TELANGANA PEOPLED ARMED STRUGGLE 7 ed of three linguistic areas; the eight Telugu-speaking districts with Hyderabad city, the capital of the State, constituting the Telangana area; the five Marathi-speaking districts in the north-west of the State constituting the Marathwada region; and the three Kannada-speaking districts in the south-western part. The Telangana region occupied 50 per cent of the area; as against 28 per cent occupied by the Marathwada region; and the remaining 22 per cent by the Kannada region. The Telugu-speaking population in 1951 was 9,000,000 (50 per cent); the Marathi-speaking population about 4,500,000 (25 per cent); the Kannada-speaking population 2,000,000 (11 per cent); and the Urdu-speaking population 2,100,000 (12 per cent). Since the Nizam was a Muslim, Urdu was made the language of the courts and the administiation at all levels, and also the medium of instruction from the primary stage. The culture and language of the overwhelming majority of the people living in Hyderabad State was sought to be suppressed by the rulers, and the natural desire for education and cultural development, for protection and development of their mother-tongue got inevitably linked up with the struggle against the Nizam's rule. The fact that the Nizam of Hyderabad, a vassal of the British imperialists, was a Muslim ^and the vast majority of the people of Hyderabad State belonged to the Hindu religion and its various sects, was reflected in the administrative set-up. The Nizam and the mullas tried to instil the feeling that the Muslims were the ruling class, with the right to lord it over the rest of the people of the State. Against this, the growing middle class intellectuals and the growing Hindu business and industrial interests took up the cudgels; the Arya Samajists became the champions of the 'Hindu masses' against the 'Muslim oppressors'. There were a large number of conflicts and clashes between these sections. In the early days, till the 1940s, the Indian National Congress refused to take up the struggle of the people against the ^princes and nawabs9 of the native states. This left the field free for the Arya Samajists to come forward as the champions of the struggle against autocracy and enabled them to divert the democratic awakening of the people, to a considerable extent, on communal lines. Later, during the Telangana struggle of 1946-47, the Nizam and his feudal administrators, his armed Razakars, tried to rally the Muslim masses to support them against the 'Hindus'. Thanks, however, to the leadership of the Communist Party, large numbers of the Muslim peasantry and rural artisans and the rural poor were rallied behind the fighting Telangana peasantry, though it has to be admitted that a vast section of Muslims in the towns and cities supported the Nizam and the Razakars. It was again thanks to the Party's leadership that the reprisals against Muslims after the 'police action' were prevented in the Telangana area; whereas in many areas in the Marathwada region, where the democratic movement was not as strong as in Telangana, reprisals occurred on a large scale,