The secret the Beheaded Head whispered from the Gallows
What a state of society is that which knows of no better instrument for its own defence than the hangman, and which proclaims, through its own brutality, as eternal law? Is there not a necessity for deeply reflecting upon an alteration of the system that breeds these crimes, instead of glorifying the hangman who executes a lot of criminals to make room only for the supply of new ones?
-Karl Marx, New-York Daily Tribune, February 17-18, 1853.
Seventy-fiveyears later, poet Sri Sri sensed that the “Hidden Bones”1 rising from the womb of the earth seemed to whisper unheard, unseen secrets. By 1937, he had clearly grasped, through The Secret the Beheaded Head Told2 that this is a hangman’s system.
The fallen, the corrupt, the victims of suffering;
the lives burnt to cinders and rendered waste;
the wretched, crushed beneath the grinding wheels of evil god’s chariot;
the destitute and the degraded;
homeless, mendicants without refuge;
pariahs, rejected by society, and exiled from the community;
the uprooted, the dispossessed, the hopeless.
In short, the poet resolved that poetry must stand on the side of these oppressed people who have neither voice nor a name. But Sri Sri asked himself: how can a person, apart from being a poet, truly achieve this? It is possible if he becomes part of the working class.
Poetry about the Dispossessed
Throughout Sri Sri’s poetry, one strand of songs offers solace to the oppressed labouring masses. Alongside his poetry runs another stream, the poetry of the dispossessed: the pariahs, the broken, the fallen.
If one stream dealt with the productive sphere, the labouring classes engaged in production, another addressed those pushed into the non-productive fringes of society. (They may not even belong to the labouring class. They may be a beggar, a madman sprawled in a drain, a drunkard- anyone.) What defines them is not their occupation, but the absence of property and privilege.
Those who possess private property as the dividing line, to protect it, they institutionalise repression and exploitation through the state and the system. Broadly speaking, they are the ruling classes. Opposite to them stand the vast numbers subjected to repression, exploitation, and dispossession, briefly, the marginalised.
Most of the poems in Mahaprasthanam3 have these two streams of poetry. From this perspective, Karl Marx’s interrogation of crime, which challenged earlier traditional perspectives, finds an echo in Sri Sri’s poetry.
What criteria would determine virtue and vice, justice and injustice, morality and immorality, violence and non-violence, good and evil? Who decides them? Who gave them the authority to decide?
Where does their authority spring from? How did some become rulers and others ruled?
How did the culture of the rulers become the ethos of the ruled? How did it happen? Why must it continue?
How did one become an executioner? From where did he derive the right to sever another’s head? In the end, why does the system itself assume the role of a hangman?
Revolt- Inevitable Response to Oppression
Ask Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. They would answer unequivocally: these norms emerged the moment the class society was born. From that very point, the oppressed have struggled to abolish them.
Those who longed to change the world have always waged a relentless struggle against the status quo they were compelled to confront. They were agitated by the existing order.
Turbulence is our life.
Agitation is our breath.
Rebellion is our philosophy.
Jesus Christ embraced a lamb. Watching the deer’s blood spilt by the tiger, he felt unrest. When a crowd hurled stones at Magdalene, he stood by her side and asked: “Who among you has not sinned?” In doing so, he questioned the very notion of ‘sin’ defined by the system and sanctified by patriarchy.
So did the Buddha. Every prophet has done likewise. Marx did no different. Every writer who has left an indelible mark upon human hearts has done so.
When you bring them into sharp confrontation-
the state versus Vasantasena in Mrichchhakatika,4
the Brahminical order versus Madhuravani in Kanyasulkam,5
capital versus Emma Bovary in Flaubert’s novel6,
whose side did the great writers stand? Whom did they choose to question?
It is as clear as day.
In Abhijnana Shakuntalam, Kalidasa employed the tricks of curse and redemption to defend the monarchical order. But in the Mahabharata, Shakuntala herself questions kingship and patriarchy, employing the weapon of empirical truth.
The thieves in Victor Hugo’s novel7, in the film Jagte Raho8, in the Buddhist Jataka tales9– through their eyes we see the system of crime itself.
Sri Sri’s poetry, too, brings out those helpless beings crushed beneath this criminal order, along with the workers and fighters who stand beside them.
In the Okaratri (One Night) poem, Sri Sri writes about a fearful man, beholding the moonlight on the night of Bahula Panchami10,
the raging sandstorm of the night, the invisible goblins in the wind,
the vast sea of stars, who stands bewildered,
as though carrying an immovable mountain upon his chest
Like a solitary camel with broken legs in the desert of the sky,
even the moonlight appeared to him only as white cowdung ash.
In another poem, Akasadeepam ( Light in the Sky), a miserable life extinguishes itself in a room at half past six in the morning.
Elsewhere, a wayfarer, who left home seeking livelihood in the city, trudges for three days hopelessly. The cold wind plays with the corpse of the traveller. His mother, the subject of the poem, back in the village, is suddenly seized by pangs in her womb, in a nightmare.11
From a state of helpless dread, the poet must gently touch the reader with a deep, humane compassion. If, in a mother’s troubled dream, her womb quivers, the reader’s very entrails must shudder in response.
From this awakening must arise a sense of duty and determination.
And then, further down the road, beneath a roadside tree, the poet shows us an older woman sitting beside the ashes of an extinguished hearth. “If that old woman dies,” asks the wandering wind, “whose sin is it?”
That restless wind is Sri Sri himself.
He did not expect an answer from dogs or monitor lizards. Even the leftover plate-leaf, blown through dust and pitch darkness, denies the blame. Yet we know the guilt lies with those who have gorged themselves in decadent excess and flung the leftovers into the darkness.
Haggard eyes, shattered hearts, defeated lives, a gaunt, half-mad presence– all these figures recur as a steady stream in Sri Sri’s poetry.
Because- on the very day he invoked poetry,
crying, Poetry! O Poetry!–
in the dead of midnight,
a woman who has just given birth,
cradling the newborn to her breast,
drifts into tender dreams-
and in that instant
the whorls of the world’s turning,
the ancient memories flickering
in the deep sleep of the child,
the murmuring pulse
in the blood-veins
of a patient who has closed his eyes
at the twilight threshold
between life and death,
within the conjurer’s spell
of the surgeon-
All these he was aware of.
Sri Sri heard
the slurred, half-articulate mutterings of a drunkard
who had slipped into the drain, unable even to move;
and he heard, too,
the refrain of songs of terrible suffering-
The prostitute’s insides are burning
in the monstrous lust of the client,
Her eyes were heavy and half-lidded.
On the outskirts of the village,
beneath the shadow of a tree beside a dried tank-
sacks piled like hills, darkness everywhere,
sorrow on one side, despair on the other-
prisons, gallows, suicides in canals….
the betrayed brothers-
Sri Sri knew the anguish of ‘deceived brethren’.
Those steeped in anguish,
those reduced to mere remnants of their own stories-
those struck by the fangs of suffering-
Their stories are the very substance of his poetry.
Sri Sri resolved:
Wielding my pen for your sake
I will bring down the earth
The Chariot wheels of Jagannatha
The deadly boom of the chariot wheels
(From) the heaven’s highway!
And I will make the earth tremble!
Earlier, we asked: who decides justice and injustice, violence and non-violence? What is the criterion?
There is a hard line. It is property; it is security. Between good and evil, you have built iron walls.
Sri Sri himself answered in his poem Vyatyasalu (Contrasts and Contradictions).
…………….
Your eyes see in a straight line
If the line is blurred, you raise a hue and cry!
All those on the other side of the line are criminals!
It is to defend the line that you have your courts,
Your police, prisons and the gallows.12
To guard this line, the system appoints the hangman of whom Marx spoke.
On behalf of the betrayed brothers, Sri Sri sounded the‘Victory Drum’13:
Can this social order
Where one man oppresses another
Where one nation crushes another
Continue any longer?
It shall not.
Czech miner, Chinese rickshaw-hand
Irish sailor and all small fry,
All the oppressed of the land
Proclaim the truth of history.
Zulu, Negro, Hottentot,
Black, brown, white and yellow man
With voices raised in unison
Announce their real historic lot.14
Those who offered fuel to the fire of the world, those who shed tears like rain upon the universe, those who joined the voices to the roar of the earth- they alone can blossom as the white petals of the world-lotus, resonate as the strings of the cosmic veena15, and rise as the banners of the world’s future.
Thus, Sri Sri proclaimed the Magna Carta of the working-class world.
Ploughing every field, furrow upon furrow,
crushing gold out of the very soil of the earth-
to fill the world with well-being-
the sweat of the peasant-heroes,
their sacred streams of toil- ah! They are priced at nothing!
Sri Sri asserted that no one can ascertain the price of the sweat of their labour.
The injustices of the world’s order,
the hunger that scorches, the anguish that shatters,
poverty, brutalities-
carving out paths of redress, of revolt,
forging ways that resolve, that cast them out-
By weaving songs-
the new poetry stirs within me
for the welfare of the working world,
for the prosperity of the toiling world.
Sri Sri did bequeath to us a new wave of poetry.
Sri Sri- speaking in his own idiom of the fallen, the corrupted, those struck by the fangs of suffering, on behalf of the invisible, vast section of oppressed masses, and invoked whatever forces in this regard, from Mahaprasthanam to Maro Prasthanam. Poems such as Jayabheri, Mahaprasthanam, Ashadootalu, Kavita O Kavita!, Desa Charitralu, Jagannathuni Rathachakralu fromMahaprasthanam, and Khadga Srishti, Yiplavam Yadundira, Jhanjha, Tudi Payanam, Tholi Vijayam fromMaro Prasthanam– among many other poetic pieces- could be given as examples.
Why did Sri Sri choose the image of the “beheaded head from the gallows” as the representative symbol of these forces of struggle? How did this symbol acquire concrete historical meaning across different epochs? This work seeks to follow that trajectory, bringing into view how these meanings are forged and re-forged within specific socio-historical contexts.
From the age of slavery, class struggle has not merely manifested in overt exploitation and torture rooted in property relations. It also killed people through hunger, disease, and poverty. Ruling classes have destroyed labouring and oppressed people in countless forms:
through repression, through mass shootings and genocides, through the lashes, through modern instruments of annihilation, through wars waged in the process of redistribution of markets.
All these have been recorded in history- though not always in the chronicles of ruling classes, but in the histories of struggle: in oral traditions, in folk songs, and above all in the living memories passed down through generations of resistance.
Yet, strikingly, it is those warriors who were executed- hanged- that have remained as milestones in history.
Why should people be hanged in the first place? In the human body, the head is the seat of thought, knowledge, and expression. To sever it is to suppress the very thought processes that generate ideas of revolt. Society may have instinctively recognised such an act as the ultimate form of anti-human repression.
Perhaps this punitive force dates back to the time when, after the revolt of slaves, thousands of fighters- including Spartacus- were crucified and hung along roads as spectacles of terror.
From then on, the gallows acquired a dark notoriety in literature and history.
Jesus Christ was crucified.
In 1987, in Mustyalapalli village of Warangal district, a tribal youth named Meghya was tortured to death in a police station, and his body was hung from a transformer at Hanamkonda Chourastha (cross roads).
Between these moments, countless such historical atrocities continued.
From the First War of Indian Independence- Mangal Pandey to Khudiram Bose, who mounted the gallows after throwing the first bomb at British rule (“Mother, I shall be born again in your womb- recognise me by the scar upon my neck,” the severed head is said to have told us); from tribal resistance leaders- Sidhu, Kanu, Birsa Munda, Veer Narayan Singh, Komaram Bheem and the martyrs of Jodeghat- to revolutionaries such as Ashfaqulla Khan, Ram Prasad Bismil, Bhagat Singh, Rajguru, Sukhdev, the Kayyur comrades, and Maqbool Bhat, the severed head returns again and again as the enduring emblem of defiance.
The list is unending.
Private Property and Capital Punishment
From the onset of British colonialism in India, and even earlier from the European conquest of the Americas, recorded documents testify to trials followed by executions of tribal fighters and other forces of resistance.
Here lies a peculiar cruelty of capital punishment:
A system claims the authority to kill a human being through due process of law.
We are taught that constitutions, legislatures, and laws grant this authority. But any serious analysis of an unequal society reveals that fundamentally this authority is given to the state to safeguard private property.
From the time of Spartacus to that of Bhumaiah and Kista Gowd, world literature has persistently attempted to unravel the secret whispered by the severed head- namely, the hidden logic of exploitation embedded in private property.
From the early lyric Suptasthikalu to Bhoomyaakaashalu (1975), over nearly five decades, Sri Sri employed this symbol to expose what Karl Marx called the hangman’s system- a system that, in time, evolved into a brokered machinery of power- placing before us the truths born at the footsteps of the gallows.
To abolish slavery, Spartacus raised the first banner of revolt.
In modern history, revolutionaries inspired by Naxalbari continue that trajectory.
Thus, what appears as the final march is also only the first victory.
For the path must move from New Democratic Revolution to socialism, and ultimately toward a classless society. Sri Sri articulated precisely this when he wrote of the Srikakulam struggle: “Final march- first victory.”
In a rousing call, he writes:
Swing, swing, swing upon the gallows-
grasp it, cling to it- swing!
You are immortal.
You stood beside the poor, the oppressed, the beaten;
You held firm your flower-like youth;
You carried a fire-like integrity upon your head;
When movement called, you leapt into battle.
These lines inspired Vangapandu Prasada Rao16 to compose the immortal song “Em Pillado Eldamostava Srikakulam lo Seemakondaku…” (O Youngman, will you join the struggle in Srikakulam hills?)
Sri Sri continues:
Eyes that shed blood will blaze as fire;
Shapeless stones will turn into bullets.
In Srikakulam’s forests, ants are slaying serpents;
On Simhadri’s peak, parrots are hunting down cats.
Yet this struggle is not akin to that of historical figures like Manchala, Mallamma, Rani Lakshmibai, or Sarojini Naidu. (Though they may be better symbols compared to Balachandra, Tandrapaparayudu, Tantia Tope, or even Gandhi within their historical contexts) Yet, they fought the wars for the ‘liberation’ of their respective classes.
In contrast, Panchadi Nirmala articulated and practiced as “Marx envisioned the way” that is, the struggle that aims at the liberation of all humanity.
That truth is deathless; it burns eternally
And therefore,
The propertied classes revere Manchala,
remember Mallamma,
shed tears for Lakshmibai,
Garland Portraits of Sarojini Naidu-
but quiver in fear at the name of Panchadi Nirmala.
He has not stopped there; He brings a universal, dialectical historical truth before us.
Yesterday, the white men called you Bhagat Singh.
Today, the brown men brand you a Naxalite.
Tomorrow, the world will hail you as a Morning Star.
Sri Sri wrote this song, ending with “Inquilab Zindabad,” in 1971. Though he does not explicitly state it, it likely emerged in the context of the death sentence awarded to Nagabhushan Patnaik17during the Srikakulam struggle.
Along with Sivasagar’s18 immortal poem- “Standing upon the gallows, I shall sing a glorious song”- these works endure in literary history not merely as individual expressions, but as defiant voices raised against the executioner-system itself.
The poems of Maro Prasthanam are rooted in specific times and places, yet each leads us from the particular to the universal. Thus, figures like Bhumaiah and Kista Gowd remain historically concrete individuals. Yet when Sri Sri expands them into “Earth and Sky”, we cannot but nod in recognition- for they transcend themselves and become the very horizon of human struggle.
Notes from the Gallows19:
Bhumaiah and Kista Gowd were hanged during the Emergency
After Bhagat Singh, Rajguru, and Sukhdev, and after the Kayyur comrades of Kerala, the peasant guerrilla fighters Bhumaiah and Kista Gowd stand out as those who were condemned to death for political reasons in the course of India’s agrarian liberation struggles.
On December 1, 1975- during the dark days of the Emergency in India- they were sent to the gallows by a regime that derived its power from repression: the rule of Indira Gandhi and Jalagam Vengala Rao (During 1968-71, he was the Home Minister, later became CM of Andhra Pradesh from 10 Dec 1973-5 March 1978.)
Born in 1929–30, during the early phase of the Communist movement in India, Bhumaiah belonged to that first generation shaped by its ideals. He was a participant in the historic Telangana Peasant Armed Struggle (1946-51). A native of Muthanur village in Peddapalli taluk of Karimnagar district, he was born to Veeramallaiah and Rajavva, a Jangam20 couple.
Kista Gowd, born in 1933 in Kannaram village of Asifabad taluk in Adilabad district, to Gunnala Ellagoud and Chinnakka, was not only a participant in that same Telangana armed struggle, but carried within his body its indelible marks: the bullets lodged in his thigh from those days of combat remained there even at the time of his execution- living scars of resistance. “When Totaramudu’s thigh was pierced, even the forest wept”21– for his sake.
Continuing their journey within the Communist movement, when the waves of Naxalbari uprising and the Srikakulam struggles spread into the Godavari valley, these two- standing on either bank of that river22– entered the Naxalite movement.
In April 1970, they were arrested in connection with an annihilation of class enemy case. For months, they were subjected to brutal torture in police stations. Later, while lodged in Warangal jail, a Sessions Court sentenced them to death in 1972.
Since executions in Telangana were carried out at the Mushirabad (Secunderabad) jail, they were transferred there. Those sentenced to death were confined in the condemned cells- the narrow enclosures of waiting, called gunj.
During their imprisonment, when they were first arrested in 1972, they shared time in incarceration with leaders such as K. G. Satyamurthy. During the Emergency, others, such as Sumanta Banerjee and Inguva Mallikarjuna Sharma, were also held alongside them for extended periods.
Deferred Death, Defiant Voices
The government issued orders to carry out their execution on November 25, 1974. This meant that even the mercy petitions they had submitted had been rejected by the President. The government formally cleared the path to the gallows. As per the procedure, prison authorities inform those condemned to death exactly twenty-four hours before the execution. At that very time, six writers of the Virasam- the accused in the Secunderabad Conspiracy Case- were also lodged in the same prison. Through them, the news reached the outside world and came to the notice of Pattipati Venkateswarlu, the secretary of the Andhra Pradesh Civil Liberties Committee (APCLC). Owing to their timely intervention, the execution was stayed that very night.
Soon thereafter, accompanied by Pattipati, Sri Sri personally visited Bhumaiah and Kista Gowd in the jail’s condemned cells. From that moment onward, as President of the Andhra Pradesh Civil Liberties Committee, he threw himself into the campaign for the commutation of their death sentences- addressing meetings, rallies, and demonstrations across the state.
Since then, the movement in the two districts of Adilabad and Karimnagar gained particular strength. After their martyrdom in Kukkalagudur, Karimnagar district, under the leadership of Comrade Devender Reddy, the people erected a memorial not only to them but also to other revolutionaries who had fallen along the banks of the Godavari, and organised massive processions and public meetings attended by thousands.
From Huzurabad to Bellampalli,and to Mandamarri, in every meeting held during 1974–75 demanding the cancellation of their executions, Sri Sri was present. One such meeting was held on May 11, 1975, at Huzurabad. The organisers, Nalla Adi Reddy and Sanigaram Venkateshwarlu, would later be etched in the history of the revolutionary movement- under the names Shyam and Sahu- in letters of blood.
Thousands gathered at that meeting. As speakers addressed the crowd, Sri Sri, seated at the back, read the pamphlet being distributed. On its reverse side, he wrote a message that would inspire the anti-death penalty movement in the years to come.
He recalled an incident from Tsarist Russia: when the great novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky was once led before a firing squad, the execution party had taken him to the very wall where he was to be shot. At the final moment, an order arrived from the Tsar commuting the sentence. It is said that only then did the Tsar realise that Dostoevsky was a great writer.
Narrating this in his characteristic simplicity, Sri Sri appealed that Indira Gandhi should not, by hanging Bhumaiah and Kista Gowd, prove herself more unjust than the Tsar.
But Indira Gandhi and Jalagam Vengala Rao went further- not only beyond the Tsar, but even beyond the Nizam in dispensing injustice.
During the Telangana Peasant Armed Struggle, though many revolutionaries had been sentenced to death, the executions were never carried out. The Nizam, out of a religious dread of sin, refused to sign the death warrants- even up to the time of the “Police Action” in September 1948.
On May 10, 1975, a second set of orders was issued for the execution of Bhumaiah and Kista Gowd. Through the martyr Madhusudan Raj23, the news again reached the outside world, reaching K G Kannabiran and a group of young lawyers. Their intervention led to yet another stay.
This time, the Bhumaiah–Kista Gowd Death Sentence Abolition Committee was formed. The movement spread beyond the state and the country, taking on an international dimension. Demonstrations were held even in France and England before Indian embassies. Within India, voices rose from across the political and cultural spectrum: Jayaprakash Narayan, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, K. A. Abbas, Mrinal Sen, along with George Fernandes, Chandra Rajeswara Rao, and Bhupesh Gupta. Intellectuals internationally, too, responded: Jean-Paul Sartre, Tariq Ali, and Noam Chomsky raised their voices in protest against the hanging orders.
On May 12, 1975, in Hyderabad, Sri Sri issued a powerful appeal:
If, by some historical blunder, Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed and Indira Gandhi were to be hanged, Eskimos in distant Alaska might remain unmoved. Likewise, if Bhumaiah and Kista Gowd are hanged, it may not trouble Ahmed or Indira Gandhi in the least. But if India executes them today, it will incur a disgrace no less than that which the United States earned when it sent Sacco and Vanzetti to the electric chair.
India is already inviting global condemnation. By retaining capital punishment- abolished by many civilised nations- it proves once again that it still lives in a prehistoric age. Even now, the Government of India has the opportunity to annul these death sentences. I warn that it must seize it.
At the same time, in Spain, five rebels had been sentenced to death. Indira Gandhi, as the Prime Minister of the “socialist republic” of India, appealed to the dictator Francisco Franco to commute their sentences.
Yet, having herself become authoritarian under the Emergency, she allowed Bhumaiah and Kista Gowd to be hanged, through Vengala Rao, on December 1, 1975.
At Bellampalli, in a massive gathering mobilised by Radicals such as Gajjela Gangaram and Peddi Shankar- who would themselves later become martyrs- Sri Sri took part and spoke before thousands.
At Mandamarri, as torrential rain poured down, thousands stood huddled under the eaves of houses, drenched yet unmoving. There, Sri Sri recited with electrifying fervour the poem that mocked Jalagam Vengala Rao (then Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh)- depicting him as a mere “band-player” to Indira Gandhi- beginning with the searing refrain: Slave to a slave, O slave…
Sri Sri called him a leech.24Your name evokes revulsion, Sri Sri remarked in his poem Dudi Puli meeda putra.25
The crowd, soaked in rain yet ablaze with emotion, echoed his words.
The next day, when Pattipati Venkateshwarlu met the Chief Minister to plead for the commutation of Bhumaiah and Kista Gowd’s death sentences, Vengala Rao- revealing his class instincts – reminded Sri Sri’s biting remarks against him (Vengala Rao) with sarcasm:
“Did you not raise a chorus when your great poet declared at Mandamarri-
Naxalites have recognised you, and they will blast a country bomb on your head?”
From the very first time he saw them in Mushirabad (Secunderabad) jail, Sri Sri envisioned Bhumaiah and Kista Gowd as Earth and Sky.
When he read on December 1 that they had been executed, he noted it in his diary. Two days later, on December 3, he wrote the poem Bhoomyaakaasalu (Earth and Sky).
When I read in a newspaper that they had been hanged,
I wrote it down in my diary.
No- let me not write a poem of tears.
They have repaid, with their lives,
the debt that time had placed upon society.
The anger that burned within them
will never be extinguished.
The hope that glowed within them
will soon find fulfilment.
They crushed darkness in their fists,
tore apart evil and scattered it.
Upon their indelible inscription,
the stars themselves have signed as witnesses.
The deathless ideal they leave behind
is our inheritance.
They are not intellectuals like the Rosenbergs,
nor gentle souls like Sacco and Vanzetti.
Of the two-
One is the Earth,
the other the Sky.
Kista Gowd’s hair, Sri Sri says, was like the delicate wings of a dragonfly; his eyes, vast as the blue sky those shadows fall upon. Bhumaiah bore the name Earth26, yet belonged to the wandering Jangam lineage. The two acres of inam land traditionally granted to such mendicant-priests- after Bhumaiah’s death sentence- were seized by a landlord, dispossessing his wife and son.
Thus, literally, this system hung both Earth and Sky, for they demanded land to the tiller.
As they asserted that like the sky, all the five elements belong to all people. Since the duo said that the very limits of struggle are as vast as Earth and Sky.
For this, the hangman’s system put them to death. This is the secret whispered by the severed head. Sri Sri transformed it into a chant for the people to sing: The sky is close to the world of ideas, and a luminous inheritance to be shared among comrades.
Sri Sri completed a century; his poetic voice fell silent over a quarter-century ago. Thirty-five years have passed since Bhumaiah and Kista Gowd were executed, and the dark days of the Emergency were ‘lifted’ thirty-two years ago.
What Relevance do these Memories hold Today?
Yet the economic crises, the assaults on democracy, the fascistic tendencies that marked the era in which Sri Sri began writing- persist in new forms. The crises of imperialism, the spectre of nuclear war, and the illusions of globalisation continue to ensnare the world.
Even today, in Sri Sri’s own words,
More than factories, academies, and offices, it is the prisons that are filled- across the land, lakhs languish within them.
Those sentenced to death in naxalite movement and national liberation struggles continue to confront death within prison walls. Among them stands Afzal Guru27, whose death sentence was upheld by the Supreme Court, awaiting only presidential clemency.
The Emergency has reappeared in new forms- such as Operation Green Hunt (November 2009) – where the state began waging war upon its own people. And that is why Sri Sri’s poetry endures- like Ugadi at the end of a long winter– rejuvenating its first youth again and again.
-Varavara Rao
(This article has been translated from Telugu. Originally published in Maroprapachapu Mahakavi on Sri Sri’s birth centenary- 2010 by Janasahiti of Huzurabad, Karimnagar district of Andhra Pradesh.)
Footnotes
1Suptasthikalu (Hidden Bones):
2 Sri Sri used the expression- uri teeyabadda sirasuu cheppina rahasyam– in his poem Kavita, O Kavita, in 1937.
3 Mahaprasthanam (Long March): Anthology of Sri Sri’s poems, first published in June 1950.
4. Mrichchhakatika ((c. 2nd–5th century CE).- Vasantasena, a courtesan, stands in moral defiance of state power and social hierarchy in this classical Sanskrit drama attributed to Shudraka.
5. Kanyasulkam (first staged 1892; published 1909)- Madhuravani, a sharp-witted courtesan, exposes and subverts Brahminical hypocrisy and patriarchal norms in Gurajada Apparao’s social satire.
6. Madame Bovary (published 1856).) – Emma Bovary’s rebellion against bourgeois norms reveals the suffocating grip of capitalist morality on individual desire and agency.
7 Les Misérables (published 1862). The “thief” Jean Valjean is imprisoned for stealing bread, and through him, Victor Hugo exposes the brutality and moral bankruptcy of the legal and social order.
8 Jagte Raho (Hindi film) released in 1956, directed by Amit Maitra and Sombhu Mitra. The central figure (played by Raj Kapoor) is not a professional thief, but a poor villager mistaken for one. As he wanders through an apartment building, the film exposes the hypocrisy and hidden corruption of “respectable” society- turning the accusation of theft back onto the system itself.
9 One famous story is about a bandit, Angulimala.
10 The fifth day of the waning fortnight
11 In the poem Batasari (Wayfarer) in Maha Prasthanam
12 Sri Sri, New Frontiers, RWA Publication, 1983, An anthology of English-translated poems of Sri Sri. From the poem: Chariot Wheels of Jagannatha, p. 30
13 Sri Sri wrote a poem titled Jayabheri (Victory Drum). Translated under the title: Jayabheri in New Frontiers, p. 59
14 In New Frontiers, p.24
15. Veena, a classical Indian plucked-string instrument, is closer to the Western lute.
16 Vangapandu Prasada Rao, also known as Vangapandu, is a well-known artist of Jana Natya Mandali. He passed away in 2020.
17 Nagabhushan Patnaik was awarded capital punishment in the Parvatipuram Conspiracy case in 1970 by a Sessions Judge, confirmed by the High Court in 1971, but later commuted to life by the State.
18 Sivasagar (KG Satyamurthy), leader of the CPI (ML) (COC) and People’s War till 1986.
19 Julius Fučík ‘s book’s title- Notes from the Gallows. Original Czech title: Reportáž psaná na oprátce (literally, “Report Written Under the Noose”)
20 The Jangam caste is associated with the Lingayatism (Veerashaiva) tradition of South India. Historically, Jangams functioned as itinerant priest-preceptors. They are the custodians of Shaivite religious practice, occupying a distinct position within the social and ritual order, especially in regions of present-day Telangana, Karnataka, and Maharashtra.
21 Sivasagar’ poem Vilukada refers to this. The poem may read as a revolutionary allegory grounded in historically verifiable incidents associated with armed struggle. The poet elevates the imagery of Totaramudu from Kishta Gowd to that of the wounded revolutionary movement that was in a setback by 1973.
22 Godavari River divided the erstwhile Adilabad and Karimnagar districts.
23 Madhusudhan Raj, (45) an engineering graduate, who became a leader of the CPI (ML) (Pratighatana Poratam), was killed in a fake police encounter in Hyderabad in 1995.
24 Vengala Rao’s surname is Jalagam, close to the word Jalaga, which in English means leech.
25 Puli meeda putra means idiomatically- a festering sore makes it even more unpredictable and threatening. Here Sri Sri says this is a cotton stuffed tiger, like Mao says that imperialists are paper tigers and ridicules the rulers in his poem.
26 : Bhoomi in Telugu means Earth.
27 Afzal Guru was executed in Tihar Jail on 9 February 2013, and buried within the jail premises. Similarly, Maqbool Bhat was hanged in Tihar Jail in 1984 and buried inside the prison grounds.
