MANYAM REBELLION 45 and their tradition? of rebellious defiance. As I tried to show at some length in my essay, thefituris were not, as Atlury persist in claiming (p.33), merely 'directed against rising is, it seems to me, to rob the hillmen of their distinctive historical experience the localised problems of dominant groups like succession to muttas and so on' and 'not against a distant or superior oppressor'. Nor is it true to say that "popular participation in them was conspicuously absent'. Disputes between the hill chiefs (ormut-tadars) over their estates (muttas ) was an important element in thefituris of the early nineteenth century as it was their interests that seemed most in jeopardy from outside interference. They were, too, an element that persisted into the 1922-24 rebellion, as I thought it only accurate to point out. But after the middle of the nineteenth century, as the oppression and exploitation of the colonial regime and of Telugu traders, money-lenders, contractors and land-grabbers rapidly intensified, this element was overtaken (and at times swamped) by the development of mass uprisings, issuing directly from the grievances of the common hillmen, giving voice to their anger and anguish, and often sweeping the muttadars and other members of the elite in the hills along with them. To say that these earlier fituris (especially those of 1879-80 and 1886) were not popular uprisings and not directed against 'distant or superior oppresssors' in simply ahistorical nonsense. Given the vitality of thefitun tradition one has then to ask, what was new about Sitarama Raju's rebellion, and to what extent did it represent a new departure in the political consciousness and political action of the hillmen ? Clearly, in Atlury's opinion, it was a complete departure—a popular mass-based rebellion, not a merefitun, inspired by its leader's nationalist ideals and ambitions, and directed against British rule in India and not merely (as in earlier risings) against plains traders and moneylenders. Sitarama Raju was successful, in his view, in linking up the hillmen's specific grievances (particularly over compulsory labour, restrictions on shifting cultivation or podu, and rights of access to forest produce) with his 'anti-colonial war.' 'He not only grasped the primary contradiction, i.e. hill people's interests as against colonial exploitative needs, but v'as also able to locate the grievances of tribals within the framework of colonial rule' (p. 9). There is, without doubt, much truth in this, but, characteristically, it represents the rebellion essentially from the perspective of Sitarama Raju himself—his ideology, his ambitions, his achievements. In so doing it belittles, even ignores, the hillmen's struggles before Sitarama Raju arrived on the scene, their ideas and their capacity for politcial mobilization. It mistakes the hero for the people. The hillmen may, at this particular historical juncture, have nepded an outsider to draw them into the broader, nationalist struggle against colonialism. But they hardly needed him to teach them that British rule was exploitative and oppressive; nor, in the 1870s and 1880s had they been short of leaders, like Tamman Dora, the immensely popular Koya-fituridar, to lead their anti-colonial struggle. The evidence available to me led me to doubt whether Sitarama Raju had been able to instil a new sense of political purpose into the hillmen and to create a new political consciousness among them. The material grievances against which the hillmen were rebelling in 1922-24 were not as new as Atlury suggests—many had helped trigger the massive explosion of 1879-80. And one cannot but wonder how far ^ven Sitarama Raju's closest associates among the hillmen shared his broader political ambitions. When, for example, Gantam Dora, one of his principal lieutenants, seized the deputy tahsildar ofGudem in May 1923, the hillman spoke of his personal grievances against Bastian, the former holder of that office, and the wrongs done to the people ofGudem generally, but said not a word about the struggle for national liberation. Indeed, he ^wice (in the deputy tahsildar's version of the episode) referred