The village of Tupran — usually written Toopran — sits on the old road north of Hyderabad, in what was Medak district of the erstwhile Hyderabad State and is now Telangana. On 31 January 1949, a son was born there to a labouring Dalit family; his parents worked the fields and took whatever wage work the season offered. They named him Gummadi Vittal Rao. Half a century later, most of India would know him only by the single word he chose for himself: Gaddar. He took it from the Ghadar Party, the early twentieth-century movement of Punjabi migrants who plotted against British rule — a name that means mutiny, and that he wore as a promise.

From a Village Wage-Earning Family to Osmania

Poverty shaped his childhood but did not stop his schooling. He finished his pre-university education in Hyderabad and won a place at the engineering college of Osmania University, an extraordinary leap for a Dalit boy from a Medak village in the 1960s. He dropped out after his first year, unable to sustain the cost and increasingly pulled towards a different education altogether. At the university he encountered teachers and students steeped in socialist thought, and outside it he was absorbing two currents that would define him: the Naxalbari uprising in Bengal, and the Dalit assertion associated with B. R. Ambedkar and, later, the Dalit Panthers.

He did not romanticise destitution. In 1975 he sat the banking recruitment examination and took a clerk's post at Canara Bank, holding it for nearly a decade while singing at night in villages. He resigned in 1984 to give himself entirely to the work that had by then become his life.

The Jana Natya Mandali and a Style Nobody Could Copy

In the early 1970s Gaddar joined a students' arts collective in Hyderabad that soon reorganised itself as the Jana Natya Mandali, the people's theatre troupe. It became the cultural front of the radical left in Andhra Pradesh, and Gaddar became its face. The troupe travelled from hamlet to hamlet performing songs and short plays about landlordism, bonded labour, untouchability, forest rights and police excess — not in the literary Telugu of the cities but in the coarse, rhythmic dialect of rural Telangana.

His stagecraft was unmistakable and entirely his own. He performed barefoot with heavy ankle bells, a red or ochre dhoti hitched high, a coarse woollen shepherd's blanket slung across his bare shoulders, and the flat frame drum of Telangana's Dalit drumming tradition in his hands. He did not stand and sing; he stamped, wheeled, crouched and shouted, turning a threshing floor into a stage and a crowd into a chorus. He described himself, accurately, as a one-man cultural army. Songs such as the ballad used in the 1979 film about Telangana's peasant struggle, and later the anthem that opened with an image of the rising sun, moved from his voice into general circulation until people sang them without knowing who had written them — which he regarded as the highest possible compliment.

Underground Years, a Bullet, and a Change of Mind

Gaddar's politics carried a heavy price. He was detained and ill-treated during the Emergency. Through much of the 1980s he lived underground as the movement he was associated with — the People's War group of the Communist Party of India (Marxist–Leninist) — was hunted by the state. On 6 April 1997 unidentified gunmen shot him at his home in Hyderabad. He survived, but a bullet remained lodged near his spine for the rest of his life; he carried it for twenty-six years and spoke of it often, as evidence rather than as grievance. He publicly blamed the police; no case was ever brought.

He also fell out with the armed movement itself. From the mid-1990s he argued, against orthodox Marxist opinion inside it, that class analysis alone could not explain Indian society, and that caste had to be treated as a structure in its own right. That argument cost him his standing in the party. By around 2010 he had severed his links with the underground entirely, describing himself as an Ambedkarite and drawing towards Buddhism.

Telangana, and a Late Turn to the Ballot

From the late 1990s Gaddar threw his voice behind the campaign for a separate Telangana state, and his songs became the movement's soundtrack at rallies, sit-ins and student marches. When Telangana was created in 2014, he was among the figures the new state most wanted to claim. He then did something that startled everyone who had followed him: at the age of sixty-nine, in 2018, he cast a vote for the first time in his life, having previously rejected electoral politics on principle. He spoke of forming his own party and, in his final years, worked with mainstream political formations.

He was not without recognition from the establishment he had spent his life attacking. He received a Nandi Award as a playback singer in 2011, and after Telangana renamed its state film honours the Gaddar Film Awards, his name was permanently attached to the industry that had borrowed his voice.

The Last Days

Admitted to hospital in Hyderabad in July 2023 with severe heart disease, Gaddar underwent bypass surgery on 3 August. Lung and urinary complications followed, and he died on 6 August 2023, aged seventy-four. Enormous crowds came to see him off; the state accorded him official honours. Statues have since gone up in Telangana, and his recordings continue to be sung at protests he never lived to see.

Gaddar remains a genuinely contested figure — admirers of his art are not always admirers of his politics, and his decades of association with an armed insurgency are a real part of his record. But there is little dispute about what he did for Telugu culture: he took folk forms that were dismissed as rustic, gave them a modern conscience, and made a labourer's dialect into a language of public argument.