The Telengana insurrection : a study in the causes and development of a Communist insurrection in rural India, 1946-51

Abstract

Like any social movement , the Communist- led insurrection in the rural districts of Telengana, in the old Hyderabad state , was a labyrinth of policies , events , and salient and obscure forces so entangled as to defeat generalization; but bound to be generalized before it could be even partially described, let alone understood . In this case, the descriptive categories are essentially misleading . Words like ' Communist ' and ' insurrection ' are not always received at their face value, even by the impartial reader; while the overtones of meaning may refer outside the limited context in which the words are used. The Communist Party of India has had to contend with circumstances - principally the concern of the sociologist , as an object of study - which are very different from those prevailing in any other country in the world; and these circumstances have moulded an unusual party, or - as one is entitled to say - an unusual constellation of parties . Insurrections and mass movements illustrate a diversity of forms as wide as the diversity of the social conditions under which they flourish . These differences are unmistakable when one is comparing peasant societies , traditional cultures at varying stages of dissolution . Nineteenth century industrial cities such as Paris , Brussels and Milan resembled one another , from the point of view of the barricades . But there is little formally in common between the more or less ' spontaneous ' agrarian movement of expropriation in Catalonia or revolutionary Nexico , for example , guerrilla raids on army detachments , of the kind carried out by the Pathans of the Indian Empire ' s North West Frontier , and the events in Hyderabad . Show more