Kanneganti Hanumanthu: A Life of Defiance

On the morning of Maha Shivaratri, 26 February 1922, a cultivator from the village of Minchalapadu was shot dead in the dry uplands of Palnadu. His name was Kanneganti Hanumanthu, and for nearly a century, the freedom struggle he died for remembered him only in the margins of history. A Life of Defiance restores him to the place he deserves.This is the biography of the man who led the Pullari Satyagraha, one of the most disciplined peasant resistances of the Non-Cooperation era-a revolt against a grazing tax that came to symbolise the injustices of colonial rule. Offered the zamindari of forty-five villages in return for abandoning the movement, Hanumanthu refused. In that refusal lies the moral heart of this book: the man who could not be bought became the man who had to be killed.Drawing on colonial records, Telugu ballads, the Telugu press, and the living memory of Palnadu, K. N. Kumar reconstructs not only Hanumanthu's life and martyrdom but also the legacy that followed-how a freedom fighter was celebrated, politicised, and gradually forgotten. Spanning from the twelfth-century War of Palnadu to the Forest Rights Act of 2006, this compelling work of history asks a question that has echoed for more than a century: To whom does the forest belong?