Not a name, not a person but a movement, a body of song, an embodiment of resistance, a cultural phenomenon that engulfed an era, an entire region, and entire generations like a prairie fire engulfing a forest. His voice engulfed the language; it engulfed the body and map of the nation. He wrote the songs on the heartbeat of the people. Till his death, his heart kept beating for his people. He once told me, “Many times I see the youth who joined on my call and songs, I feel responsible for their deaths, and I feel the pain of the mother. I am the mother.”
When he used to sing ‘Vandanalu Biddalu’ becoming a mother, it was difficult to say if he is not the mother who keeps waiting for her dead or disappeared children. Playing with small props, he used to become her and sing:
Oorapicchuka janta vasthe goodu kattu koniyistham
When the a pair of sparrows come to the village, we let them build a nest
Janta vidipokunda kanta memu kanipedatham
We keep watch so the pair doesn't split up
Oorapicchuka guddulauthara, maa biddalu
Dear children, will you beome the eggs of the sparrow?
Aa guddulo maa biddalauthara, maa biddalu
Dear children, will you become our kids in that egg?
But he also manifests rage, as he does in the ‘Dachanna’ song —
We will unite all the coolies
And bring them together
Like a band of locusts,
We will descend on the landlords
Gaddar's symbols of resistance rarely came from privileged backgrounds. They were marginalised objects and figures of the societies. They were locusts, they were ants, they were cats and puppies. They were dappu (drum), broom and slippers. He wrote songs on human excreta and he turned garbage into mother garbage. Gaddar's politics can be only truly measured by the new sensibilities he developed, the signs he broke, the symbols he transformed, the voices he brought, the power and authorities he confronted, and the hope and resistance he distributed. How shall we forget the Karamchedu massacre and his raging songs in the aftermath that gave the community strength. ‘Dalita Pululama’ (Dalit tigers) became the anthem of the Dalit resistance.
Gaddar has songs for almost everything, on every topic from neoliberalism to displacement, from the questions of Adivasi, nationalities to the situations of women in societies, from rickshaw pullers to police personnel. He sang about how societies treat daughters:
Nindu amaasa naadu o laccha gummadi
Aada bidda puttinaado o laccha gummadi
A daughter is born
On a dark, new moon day
Attha thongi sooda ledu o laccha gummadi
Mogadu mutthada raale o laccha gummadi
The mother-in-law stays away
The husband does not come to kiss her
[...]
Settha gampalesukoni o laccha gummadi
Settha kundileyyabothe o laccha gummadi
As she puts the baby in a garbage bin
and goes to throw her in the garbage can
Kukka pillanaddam occhi o laccha gummadi
Akka atla seyyakandho o laccha gummadi
A puppy stops her and says
'Oh sister, don't do that'
[...]
Setthalo badeyya biddo o laccha gummadi
Baavi lo badeyyanammo o laccha gummadi
Child, I will not throw you away in the garbage or into a well
[...]
Ninnu sammakkanu jestha o laccha gummadi
Ninnu sarakkanu jestha o laccha gummadi
I will raise you to be like Sammakka, Sarakka (tribal deities who fought injustice)
The problem is that the power of Gaddar's songs and performance cannot be fully translated. It used to vibrate through his musical body and chord. It used to come through his cry and guts, through his moving eyes and pulsating heart.
One can ask what is the legacy of Gaddar. Go and see Gaddar's legacy lies in the streets of Telangana, in the styles and movements of the hundreds of singers, performers and artists, in the voice of resistance. We cannot measure Gaddar's contributions in fragments. It needs a totality of view to understand the work of an artist. He was perhaps the last artist in our time who represented the unity of struggles. He tried to build solidarity from the point of vulnerability and from the last vantage point of the marginalised. The point is not only how much he shifted from his radical positions but also how much radical politics shifted to its edge, to the points of margin. Radicality does not lie in its radical positions but in its movement towards the edge, in the dialogue and dialectics of an ideology and its radical subjectivity.
In my interactions over 12-14 years, I always felt that he was different. He still carried the cult and aura that Walter Benjamin has termed that art has lost in modern times. Termed a hardcore Naxal in his heydays, I always find an embrace and compassion in his eyes. His songs are full of compassion, suffering and rage. He combined the rage of the raps and the poignancy of blues. Gaddar was not a person but made of actions. Gaddar was not a think tank but a thought in actions and association of bodies, not a call but a bell that jingles against the injustices, not the root but the routes, not a singer but a song, not a signature but a sign, not a rebel but the rebellion. And a rebel dies not the rebellion, a singer dies not the song and a person dies not the phenomena. Gaddar is going to live on. He has joined the legacy of Kabir and Tuka, of Billie Holiday and Federico Garcia Lorca. He did what he could, now it depends on his people whether they can carry his memories and struggles, whether they can memorialise and immortalise him in history for the future. He had a strong faith: My people will remember me.
Brahma Prakash is a writer, cultural theorist and Assistant Professor at the School of Arts and Aesthetics at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He is the author of Cultural Labour (2019) and Body on the Barricades: Life, Art and Resistance in Contemporary India (2023). Views expressed here are the author’s own.