Pamarru, in the Krishna district of Andhra Pradesh, was in the early twentieth century a village like thousands of others in the Telugu country: agrarian, caste-bound, and utterly certain about what a girl's life was for. Kondapalli Koteswaramma was born there on 5 August 1918, and almost everything that happened to her afterwards was a refusal of that certainty. She was married as a child, widowed as a child, went underground as a young woman in an armed peasant movement, was abandoned in middle age, buried both her children, and then, past the age of ninety, wrote the memoir that made her one of the most quietly devastating voices in modern Telugu prose.

A Childhood Undone Twice

She was married at the age of seven, in accordance with the custom of the time, to a relative much older than herself. Within two years he was dead and she was a widow before she was ten years old. In the social world of a Telugu village in the 1920s, that was intended to be the end of her story. Widowhood carried austerity, invisibility and the expectation that she would live out her life at the edge of somebody else's household.

What rescued her was the social reform current then running through coastal Andhra, and a family willing to act on it. At nineteen she was remarried, this time to Kondapalli Seetaramaiah, a young communist organiser who would go on to become one of the most significant and controversial figures of the radical left in the region. The marriage brought her out of enforced seclusion and directly into the political ferment of the late colonial period.

The Underground Years

Koteswaramma became an active worker of the Communist Party of India rather than a politician's wife. She organised, she carried messages, she taught, and she sang. During the Telangana peasant uprising, when the party was banned and its cadre hunted, she lived underground for extended periods, moving between Machilipatnam, Eluru, Puri and Raichur under assumed identities and away from her own small children. Her comrades included figures such as Puchalapalli Sundarayya, and she worked in a movement in which women were expected to take the same risks as men while being credited with far fewer of the achievements.

That gap between contribution and credit became one of the central subjects of her later writing. She wrote without bitterness but without softening either: about the party's willingness to use women's labour and courage while leaving untouched the domestic hierarchies those women went home to, and about how easily a movement that spoke of liberation could reproduce the arrangements it claimed to be dismantling.

Rebuilding a Life Alone

Her marriage eventually ended, and she was left to raise her children and support herself. She did so, and she did it in an India where a separated woman in her forties had almost no social scaffolding to fall back on. Both of her children predeceased her: her daughter Karuna, who became a physician, and her son Chandrasekhar, who had studied engineering at Warangal. She spent her later years in Visakhapatnam with her granddaughters, and for a period at a home for the elderly in Hyderabad.

Through all of it she kept writing. Her earlier books included a collection of songs, Amma Cheppina Aidu Geyalu, published in 1972, followed in 1991 by Ashru Sameekshanam and the story collection Sanghamitra Kathalu. Her poetry and songs circulated in movement circles long before the literary establishment took any notice of her.

The Sharp Knife of Memory

In 2012, at the age of ninety-four, she published Nirjana Vaaradhi, an autobiography whose title translates roughly as a deserted bridge. It was later translated into English as The Sharp Knife of Memory, and it reached an audience far beyond Telugu readers. The book is short, plain and unsparing. It recounts child marriage, child widowhood, clandestine political work, personal betrayal and repeated bereavement in a register almost entirely free of self-pity, and in doing so it became a rare first-person account of the Telangana struggle written by a woman who was actually inside it.

The response was immediate. Readers who had known the official histories of the Andhra communist movement found in her pages a version of events that included the cooking, the childcare, the hiding places, the loneliness and the abandonment that the official histories had left out. Younger feminist writers in Telugu treated her as a foundational figure. She had, without ever framing it as such, written a corrective to an entire body of movement literature.

Kondapalli Koteswaramma died in Visakhapatnam on 19 September 2018, at the age of one hundred, following a brain haemorrhage. She had lived through colonial rule, an armed peasant uprising, the splitting of the Indian left, and the arrival of an India she would barely have recognised from Pamarru. Her life is remembered less for any single office or honour, of which she held almost none, than for the fact that she survived what was meant to erase her and then wrote it all down.