Dalit Movement in Andhra Pradesh

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This article is an attempt to recapitulate a historical outline of the Dalit movement covering 100 years in south India in general and Telugu-speaking regions in particular, that is, covering the geographical regions of the Madras presidency and the erstwhile Nizam state. In other words, this article covers the areas of what till recently used to be known as Andhra Pradesh. The article argues that the Dalit movement in India is an ideological movement for establishing an egalitarian social order, a struggle for their identity and a movement for their human dignity. While rejecting the existing compartmentalised hierarchical Hindu social order that sanctions and glorifies inequalities, oppression epitomised in the most inhuman practice of untouchability, itis a radical movement that aims at the reconstruction of ‘self’ by destroying pejorative and community identities imposed by the non-Dalits. This article is woven around three sections: in the first part, we will briefly trace the Dalit movements as they figure in historiography and the conventional sources for reconstructing Dalit history; the second section refers to some of the major events that represented shifts in the history of the Dalit movement during the colonial period. Finally, it will foreground the interconnections between these historical developments and critical shifts in the Dalit movement during the post-colonial period.