India's Subalterns
Too Have A Poet
By Syed Amin
Jafri
02 September, 2005
Rediff.com
The
folk singer Gaddar, Gummadi Vittal Rao, is 56 years old, has acted in
two movies, and carries a bullet in his body. He is best known as a
singer, and thousands of copies of his songs have been sold throughout
India.
He is on the Andhra
Pradesh police's list of people marked for overt support to ultra-left
wing rebels, the Naxalites. And yet successive state governments have
used his services in the failed peace initiatives with the outlawed
Maoists.
In Left wing circles,
he is a living legend. He is Gaddar, the balladeer. And if that's all
you know about him, read on:
Gaddar who?
He was born into
a poor Dalit family in Toopran village in Medak district on the outskirts
of Hyderabad. His parents Seshaiah and Lachumamma worked as labourers.
He passed his PUC (now 12th class) exams with 77 per cent marks from
a government junior college in Hyderabad. He joined the Osmania University
Engineering College to pursue a BE degree and dropped out after the
first year to earn a living.
Gaddar how?
Gaddar joined the
movement for separate a Telangana state in 1969 and formed a burrakatha
(folk art) troupe named after Mahatma Gandhi to spread the message.
He was soon disillusioned. For a while, he gave performances on family
planning and other social themes for the Indian government's information
and broadcasting ministry.
After a stint as
a manual worker in a chemical factory, he joined the Art Lovers Association
founded by B Narsing Rao, producer of hit Telugu movies such as Maa
Bhoomi, Rangula Kala and Dasi. Gaddar acted in the first two films.
His political affiliation began when he heard about the Srikakulam armed
struggle by tribals in north coastal Andhra under the leadership of
the Communist Party of India. Gaddar chose folk art to fight against
social inequalities.
Who are the Naxalites?
A primer
The Art Lovers Association
was renamed the Jana Natya Mandali in 1972 and Vittal Rao adopted the
pseudonym Gadar -- as a tribute to the Gadar Party, which resisted British
colonial rule in Punjab during the early twentieth century. Due to a
spelling error, Gadar became Gaddar. And it stuck.
Even while he was
singing of revolution in the villages, Gaddar took a banking recruitment
exam and got the post of a clerk at Canara Bank in 1975. He quit his
bank job in 1984 and concentrated on the Mandali. After he voiced his
protest against the killing of several Dalits by upper caste landlords
in Karamchedu village in Prakasam district in July 1985, the police
raided Gaddar's house. He went underground.
In exile, Gaddar
roamed through the forests of Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh
and Orissa, spreading the revolutionary ideology through folk arts.
Gaddar and his troupe adapted folk forms such as Oggu Katha, Veedhi
Bhagotham (vernacular ballets using a combination of song, dialogue
and dance) and Yellamma Katha (the story of the local deity) to revolutionary
themes depicting the travails of peasants, labourers and other weaker
sections. The Mandali was soon regarded as the cultural wing of the
People's War, the Maoist group active in Andhra Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh,
Maharashtra and Orissa.
With his revolutionary
songs catching the imagination of the masses, Gaddar became a legend.
Hundreds of thousands of printed copies and thousands of cassettes of
his songs have been distributed and sold over the last two decades.
After four-and-a-half
years of exile, Gaddar emerged from hiding when the then Congress government
led by Dr Marri Chenna Reddy adopted a 'liberal attitude' towards the
Naxalites. On February 18, 1990, Gaddar met the media. Two days later,
the Mandali celebrated its 19th anniversary at the sprawling Nizam College
Grounds in Hyderabad. A staggering 200,000 people came to watch Gaddar.
Gaddar why?
In the last 15 years
since he surfaced from self-imposed exile, Gaddar has seen six chief
ministers blow hot and cold on the Naxalite movement. During this period,
he has launched campaigns to protest against State repression in the
countryside and killings of scores of Naxalites by the police in what
he calls 'fake encounters.'
Gaddar believes
those wielding political and administrative power will, one day, realise
that the Naxalite issue can be tackled only by addressing the socio-economic
issues in the countryside, and not through 'State terror.'
On April 6, 1997
there was an assassination bid on Gaddar. While two of the three bullets
the assailants fired into him, two were removed. One was left untouched
because of medical complications. The near-fatal attack, which the balladeer
believes was engineered by the police, did not deter Gaddar from being
a champion of the downtrodden.
Gaddar now?
The police have,
so far, not arrested Gaddar though they say they have evidence against
him. Since the re-imposition of the ban on the Maoists, particularly
on Virasam, (the Viplava Rachayitala Sangham, or Revolutionary Writers
Association) Gaddar has been highly critical of the Congress government
in general and Chief Minister Y S Rajasekhar Reddy in particular for
following in the footsteps of the earlier Telugu Desam Party regime
led by Nara Chandrababu Naidu, who had re-imposed the ban on the People's
War in July 1996.
The police accuse
Gaddar of inciting violence and propagating the Naxalite ideology of
'power through the barrel of the gun.'
Unlike other left-wing
revolutionary writers and poets, Gaddar is equally well known in rural
and urban Andhra Pradesh. He is a familiar face on television screens,
participating in protest programmes or spirited debates. His songs cut
across the barriers of region, religion, dialect, caste and social status.
In the words of
prominent academic Dr Kancha Ilaiah, 'Gaddar was the first Telangana
intellectual who established a link between the productive masses and
the literary text and, of course, that text established a link between
the masses and educational institutions.'
Gaddar's attire
is as well known as his songs. In his own words, 'in the beginning,
we used to perform wearing lungis. But then, since women too formed
a part of the audience, we thought that costume was not appropriate.
Therefore, we preferred gochis (dhotis). In the same way, gongali (a
thick blanket made of rough wool) worn across the chest had its own
advantages. It is in the jungles that we first took to wearing anklets
and a loaded rifle on the right shoulder. On the left one, we had a
dolu (drum).'
He sticks to the
same gochi and gongali, anklets and dolu. The loaded rifle has given
way to a lathi in the right hand.