Also on 4th Of July
The land was restless.
Not from tremors or storms, but from something older—a remembering.
The trees spoke in rustling syllables. The wind carried chants. And deep in the soil, a question stirred:
Who are we, if we forget?
July 4th. A date that, in textbooks, usually glows with a foreign fire. But here, in our own soil, it marks the life threads of two mystics whose relationship with freedom was not about victory—it was about remembrance.
Alluri Sitarama Raju.
Swami Vivekananda.
They never met.
But time—playful, conspiratorial—stitched their lives into a shared rhythm.
One walked barefoot through forests.
The other crossed oceans with fire on his tongue.
Let us begin with Alluri Sitarama Raju—the rebel, the mystic, the barefoot thunder.
Born in 1897 in present-day Andhra Pradesh, he grew up listening to both the Ramayana and the forest.
As a young man, he wandered through the tribal hills of the Eastern Ghats, quietly absorbing their ways, their pain, their erasure.
The British called his people encroachers.
He called them ancestors.
When colonial laws outlawed podu cultivation—the ancestral farming system of Adivasi communities—it wasn’t just land that was lost. It was memory, rhythm, dignity.
Alluri didn’t rebel out of ideology.
He rose because the forest was being silenced.
Between 1922 and 1924, he led the Rampa Rebellion, a guerrilla uprising of tribal communities against British colonial forces.
To the empire, he was a bandit.
To his people, he was a priest of revolt.
He carried no crown. He wore no saffron.
Just the earth on his soles and the rage of a rooted people in his heart.
Swami Vivekananda, on the other hand, spoke a different language—but the fire was the same.
A monk who refused retreat.
A sanyasi not of silence, but speech.
Born in 1863 as Narendranath Datta, his path was inward—but his vision outward.
He studied logic, Western philosophy, and Vedanta.
He trained not just in scripture, but in speech, presence, and awakening.
And in 1893, he stood before the Parliament of the World’s Religions in Chicago—not to plead, but to proclaim.
“We are not your shadows,” he said, without saying it.
And the world—used to echoes—heard a voice.
Between the two mystics, there is no hierarchy.
There is only contrast.
Alluri listened to tribal elders.
Vivekananda listened to ancient shlokas.
One tuned into the rustle of leaves, the memory of sacred land.
The other echoed the truths of rishis in a language the world could hear.
One walked barefoot so the forest would speak.
The other walked to Chicago so India could speak.
And yet, they asked the same question:
Who am I, without the language of my oppressor?
They never answered it.
Mystics rarely do.
But perhaps they didn’t need to.
Because they lived in a way that made the question tremble.
As a student of natyashastra, I am often taught to distinguish between shuddha and desi.
The classical and the folk. The polished and the raw.
But both are sacred. Both are India.
Alluri was desi—not in the sense of regional, but in the sense of rooted.
His body moved to rhythms that never saw notation.
Vivekananda was shuddha—not in the sense of elite, but of distilled essence.
His fire was forged in the crucible of ancient thought.
But truth knows no caste of sound.
It simply rings true.
In mantras. In war cries.
In barefoot revolts. In burning speeches.
We often forget them.
And perhaps that forgetting is the real violence.
Because to forget them is to forget ourselves.
To forget that resistance, too, can be sacred.
That rebellion is not always rage.
Sometimes it is the quiet audacity of belonging.
In the end, the forest remembers.
The flame does not beg.
And somewhere in that rhythm—in that chant of soil and fire—we find a freedom untouched by flags.
A freedom that refuses to be taught, only remembered.
And in remembering, we return.
Not to a past, but to a pulse.
Parwatisingari's Weblog 
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