Komaram Bheem; a great revolutionary

Bheem was born in the year 1900 to Komaram Chinnu and Sombai. His father was killed by forest officials when Bheem was 15. He fought against the Asaf Jahi dynasty for the liberation of Hyderabad. Bheem openly fought against the Nizam government in a guerrilla campaign. He defied courts and the law, choosing to depend on the wild world. He took up cudgels against Nizam’s soldiers and breathed his last fighting at Babijhari.

Bheem in the contemporary Gond history was a man of great valour who stood like a rock to protect the tribes. He was a man who never knew anything other than physical labour and was a beacon that lighted up the dark world of the Gonds with the flames of ideologies like the very sun lighting up the wilderness. Like all the children of wild, Bheem's younger days did not expose him to the outside world. As he came on the threshold of adolescence, he heard the plight of tribes paying unjustifiable cess.

Even as an adolescent, he took Siddiqui, an officer of the Nizam, to task and gave him a taste of his muscle. Bheem killed Siddiqui and went into hiding for about 5 to 6 years. Historians said that he worked in various tea plantations of Assam in this phase. He learnt reading and writing there.

Bheem was inspired by Alluri Sitaramaraju, and his heart was aflame when he heard the death of Bhagat Singh. He finally reached the Gond land to sow the seeds of revolution. Realising that the time was ripe to revolt against the Nizam Government's injustice, Komaram Bheem became a veritable deity, raging with the fire of revolt.

He had given the slogan of ‘Jal, Jungle, Jameen (Water, Forest and Land)’. It meant the people who lived in forests would have the right to all the resources of the forest. He met the Asifabad collector and asked for self-governance status to 12 Gond villages. However, those discussions yielded no results. Bheem set out to Hyderabad to meet the Nizam but the officials didn’t permit him.

With Jodheghat forest as the hub, he trained tribes in guerilla warfare. The Gond soldiers fought Nizam’s police and army. Nizam invited Bheem for talks on September 1, 1940. He agreed to give land documents to the Gonds. However, Bheem reiterated his demand that he needed self-governance status bestowed to Gond villages and the talks ended in impasse.

With the help of the British army, Talukdar Abdul Sattar, who earlier failed to capture Bheem, attacked his hideout at Babijhari. Kurdu Patel, a havaldar in Bheem’s Gond army, backstabbed him by giving directions of Bheem’s hideout.

A team of 90 policemen, armed with guns, attacked Bheem, who did not have any armour to protect himself. On that fateful night, hundreds of followers of Bheem armed with bows, arrows, swords and spears launched a frontal assault, from just a dozen feet away from the Nizam's police force. They braved their guns only to be showered by bullets. That night, the wild moonlight became a veritable stream of tears. The martyr Komaram Bheem became a deity to the Gonds.

(With this we end the ‘Statues of Hyderabad’ series. Next week we are starting ‘Ye Shehar Hamara’, a new series that speaks about the etymology of street names and what the streets are famous for.)