Rebellion, Activism, and Revolution in South India: Activist Analyses of the Colonial State, 1918–51

My research focuses on the intellectual histories of social movements in the Telugu and Tamil-speaking regions of South India, spanning the British Indian presidency of Madras and the princely state of Hyderabad, in the early twentieth century. For this panel on the colonial state in India, I propose a paper that uses sources in Tamil, Telugu, and English and focuses on how actors in social movements, particularly the trade union/workers’ movements, the communist movement, and the anticolonial nationalist movement, understood the colonial state in their diagnosis of power, and attempted to reconcile their ideological and often internationalist commitments with the condition of colonialism in ways that transcended the colonialist/nationalist binary. By the same token, I elaborate on the ways in which the colonial state understood, regulated, surveilled, and repressed these movements through the technologies of policing and intelligence gathering. The internationalist dimension of some of these movements was a primary cause for anxiety within the colonial state as well. My research is motivated by the overriding concerns of how we might conceptualize knowledge production and epistemology, political education, and the porousness of borders and categories, through the lens of social movements. In addition, by comparing movements in the directly-ruled Madras Presidency with those in the princely state of Hyderabad – where the politics of resistance generally took on a much more violent color, culminating in the communist-led Telangana Rebellion of 1946-51, one of the largest instances of communist mass insurgency of the twentieth century – I aim to shed light on how movements interpreted the “colonial state” and the condition of colonialism under the divergent social and political conditions of “direct” and “indirect” rule, as well as how these varied contexts shaped their internationalist dimensions.