My Life Is a Song

Gaddar, poet, singer, revolutionary, is among the most well-known of the creative minds associated with people’s resistance movements in India. Born Gummadi Vittal Rao in 1947, in Tupran village of Medak district in what is now Telangana, Gaddar became an activist in his youth after dropping out of engineering college due to poverty. With a gift for singing and song-writing, he travelled the road—for some time underground—reaching lakhs of people with his music, and became the cultural face of ‘rebellion’, the literal meaning of his nom de guerre.