When I met 90-year-old Jaini Mallaya Gupta on January 23, 2019, at his Hyderabad apartment, he had just finished reading the Urdu daily newspaper, Siāsat—his morning ritual of almost seventy years. Not surprisingly, our conversations found a relevant beginning with his long journey with the Siāsat, a paper launched in the aftermath of the Police Action. For Mallayya Gupta, reading Siāsat was a major source of his passionate engagements with the progressive literature in Urdu and the rise of Muslim discourse against the background of the Police Action. He said:

“Look,” he insisted, “we used the same weapon to fight against the Nizam and all that gruesome violence of the Police Action.” Elaborating further, he continued:

For many young political activists of 1940s Telangana, the progressive literature (Gupta used the Urdu equivalent throughout our conversations, taraqqī-pasand), particularly in Urdu, was a major source of inspiration and political resistance. Gupta was barely eighteen when he started a reading group in his hometown of Nalgonda in the late 1940s (Figure 4.1). It was a humble beginning that attracted a significant number of the new-generation writers and readers who had just started engaging with a vibrant political and cultural climate in the princely state of Hyderabad.