Alluri Sitarama Raju Led a Guerrilla Campaign in the Godavari Hills From August 1922 to May 1924, and an Andhra Pradesh District, a 1986 Stamp and a 30-Foot Statue Now Honour Him

On 22 August 1922, Alluri Sitarama Raju and his followers attacked the police station at Chintapalli in the Visakhapatnam hill tracts. By 24 August they had also raided Krishnadevipeta and Rajavommangi. Historian David Arnold counts 26 muskets and 2,500 rounds of ammunition taken in the three raids, which armed a rebel band that the Madras government needed until 1924 to subdue. Names for the campaign vary: the Rampa rebellion, after the hill country north of the Godavari, or the Manyam rebellion, after the local word for the forest.

Two birth years, two birthplaces

Raju was born on 4 July 1897, according to the Prime Minister’s Office release of 4 July 2022, and the Ministry of Culture’s Amrit Mahotsav page agrees. An official report by A. J. Happell, dated 21 April 1923 and cited by Arnold, puts his birth in Bhimavaram taluk of Krishna district in May 1898. The Andhra historian M. Venkatarangaiya gives 1897, Arnold notes.

That report calls him a Telugu Kshatriya, the son of a travelling photographer and nephew of a deputy collector, who studied to the fourth form at Visakhapatnam. It dates his arrival in the hill Agency to 1918. Venkatarangaiya says he went at the age of eighteen, which would be 1915. For his birthplace, the Ministry of Culture page names Bhimavaram, while the 2022 Prime Minister’s Office release lists the restoration of his birthplace at Pandrangi, in Vizianagaram district, among its projects.

In the Gudem hills, Arnold writes, Raju moved as a sanyasi (a wandering ascetic). Quoting Venkatarangaiya, Arnold says Raju’s austerity and his knowledge of astrology and medicine won him the respect of the hill people.

What the hills had lost

Gudem and Rampa are hill tracts near the Godavari, and Arnold lists what lay behind the 1922 rising. Hill communities faced limits on podu, the shifting cultivation in which a patch of forest is cleared and burned for a season, and on their access to the forest. Subordinate officials treated them harshly, and dispossessed headmen and outlaws supplied leaders.

The Ministry of Culture’s page ties the restrictions to the Madras Forest Act of 1882. In the text of that Act as republished in Tamil Nadu, section 3 lets the government constitute any land at its disposal a reserved forest, section 21 makes clearing or cultivating land inside a reserve an offence, and section 26 lets the government make rules regulating or prohibiting the clearing of land elsewhere. In Gudem, Arnold writes, the forests were reserved, podu was confined to a few areas and even the collection of building materials for huts was restricted. Rampa was spared until the mid-1920s because the government feared another revolt there.

An official report of August 1924, as Sarkar reads it, recorded the grievances as exploitation by moneylenders and forest laws on shifting cultivation and grazing. Bastian, the unpopular tahsildar (revenue officer) of Gudem, brought matters to a head by trying to build forest roads with unpaid tribal labour. Arnold gives a related case: a headman named Yendu Padal built a ghat road on Bastian’s contract, and Bastian refused to pay for it.

The hills had risen before. In March 1879 a rebellion spread over about 5,000 square miles and was put down by November 1880 only with six regiments of Madras infantry, Sarkar writes. Birsa Munda’s Ulgulan in Chotanagpur, told in the piece on Birsa Munda and the Ulgulan, is the better-known tribal rising of the period in his account.

A follower of Gandhi who believed in force

In 1921 Raju went on a pilgrimage to Nasik, and Arnold suggests he met the Gandhian movement on the way. Back in Gudem he preached temperance, told the hill people to settle disputes in their own panchayats instead of British courts, and wore khadi. He was reported to speak well of Gandhi while holding that independence could come only by force, Arnold says. In meetings with local officials during the rebellion, Sarkar writes, Raju “spoke highly of Mr Gandhi” yet considered violence necessary.

Gandhi suspended Non-Cooperation in February 1922 after the violence at Chauri Chaura. Unrest did not stop at once, Sarkar writes, and he calls the Rampa rising the most striking evidence of continued popular militancy. Police put Raju under surveillance in January 1922, Arnold says, and he began promising the hill people redress against Bastian.

The August 1922 raids

More than 300 followers joined the first attack, on Chintapalli on 22 August, according to a Press Information Bureau feature of 2016 by K V Kurmanath. Raju announced the date and time in advance, the feature adds, and left a signed note in the station diary listing what his men had taken. On 24 August, Arnold writes, the rebels freed a former muttadar (hill chief), Mottadam Virayya Dora, from the Rajavommangi lock-up.

A police party was ambushed on 24 September 1922. Sarkar places it at Damarapalli and says two British officers were shot after an advance party of Indians had been let through. Scot and Heiter are the officers’ names in the PIB feature. Arnold, describing the first of two ambushes without giving a date, counts two European officers and four Indian subordinates killed and says six rifles and a pistol were captured. Rebel policy, he writes, was deliberate: only European officers were to be killed.

Twenty months of guerrilla war

Raju’s base lay in the back country between Peddavalasa, Gudem and Darakonda, Arnold says. In June 1923 he crossed into Malkangiri, and in September he reached Paderu before police drove him back. Villagers fed and sheltered the rebels and passed on news of police movements. A punitive police tax imposed in March 1923 was a serious government mistake, Arnold writes, because it deepened hostility without stopping the help.

Sarkar describes the rebels as a band of about a hundred, moving “like fish in water” over roughly 2,500 square miles, and says the British came to admire Raju as a formidable guerrilla tactician. Madras sent in the Malabar Special Police and the Assam Rifles. His figure for the cost to the Madras government is Rs 15 lakh (Rs 1.5 million). The Ministry of Culture page and the PIB feature put it at over Rs 40 lakh (Rs 4 million), and the sources do not reconcile the two figures.

Raju tried to recruit fellow Kshatriyas and Congress workers from the coastal districts, Arnold writes, and only one Kshatriya, Aggi Raju, joined. The Telugu paper Andhra Patrika of 17 May 1924, he notes, read the rising as proof that violence was useless. Of Raju, Sarkar writes: “a truly remarkable man who has become a folk hero in Andhra but is almost unknown elsewhere.”

Captured on 6 May, dead by 7 May

The sources agree on May 1924 and differ on the day and the place. Raju was captured and shot on 6 May 1924, during a second sally into Madugula, in Arnold’s account. Sarkar also gives 6 May for the capture and adds that he was promptly reported shot while trying to run away. Both the Ministry of Culture page and the PIB feature give 7 May. Koyyuru is the place the Ministry of Culture names, saying he was tied to a tree and shot there; it places his tomb at Krishnadevipeta near Visakhapatnam.

Open Magazine reports that an Assam Rifles party killed him at Mampa on 7 May. Historian Pala Krushna Moorthy, it records, holds that the claim Raju gave himself up has no historical support. T. G. Rutherford was sent in April 1924 to end the movement, the PIB feature says. Resistance was finally stamped out in September 1924, Sarkar writes.

A stamp, a statue and a district

Philatelic listings put an Alluri Seetarama Raju stamp in the India’s Struggle for Freedom series, issued on 26 December 1986. A collector’s list of commemorative stamps gives its value as 50 paise. India Post’s own catalogue entry could not be opened for this article.

The Prime Minister’s Office release calls him “Manyam Veerudu”, Hero of the Jungles, the name local people use. At Bhimavaram on 4 July 2022 the Prime Minister unveiled a 30-feet tall bronze statue of him and launched a year-long programme for his 125th birth anniversary, with the Governor and the Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh present. Its list of works covers restoring his birthplace at Pandrangi and renovating the Chintapalli police station, whose attack it says began the rebellion. It also names a hall called Alluri Dhyana Mandir at Mogallu, with a statue and murals of his life, and says a museum, the Alluri Sitarama Raju Memorial Tribal Freedom Fighters Museum, was being built at Lambasingi.

On 4 July 2023 the President closed the anniversary year at Hyderabad. She said, according to the Rashtrapati Bhavan release, that he is “being remembered as a tribal warrior and it is his true identity.”

Andhra Pradesh, whose government and economy are laid out in the state guide, named a district after him when it reorganised its districts on 4 April 2022. Paderu is the district headquarters. On 31 December 2025 the state redrew its districts again, taking the total from 26 to 28, and the Alluri Sitharamaraju district, which gave 12 mandals to the new Polavaram district, was left with 11. Its website lists Chintapalli and Koyyuru among the mandals of its hill country.