This paper presents a comprehensive, interdisciplinary study of Telugu Jānapadam (folk) traditions in the Telugu-speaking states of India—principally Telangana—tracing their origins from pre-classical Dravidian expressive cultures (c. 1500 BCE) through the medieval Bhakti period, colonial modernity, the Telangana Peasant Armed Struggle (1946–1951), the formation of revolutionary cultural organisations (Praja Natya Mandali, 1946; Virasam, 1970; Jana Natya Mandali, 1972), and the rise of viplava Jānapadalu (revolutionary folk songs) as a mass political medium in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Drawing on oral poetics, performance studies, subaltern historiography, and decolonial epistemology, the paper argues that Jānapadam is not a residual folk relic but a living, adaptive epistemological system through which communities historically excluded from literacy, land, and institutional power have generated, transmitted, and enacted political knowledge. Particular attention is given to the structural features of Jānapada forms—Oggu Katha, Burrakatha, Dappu performance traditions, Golla Suddulu, Chindu Yakshaganam, Lambadi dance-song—and to key historical actors: Suddala Hanumanthu (1908–1982), Sri Sri / Srirangam Srinivasa Rao (1910–1983), Gaddar / Gummadi Vithal Rao (1949–2023), Varavara Rao (b. 1940), and Vimalakka. The paper concludes by theorising Jānapadam as dormant social energy—cyclically reactivated in moments of crisis—and viplavam as the inevitable cultural-political expression of communities whose epistemology is carried in drum-skin, breath, and shared memory.

Authors:
Prudhvi Kumar Kanyadari, Loughborough University, United Kingdom

About the Presenter(s)
Dr Prudhvi Kumar Kanyadari is an independent literary and cultural historian specialising in oral traditions, vernacular culture, and postcolonial studies. His current research examines storytelling, and community knowledge across global contexts.

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