Vinodarayunipalem is a village in the coastal Andhra country, in the district that now carries the name of the man born there on 23 August 1872. Tanguturi Prakasam Pantulu rose from that village to become a barrister in Madras, a newspaper proprietor who bankrupted himself for the national movement, the Premier of Madras Presidency and, in 1953, the first Chief Minister of the newly created Andhra State. He is remembered across the Telugu-speaking country by a single title: Andhra Kesari, the Lion of Andhra.

A precarious start

Prakasam's family was poor, and his father died when he was a boy, leaving the household in real difficulty. His education was rescued by a schoolteacher, Immaneni Hanumantha Rao Naidu, who recognised the boy's ability and took responsibility for him, moving him to Rajahmundry to continue his studies. Prakasam acted in Telugu theatre as a young man and had, by several accounts, a genuine stage presence — something that carried over into a lifetime of public speaking.

He qualified as a pleader in 1901 and built a practice. In 1904 he travelled to England for formal legal training and was called to the bar in 1907. Returning to Madras, he established himself as a barrister at the High Court and became a conspicuously successful and wealthy one, with a large practice and a prominent position in the public life of the Presidency.

Giving it up

In 1921, in response to Gandhi's call for non-cooperation, Prakasam abandoned his legal practice. This was not a gesture: it was the deliberate destruction of an income at its peak, and he never rebuilt it. He founded and ran the newspaper Swarajya, published in English, Telugu and Tamil, as an organ of the national movement. The paper carried the message of non-cooperation across the south for years, and it consumed his personal fortune. He ended his life a man of very limited means, a fact widely known and widely respected.

Andhra Kesari

The incident that gave him his title occurred in 1928. The Simon Commission, appointed by Britain to review constitutional arrangements in India without a single Indian member, was met by protest wherever it went. During its visit to Madras, a demonstration was held near the High Court. Police opened fire, and a young man was killed. When the police barred the crowd from approaching the body, Prakasam walked forward, tore open his shirt, bared his chest to the armed police and dared them to shoot him.

They did not. He went on and reached the body. The image — a middle-aged barrister offering his chest to loaded rifles — passed instantly into Telugu political memory, and from that day he was Andhra Kesari.

Office

Prakasam held senior positions in the Congress organisation in the south and was imprisoned on several occasions during the freedom struggle. His political career after independence was turbulent, marked by repeated conflict with the Congress high command and by a stubbornness that made him difficult to accommodate but impossible to ignore.

He served as Premier of Madras Presidency from 30 April 1946 to 23 March 1947, on the eve of independence.
Following the successful agitation for a separate Telugu-speaking state — and the death by fasting of Potti Sreeramulu in 1952 that forced the issue — Andhra State was created on 1 October 1953 with its capital at Kurnool. Prakasam became its first Chief Minister, holding office until 15 November 1954.

At various points he left the Congress and formed his own political vehicles, including the Praja Party and later the Krishikar Lok Party, before returning. His independence of the party machine was both his defining virtue and the reason his periods in office were short.

He died on 20 May 1957 in Hyderabad, at the age of eighty-four, while still active in public life.

What carries his name

Few Indian politicians of his generation are as thoroughly written into the map of their region:

In 1972, Ongole district was renamed Prakasam district in his honour — the district containing his birth village.
The Prakasam Barrage across the Krishna at Vijayawada, one of the great irrigation works of coastal Andhra, carries his name.
Schools, colleges, roads and public buildings across Andhra Pradesh and Telangana are named for him.

Prakasam belongs to a generation of Indian leaders whose sacrifices were personal and financial as much as political. He gave up one of the most lucrative legal practices in southern India, put his fortune into a newspaper that never made money, and died without wealth. He held the highest office in his region twice and left it both times without accumulating anything.

He was also the essential bridge between the freedom movement and the linguistic reorganisation of the Indian union. The creation of Andhra State in 1953 was the first redrawing of India's internal map along language lines and set the precedent that reshaped the entire country three years later. That Prakasam, born in a village in the Andhra countryside, was the man sworn in to lead it gave the new state a founding figure whose claim to it was rooted in the soil rather than in any capital city.