Who Was Alluri Sitarama Raju? The Manyam Veerudu Behind the Airport's Name

Andhra Pradesh’s newest international airport is named after a man who spent his final years being hunted through the forests roughly a hundred kilometres inland from its runway. Alluri Sitarama Raju led the Rampa Rebellion of 1922–1924, an armed uprising of Adivasi communities in the Eastern Ghats against colonial forest law. He was killed in May 1924 at around the age of 27. In July 2026 the Ministry of Civil Aviation renamed the Bhogapuram greenfield airport in his honour, and it opened on 1 August 2026 as the Alluri Sitarama Raju International Airport (ASR International Airport, IATA: VTZ).

Who was Alluri Sitarama Raju?

Alluri Sitarama Raju was a Telugu revolutionary who organised and led tribal fighters against British authority in the Godavari agency areas of the Madras Presidency between 1922 and 1924. He was not a tribal man himself, and that distinction matters to how his story is told: he came from outside the hill communities, lived among them, learned their grievances, and became the person around whom their resistance organised.

What follows separates what is well established from what is contested, because a great deal of the Alluri story reaches us through oral tradition, colonial administrative records written by his opponents, and later Telugu literature and cinema that shaped him into a national symbol. All three are useful. None is neutral.

What is known about his early life?

Less than the legend suggests, and the gaps are worth stating plainly. His birth is widely placed in 1897, and even his birthplace is disputed — different accounts and different local traditions claim villages in the Visakhapatnam region and in the Godavari delta. He is generally described as coming from a Kshatriya family of modest means, with a formal education that was interrupted.

What most accounts agree on is a period of wandering in his late teens and early twenties. He is said to have travelled widely, taken up ascetic practice, and acquired a reputation for astrology, herbal medicine and spiritual authority. Whether these were sincere pursuits, a deliberate strategy to build standing among the hill communities, or both, is not something the sources can settle. What they do establish is the effect: by the early 1920s he was a figure the Adivasi communities of the Manyam listened to.

The legend accumulated fast. Stories circulated of invulnerability to bullets and of supernatural protection — the kind of narrative that gathers around any rebel leader who evades capture for a long time. Those stories were part of his effectiveness, because they made recruitment easier and made the colonial administration look powerless.

Why did colonial forest laws push the Manyam into rebellion?

Because they made a legal way of life illegal. The Madras Forest Act of 1882 and the regulations that followed brought vast tracts of the Eastern Ghats under state control and placed the communities living inside them on the wrong side of the law.

The central grievance was podu — shifting cultivation, in which a forest patch is cleared and cropped for a few seasons and then left fallow to regenerate while cultivation moves on. Practised across the Eastern Ghats for generations, it was the subsistence base of the hill communities. Colonial forest policy classified it as encroachment and destruction of state property. Enforcement did not merely restrict podu; it removed the food security of entire villages and offered nothing in its place.

Around that sat a stack of compounding pressures that recur in almost every contemporary account of the period:

• Loss of access to forest produce — timber, bamboo, honey, tamarind, mahua and medicinal plants that supplemented food and provided cash income.
• Forced and underpaid labour on colonial road-building projects into the agency areas, a grievance widely recorded as a direct trigger.
• Moneylenders and contractors operating in the hills with the protection of the administration, trapping cultivators in debt.
• Erosion of customary authority as traditional headmen were displaced or co-opted by revenue and forest officials.

This is the part of the story that is often flattened into generic anti-colonial sentiment. The Rampa Rebellion was not abstract. It was about who was allowed to farm a hillside and gather from a forest.

What happened during the Rampa Rebellion of 1922–1924?

The rebellion opened in 1922 with a sequence of raids on police stations across the Godavari agency, widely recorded as beginning at Chintapalli in August 1922 and continuing at other stations including Krishnadevipeta and Rajavommangi. The objective was practical: the fighters needed firearms and ammunition, and police armouries were where those were kept.

What followed was a guerrilla campaign fought on terrain the rebels knew and the colonial forces did not. Small mobile groups struck and dispersed into forest and hill country; villages provided intelligence, food and shelter. Alluri is widely recorded as having worked alongside local leaders from the agency areas, including the brothers Gam Gantam Dora and Gam Mallu Dora, whose standing in the hill communities was essential to the campaign’s reach.

There is a detail that recurs in almost every account and says something about the character of the campaign: Alluri is said to have announced raids in advance, sending notice to the police stations he intended to attack. Whether this was bravado, a code of conduct, or a calculated demonstration that the administration could not defend itself even when warned, accounts differ. It had the effect of turning tactical raids into public humiliations.

The colonial response escalated through 1922 and 1923. Police proved insufficient and armed units were brought in from outside the region, including forces with experience of frontier and jungle operations. The campaign is widely recorded as having cost the administration heavily in money and in casualties, including the deaths of British officers in ambushes — a significant part of why it eventually attracted an all-out military response.

How was Alluri Sitarama Raju captured and killed?

By attrition and by pressure on the villages, rather than in open battle. Having failed to suppress the rebellion with ordinary policing, the colonial administration placed the operation under a special commissioner with expanded powers and deployed additional armed forces to the agency areas.

The methods used were the standard counter-insurgency repertoire of the period: sustained patrolling, punitive measures against villages suspected of supporting the rebels, the arrest of associates, and pressure applied through informers. By 1924 the network that had sustained the campaign was breaking down and Alluri’s room to move had narrowed sharply.

He was taken in May 1924 in the agency country. Accounts widely record that he was not tried but shot after capture, tied to a tree, on the orders of the officers present. The precise circumstances of how he was located and captured differ between contemporary colonial reports and later Telugu accounts, and this is one of the places where the record should be treated with care. He was around 27 years old. The rebellion did not survive him for long.

Why is he remembered as Manyam Veerudu?

Manyam is the Telugu word for the hill and forest tracts of the Eastern Ghats; veerudu means hero. Manyam Veerudu — Hero of the Manyam, usually rendered in English as Hero of the Jungle — is the name by which he is known across Telugu-speaking India, and the phrasing carries the point. His authority was not conferred by a party, an institution or a national movement. It came from the communities he lived among.

His place in public memory has been reinforced steadily since independence:

• Statues and memorials across coastal Andhra and the agency areas, some of them substantial civic landmarks in their own right.
• Telugu cinema, which has returned to him repeatedly — most influentially in a 1974 biographical film, and more recently through a fictionalised character bearing his name in a globally released 2022 production that introduced him to audiences far outside India.
• A district named after himin Andhra Pradesh’s 2022 administrative reorganisation, covering agency territory in the Eastern Ghats.
• School curricula and commemorations, including the 125th birth anniversary observances held in 2022.

There is a live debate among historians about how far the popular image has drifted from the historical record — how much of the invulnerability legend, the announced raids and the ascetic backstory is documented and how much is accretion. That debate does not diminish him. It is what happens to figures who matter enough to be retold.

Why is the Bhogapuram airport named after Alluri Sitarama Raju?

The Ministry of Civil Aviation renamed the airport by gazette notification in July 2026, replacing the working name Bhogapuram International Airport with Alluri Sitarama Raju International Airport. The choice reads as deliberate on three counts.

Geography. The airport sits at Bhogapuram in Vizianagaram district, on the coastal plain directly below the Eastern Ghats. Drive inland and you are in the agency country — the hill tracts around Araku, Paderu and the Godavari agency where the rebellion was fought. This is not a name borrowed from elsewhere in India and applied to a convenient site. It belongs to the landscape the runway looks towards.

Constituency.The districts this airport serves have substantial Adivasi populations whose ancestors were the people the Rampa Rebellion was fought for. Naming Andhra Pradesh’s first international airport built after the 2014 state bifurcation after a leader of tribal resistance places that history at the front door of the region’s most visible new asset.

Symmetry. There is a genuine irony worth noticing rather than smoothing over. Alluri fought a colonial state whose road-building into the hills was itself a grievance — infrastructure imposed on communities through forced labour. A century later, an airport named for him is presented as infrastructure built for those same communities. Whether it delivers on that is a question of jobs, access and whether the growth reaches inland; we look at that in our guide to the Bhogapuram aerotropolis and its economic impact. For the airport itself — the 3,800 m runway, the 78,000 sq m terminal and the 17 August 2026 start of commercial flights — see our complete ASR International Airport guide and our airport hub page.

What did the Dhimsa dance at the inauguration signify?

Around 13,000 tribal women and students performed the traditional Dhimsa dance at the inauguration on 1 August 2026, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi opened the airport alongside Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu, Deputy Chief Minister Pawan Kalyan, Governor S. Abdul Nazeer and Union Civil Aviation Minister K. Ram Mohan Naidu.

Dhimsa is a group dance of the Adivasi communities of the Eastern Ghats, performed by women moving in a linked circle to drums and wind instruments, typically at festivals and community gatherings. It belongs to precisely the hill districts that Alluri organised, and it is danced collectively rather than performed by soloists — the form itself is communal.

Staging it at that scale, at that ceremony, was a choice about whose region this is. An airport named after a leader of tribal resistance, opened to a dance from the communities he fought alongside, in a district at the foot of the hills where the rebellion happened. Our full account of the inauguration covers the day in detail, and our guide to places to visit near Bhogapuram covers the Eastern Ghats country — Araku, Borra Caves and the hill tracts — that gave Alluri Sitarama Raju his name.