48 SOCIAL SCIFNTIST developed into a form of popular protest against outside interference and exploitation and yet the 1922-24 rising gave expression to only one half of that tradition, i.e. the anti-European element, to the exclusion of the hostility against plainsmen. Sitarama Raju, a nationalist and a man of the palins (though hardly a 'peasant' as Atlury curiously claims on p. 12), necessarily sought to play down the class dimension while seeking to elaborate and exploit the anti-colonial one. His early support came despite his being a plainsman—because he was able to identify himself with the existing idioms, especially the religious idioms, of the nillmen's society and struggles. As a holyman he took up a persona that overrode his outsider's status. Ther was, as I pointed out, a precedent for this, too, m Rajanna Anantayya, aTelugu from the plains (and an ex-policeman to boot!) who, like Sitarama Raju, acquired a religious authority among the hillmen and who became a leading figure in the 1886 Gudemfaun Several otherftuns in the region also centred around a religious figure. One such was Swami Korra Mallayya Dora. the principal in the Korravanivalsa^z/n of 1900 in Salur taluk, who was also credited with many of the religio-magical powers attributed to Sitarama Raju, bur with the difference that he was himself a Konda Dora, or hillman. The religious idiom of communication, solidarity and revolt were thus perhaps powerful enough to outweigh the suspicion and hostility otherwise shown towards outsiders in the hills. Again, too, though this I confess is mere speculation, Sitarama Raju's pre-fitun non-cooperation campaign against drink and colonial law courts may have touched a sympathetic chord among the hillmen, not because it was a part of the Gandhian programme of national liberation, but because they had fallen increasingly into the hands of liquor-shop contractors and lawyers from the plains and welcomed the chance to rid themselves of their thraldom. I am glad that Sitarama Raju's rebellion is beginning to receive the serious attention ir deserves, and there is much in Atlury's article with which I fully agree or am happy to learn from. It is an episode about which one would like to know and understand more. But in the final analysis I cannot disguise the dissatisfaction I feel with Adury's basic approach. It seems to; me that he has accepted rather too readily the nationalist interpretation of the rebellion advanced by Annapurniah in the pages of the Congress newspaper in the late 1^20s and seemingly endorsed by Gandhi in Young India in 1929.1 do not dispute the importance which the rebellion and its leader came to assume in Andhra after his death and the collapse of the 'Ramps'fituri. Together they served as an example and source of inspiration in the Andhra desa during subsequent phases of the nationalist movement But I think it is important to distinguish this retrospective interpretation from the reality of the rebellion, as far as it is possible to reconstruct it, and the hillmen's own historical experience, up to and including the rebellion itself. I find it somewhat 4isappointing that Adury chooses to ignore what I thought had been one of the major advances in Indian historiography in recent years—the realization that the popuir struggles which fed into the nationalist movement (in the 1920s and 1930s especeally) were not created overnight by outsiders and middle-class leaders but grew out of a long history of popular movements stretching far back into the nineteenth century and beyond. Atlury seems intent on returmg us to an earlier historical tradition which assumes that India's masses existed in some kind of pre-political darkness until Gandhi and other nationalist leaders arrived to enlighten them. Of course, there is a danger (to which perhaps I succumbed in my essay) of elevating the tradition at the expense of the transformation, giving too much emphasis to the continuities of popular resistance and n6t enough consideration to the changes that came about and could only come about through some kind of external ideology and leadership. Ideally, one would like maintain a balance : on the one