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Vande Mataram protests in Nizam’s Hyderabad recalled
In the winter of 1938, students of Osmania University and other colleges in the Nizam's Dominion sang Vande Mataram in their hostels and prayer halls, sparking a mass protest. The Nizam's government…
In the winter of 1938, students of Osmania University and other colleges in the Nizam's Dominion sang Vande Mataram in their hostels and prayer halls, sparking a mass protest. The Nizam's government saw the song as fueling patriotism and banned it on November 28, 1938. Students who sang it were forced out of hostels overnight, and by December 12, 350 students were rusticated from Osmania University alone, with hundreds more expelled from other institutions across the dominion.
The protests began in schools earlier that year. A 17-year-old P.V. Narasimha Rao was expelled from his school in Warangal for singing the mantra. Another student, Laddipalli Anjayya, was whipped and jailed for three days. The unrest grew alongside the formation of a provisional committee for the Hyderabad State Congress in July 1938, which was banned by the Nizam under the Public Safety Regulation. Satyagrahis were jailed and beaten, with one, Ramachandra Rao, later winning an Assembly seat three times.
Indian Opinion Analysis
The 1938 Vande Mataram protests predate the 1948 police action that integrated Hyderabad into India. The Nizam's government, while nominally autonomous, was a British princely state with a Muslim ruler and a largely Hindu population. The ban on the song, which had been a nationalist rallying cry since the 1896 Indian National Congress session, was seen as a test of loyalty to the freedom movement. The scale of expulsions, over 800 students across the dominion, shows how deeply the Nizam's administration feared the spread of Congress-led nationalism. The students' defiance, despite facing whipping, jail and expulsion, became a symbol of resistance that outlasted the Nizam's rule.
The episode highlights a lesser-known chapter of the freedom struggle in the Deccan, where the fight was not against the British directly but against a princely state aligned with them.
Source: thehindu.com
This brief was synthesised by AI from the source linked above.
