The early days of the Telangana Movement in southern India serves as a measure of subsequent Maoist efforts in the region.
Maoism first appeared in the Subcontinent in the course of the revolutionary peasant movement that spread in early 1947 in the Telugu-speaking Nalgonda and Warangal districts of eastern Hyderabad, known as Telangana. Up until the 1947 transfer of power by the British, Telangana was under the despotic rule of the Nizam of Hyderabad. The cadres of the Communist Party of India initiated the Telangana Movement during the Second World War as a genuinely indigenous mass campaign against the landlords and the state aristocracy.
At first, the communists maintained a facade of cooperation with the Indian National Congress in the state, pledging to support Hyderabad´s accession to India, and aiming the revolt at ending the illegal exactions and other landlord excesses. However, the "intense particularism" of the Telugu-speaking people and general peasant discontent encouraged the communist leadership to expand the movement to an attack on the government.
A chain reaction of village revolts led to the establishment of gram rajs (village ´soviets´), complete with people´s courts and militia, land seizures, and the expulsion of the landlords and local officers of the Nizam´s government. A full-scale guerrilla army was quickly recruited and virtually all of the Nalgonda and Warangal districts, encompassing 3000 villages, 3 million people, and an area of 16,000 square miles, came under communist control.