The Balladeer's Mutiny

For decades, the shirtless bard’s stirring songs lent punch to a class struggle. Gaddar may carry on singing, but his opting to be a voter implies the mutation of a rebel note.

- Prasad Nichenametla

He would appear typically bare-chested in public venues while rendering revolutionary songs, but what Gaddar stripped himself of the other day came as a surprise to many: the Telugu balladeer has given up Maoism. On April 6, exactly two decades after he survived a murder attempt, the sexagenarian announced embracing democracy. “I have applied for my vote,” he said aloud, waving a voter registration form. “I have no membership with any party. I am only a common man with the freedom to decide my path,” he told a Hyderabad gathering in a voice and tone that resounded with pain as well as relief.

Hundreds of Naxalites have over the years surrendered bef­ore the law, yet Gaddar’s decision to snap his four­decade ass­ociation with the Maoist party was least routine news. For, it also implied his exit from the Jana Natya Mandali (JNM), a Leftist cultural front he founded and led passionately. For long, central India’s most popular Naxalite’s JNM tours were a celebration of hundreds of soulful, earthy songs that stirred the minds of thousands of educated youth and the downtrod­ den, who either joined the armed resistance against the state or turned sympathetic to the class struggle.

Gaddar was born in 1949 to a Dalit family of rural labour­ers in what is now Medak district of west­central Telangana. Gummadi Vittal Rao was the name of the boy who was raised in remote Toopran village. As a youth, he enrolled in Osmania University for an engineering course, but dropped out, inspired by Naxalbari politics. In the late 1970s, Gaddar worked with the Canara Bank for a few years—only to return to the ultra­-Left movement.