The Rampa administrative area, situated in the hills of what are now the Alluri Sitarama Raju district of Andhra Pradesh, comprised around 700 square miles (1,800 km2) and had a mostly tribal population of approximately 28,000.

[1] The British Raj authorities had wanted to improve the economic usefulness of lands in Godavari Agency, an area that was noted for the prevalence of malaria and blackwater fever.

[1] The tribal people of the forested hills, who now faced starvation,[3] had long felt that the legal system favoured the zamindars (estate landowners) and merchants of the plains areas, which had also resulted in the earlier Rampa Rebellion of 1879.

Their economic status was now dictated entirely by British Raj policy, where previously they had enjoyed the flexibility to levy and to cream off tax income and to use the land of others as they saw fit.

He saw the overthrow of colonial rule in terms similar to a millenarian event and he harnessed the discontent of the tribal people to support his anti-colonial zeal, whilst also accommodating the grievances of those muttadars who were sympathetic to his aim rather than merely narrow-minded in their pursuit of a revived status for themselves.