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Finely curated walks, snazzy reels enshrined on Instagram pages, meticulously researched features, timely oral histories woven into readable prose, and popular cinema — for about the past few decades, these have been mediums by which people explore and reclaim their heritage.
Besides being a buzzword, heritage is defined as something that is “handed down from the past, as a tradition.” The term can encompass architecture, language, food, or even folk wedding songs. Retellings of bygone times — whether they are first-hand accounts from those who lived through landmark events, or any piece of cultural production that takes one down memory lane — also fall under the umbrella of ‘heritage.’
In 2024, Razakar: The Silent Genocide of Hyderabad set out to retell one such chapter of history — a chapter often left out of mainstream Indian memory. More recently, the Gudur Narayana Reddy-produced film won the “Best Feature Film on Environment/Heritage/History” honour at the recently revived Gaddar Awards.
Why was a film that failed to leave any mark at the box office, and has been widely criticised for distorting history, chosen to receive an award in Gaddar’s name?
Was this just another instance reflecting the government’s newfound propensity to fete substandard cinema? Or is something else at work?
Whatever the reason, it hardly feels like a fitting tribute to Gummadi Vithal Rao — the revolutionary poet, performer, and activist we knew as Gaddar.
What would Gaddar do?
Gaddar’s legacy was one of representing people’s aspirations. Be it the plights of landless peasants or Telangana’s demand for statehood, his art and activism were about keeping various struggles alive among subsequent generations. With heritage also defined as that which is passed on, the fact that the award is named after Gaddar raises another question.
Would he have approved of a propaganda film riddled with half-truths receiving such an honour — especially one that bore his name?
Razakar, a three-hour fare, is anything but a fully factual portrayal of the anti-Nizam uprisings, which gained momentum against the backdrop of the broader Indian independence movement.
As Hyderabad-based journalist and historian Yunus Lasania recently wrote: “The Razakar movie majorly ignored the Telangana Armed Struggle (1946-51), a Communist Party of India (CPI)-led peasant rebellion against feudal landlords. It continued all the way till 1951. It was a bigger reason for the Indian army being sent. Many of the CPI’s leaders were Muslims, and many amongst Muslims in fact also wanted the Nizam to peacefully accede to the Indian government through negotiations.”
If there’s one film that managed to capture the layered realities of that era, it was Maa Bhoomi, directed by B Narsing Rao. Based on Krishan Chander’s fictional yet historically accurate Urdu novel Jab Khet Jaage, it told the story of rural Telangana’s class war, not as Hindu versus Muslim, but as oppressor versus oppressed.
Gaddar himself featured in the film. His revolutionary anthem, ‘Bandenka Bandi Katti’, was picturised on him.
Never would he have endorsed Razakar as an award-worthy film.
In both Maa-Bhoomi and its source material, the protagonist, Raghu Rao, is a peasant who suffers immensely at the hands of a Hindu landlord in the Telangana districts. When the plot shifts to the city, a unionist and poet named Maqbool takes Raghu under his wing. This versifier and leftist leader is clearly modelled on the legendary Urdu poet Makhdoom Mohiuddin, born in Andole, Medak district.
At one point, Raghu poses a question to Maqbool.
“Why would a Hindu feudal utilise Muslim Razakars to clamp down on labourers who were participating in the Telangana Rebellion?”
His response is a fitting one.
“Profiteering and tyranny transcend religion. It has always been the norm in the country for backward-thinking powers to fall back on communalism whenever they are on the wane.”
The tendency to view the past solely through an “us versus them” prism was largely absent from both Maa Bhoomi and Jab Khet Jaage. This kind of nuance, the rejection of easy binaries, defined that film.
The same, however, cannot be said for Razakar.
Some grisly realities
By no means was the Asaf Jahi state a utopian paradise for all its subjects, as certain Hyderabadis like to claim. However, painting Muslims as the sole aggressors in princely Hyderabad’s Hindu majority context — simply because the Asaf Jahis happened to be Muslim — isn’t just lazy writing. It's a historical distortion.
This year’s Gaddar Award-winning film for “Best Feature Film on Environment/Heritage/History” was rather brazen in its attempts to rewrite the past.
Chukka Ramaiah, a participant in the Armed Struggle and now an IIT entrance coach, does not remember the conflict through the Hindu-Muslim binary. When interviewing him for my book back in late 2021, he told me outright: “The Razakars and the Nizam were problematic. But it would be wrong to not look at the local Hindu landlord as a guilty party too.”
He insisted that the Telangana Rebellion had a secular and not a communal character, “as Muslims like Shaik Bandagi inspired us to stand up against cruel landlords.”
Telangana statehood activist Inukonda Thirumali also emphasised this in his book Against Dora and Nizam: People’s Movement in Telangana. When it came to upholding the supremacy of a feudal apparatus powered by the blood and sweat of helpless peasants, the Hindu nobility had no qualms about deploying Razakar militiamen to violently suppress those they saw as little more than bonded labour.
Beneath these high-handed Hindu nobles were the village officials, known as patels and patwaris. They too were typically the religious kin of the landlord. While the patels were not always from a specific caste, the patwari was invariably a Niyogi Brahmin. Maa Bhoomi, though not as comprehensive as Thirumali’s work, did allude to these aspects of the pre-1948 dispensation.
After all, if history that is passed down through art — both fiction and non-fiction alike — counts as heritage, then these grisly realities are just as much a part of Telangana’s past.
Yet, these atrocities committed by the co-opted Hindu elite found no mention in Razakar.
The past and the future
The image of Chief Minister Revanth Reddy presenting the award to the film’s producer Gudur Narayana Reddy, who is also a leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), is a rather alarming one. It comes on the heels of a Muslim family of five being attacked in Nizamabad district. Of course, this upsurge in communal incidents in rural Telangana didn’t originate during Revanth Reddy’s tenure. But the CM’s right-wing antecedents — which may or may not have influenced this moment — aside, Razakar and heritage being mentioned in the same breath is cause for concern.
With information and art increasingly consumed on screen, younger heritage enthusiasts and researchers have rightly taken to showcasing history, architecture, and cultural curation via Instagram. And they have held their own, despite competing with revisionist narratives backed by powerful infrastructures.
Still, considering the patronage Razakar has received from the powers that be at both the state and national levels, one thing is clear.
Counter-narratives remain the need of the hour. They can take the form of accessible literature, or the more voraciously consumed full-length feature films and OTT shows. Despite its fate as a box-office dud, the fact remains that there hasn’t been an alternative to Razakar in more contemporary times.
Perhaps Zeenat Khan’s upcoming historical fiction novel, The Sirens of September, which takes place before and during Operation Polo, might provide some fodder for another flick, one with the potential to authentically represent Telangana’s heritage and history.
Until then, we may just have to make do with revisionist cinema being passed off as heritage.
Daneesh Majid is a Hyderabad-based writer and researcher on South Asian culture and security. He is the author of the HarperCollins-published book ‘The Hyderabadis: From 1947 to the Present-Day.’