“LAND GUNS CASTE WOMAN: THE MEMOIR OF A LAPSED REVOLUTIONARY ” :- GITA RAMASWAMY

’ Land Guns Caste Woman: The Memoir of a Lapsed Revolutionary’

About the book

1980s. Ibrahimpatnam, Telangana, South India. Landless dalits are caught between a Reddy and a hard place. Enter Gita Ramaswamy,. In her teens, Gita had escaped the Brahminical clutches of her family that tried to cure her of Naxalism with shock treatment and sedation. She has endured the horrors of the Emergency. She is disillusioned. But not without hope.
Gita starts living with the agricultural labourers. They are in bondage, cheated out of land and all rights. They are in the mood to fight. Together, they take on the tyrannical landlords who brutalized the villages for generations. A revolution without a gun is in the making. Gita writes with relentless self-reflexivity. This is as much a story of struggles and victories as it is a testimony of personal failings and regrets. Gita Ramaswamy will be speaking with C. Rammanohar Reddy, Editor, The India Forum, about the issues that emerge from her book

Gita Ramaswamy

Gita Ramaswamy has been at the helm of the Hyderabad Book Trust for 43 years since 1980. She has commissioned over 400 books, both original in Telugu and translations from global literature into Telugu with this organisation. Some of her books, India Stinking (2005) and Jeena Hai To Marna Seekho: The Life
and Times of George Reddy (2014) and is the co-author of Taking Charge of Our Bodies (2004), On Their Own (2005), and The Oxford India Anthology of Telugu Dalit Writing (2016).

She has translated and edited Here I Am, (stories by P.Sathyavathi, 2019) as also Prison Notes (Stories by B.Anuradha) (2021). She has translated Devulapalli Krishnamurthi’s autobiography Ooru, Vaada, Batuku into English as Life in Anantharam (2016). As an activist, she has worked extensively with Dalits on bonded labour, agricultural wage labour, and land entitlements.