The Fire of Defiance

Even as the movement for Indian independence gathered momentum at the national level in the 1930s and ‘40s, a different kind of mobilization and struggle was unfolding in the Telangana region. Led by the Communist Party, the Telangana armed struggle swept through the Nizam’s dominions, targeting the exploitative practices of the doras, or landlords. Hundreds of men and women, from a wide spectrum of social locations, participated in the movement, and pictures of women wielding rifles have today become iconic.

Among the many women in the movement was Mallu Swarajyam, who joined the armed squads of the movement and also became a cultural activist. Her extraordinary story, as told to three women, is captured here. In her words: “I also worked in the Kothagudem coal mines. Our informants were tribal women who went into the forest to gather mahuva flowers. On one occasion, we received information that the police were travelling in a bus along the route. I stormed onto the road, stopped the bus and punctured its tyres with my pistol.”

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Uma Chakravarti is a distinguished feminist historian who has taught at Miranda House College for Women, Delhi University. She writes on Buddhism, early Indian history, the nineteenth century, and on contemporary issues. Among her many publications are: Social Dimensions of Early Buddhism (1996), Rewriting History: The Life and Times of Pandita Ramabai (2013), Gendering Caste through a Feminist Lens (2018) and The Dying Lineage: The Crisis of Political Power in the Mahabharata (2024). She is closely involved with the women’s movement as well as the movement for democratic rights in India, and has been part of many fact-finding teams to investigate human rights violations, communal violence and state repression.

Vimala Morthala, a women’s rights activist, is noted for her poetry and short stories, and has published several anthologies of both. She edits the Mehfil page for Mana Telangana.

S. Katyayini is a noted Telugu writer and critic and has translated extensively from Telugu to English with a large body of work that includes anti-caste literature, novels and the stories of Bibhutibhushan Bandhopadhyay.

Purnima Tammireddy is a writer, translator and publisher, working in both Telugu and English. A techie by profession, she founded Elami Publications, an independent Telugu publishing house, and co-founded pustakam.net, a website for book reviews, in 2009. Her published works include a short story collection, Emotional Pregnancy (2022), Telugu translations of Manto’s Siya Hashiye (2022) and Amrita Pritam’s Pinjar (2023) and an English translation of the Telugu novel Pampateeram (2025).