The Telangana movement offers a classic example of the oppressor-oppressed equation in that a coloniser need not be a foreign ruler. In the post-independence situation, he could be a neighbour with power and voice. Telangana’s intellectuals, writers, activists, poet-performers, employees and students are actively engaged in this process of decolonisation. These are the ‘Frontline Formations,’ providing strength and substance to a people’s movement.
In the 1969 Telangana agitation, and again since the year 2000, hundreds of people, especially the youth, lost their lives. . A poet captures the agony of a mother who has lost her son: From shrunken breasts/I offered life-source./Will you go like that without a bother for me?(‘Dear Children!’ by Narayana Swamy)
The merger of the region into the state of Andhra Pradesh in 1956 was a source of trouble from the beginning. Vajjala Shivakumar portrays what this meant for the people here: All mergers are not unions/For the meeting point of two opposite poles/there is no fusion-measure./In the irreconcilable juxtaposition/word will not have value,/greetings will not last long
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