Steel Fortress

Prairie Fire Publishing is proud to present Steel Fortress by Renuka (Midko), a short novella drawn from the People's War in India. Based on Comrade Swamy's own account of the 1993 Padkal encounter in Telangana, the work recounts a twenty-four hour battle in which the Sirnapalli guerrilla squad, besieged by police in a village shelter, fought against overwhelming force. Of the six squad members, only the commander survived.

Renuka preserves the voice of the comrade who lived through it, taking up the decisive questions faced by revolutionaries under enemy siege: the discipline required to resist capitulation, the consequences of believing the promises of the class enemy, and above all, the role of the masses — particularly the peasant women of Telangana — as the steel fortress of the people's war. The commander whose story this is, Loketi Chander, went on to serve the revolutionary movement for another thirty-three years across Telangana, Bastar, and Gadchiroli as a member of the Dandakaranya Special Zonal Committee.