Talk:Papadu

This borders on being a hoax
This article - one of many that I have come across lately that are pushing the POV of the Goud community - is bordering on a hoax in its present form. According to the references in relies on. The only likely candidate anywhere in that book is a chap called Papadu, who features on pp. 30-31. Of this person the authors say "... the weakening of the empire opened opportunities for the ruthless and ambitious of all sorts. One, who later became a Robin Hood-like folk hero, was Papadu, a low caste Telegu bandit chieftan. In the years after 1700, as John Richards and V. Narayana Rao tell us his story, Papadu, from a toddy tapping (fermented liquor manufacturing) caste, recruited followers from an array of untouchable and ritually low groups to form an army of several thousand. With it he mounted successful assaults against several of the major towns in Telengana. finally, following a year-long siege of his hill-fort refuge by a combined Mughal and zamindari force, Papadu was captured and killed. Rebellion of this sort, as Richards and Narayana Rao make clear, was not destined for success. As a leader of a 'dual rebellion', against both imperial and local chiefly authority, Papadu struck too boldly at the most basic ordering of society, and thus mobilized against him all those with a stake in the established hierarchies of caste and wealth."

And that is it. Nothing more. Anywhere.

I think that most people would agree that it bears only a slight resemblance to the article, sufficient to make me feel comfortable that we are talking about the same person but that is about all.

I am going to dig around for other printed sources using this name (they do exist) but one clear first step is that this article needs to be moved to a new name and the references to Goud and to him being a king of some sort need to be scrubbed for now. There are no printed sources at GBooks or GScholar that call him Papanna, and my limited search access to JSTOR suggests the same applies there. - Sitush (talk) 22:06, 30 December 2011 (UTC)


 * I have completely rewritten the article and it has now been moved to a more correct title. - Sitush (talk) 14:02, 2 January 2012 (UTC)

Recent edits
These changes keep being made, allegedly on the grounds that our article denigrates the subject. I can see no denigration in the original version but I can see removal of reliably sourced content in the new version, not to mention use of an uncommon (& perhaps even completely unsourced) name for the guy and mention of a Hindu nationalist blog operated by the Sangh Parivar. It would perhaps be no surprise to see Hindu nationalists trying to push a pro-Hindu/anti-Muslm slant on this article but whoever is doing the current stuff is primarily ignorant of other matters, such as how to cite correctly and how to avoid redlinked categories. All in all, the changes are making a complete mess of the article per WP:V, WP:RS, WP:NPOV, WP:COMMONNAME and other standards. Please revert them now. - Sitush (talk) 16:46, 26 September 2013 (UTC)