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Prudhvi Kumar Kanyadari, Loughborough University, United KingdomAbstract
This paper is an interdisciplinary study of Telugu Jānapadam (folk) traditions in the Telugu-speaking states of India, specifically Telangana, from their origins in pre-classical Dravidian expressive cultures (c. 1500 BCE) to the medieval Bhakti period, colonial modernity, the Telangana Peasant Armed Struggle (1946–1951), the emergence of revolutionary cultural organisations, and the emergence of viplava Jānapadalu (revolutionary folk songs) as a mass political medium in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Through the lens of oral poetics, performance studies, subaltern historiography, and decolonial epistemology, the paper shows that Jānapadam is not only a relic of the folk but an active, adaptable epistemological system by which communities historically denied access to literacy, land, and institutional power have produced, disseminated, and enacted political knowledge. The paper focuses on the formal aspects of Jānapada forms—Oggu Katha, Burrakatha, Dappu performance traditions, Golla Suddulu, Chindu Yakshaganam, Lambadi dance-song—and key historical actors: Suddala Hanumanthu (1908–1982), Sri Sri / Srirangam Srinivasa Rao (1910–1983), Gaddar / Gummadi Vithal Rao (1949–2023), Varavara Rao (b. 1940), and Vimalakka. The paper concludes by theorising Jānapadam as latent social energy—periodically recharged in moments of crisis—and viplavam as the natural cultural-political expression of communities whose epistemology resides on the skin of the drum, in breath, and in collective memory.
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