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Kannada Ekikarana: The great coming together
This ‘ekikarana’, or unification, had been campaigned for since the early 1900s; the sundering of the Kannada country itself, however, dated back to the 16th century.
On no other day in the year does the Kannadiga heart swell as proudly as on the first of November, Rajyotsava Day. This was the day, back in 1956, when the aspirations of hundreds of thousands of Kannadigas came to fruition, with the state of Mysore expanding its borders to embrace neighbouring Kannada-speaking regions into itself.
This ‘ekikarana’, or unification, had been campaigned for since the early 1900s; the sundering of the Kannada country itself, however, dated back to the 16th century.
The end of the vast Vijayanagara Empire in 1565 cast the Kannada-speaking regions it had once incorporated into disarray. To the south, however, the kingdom of Mysore continued to be the heartland of the Kannada people, administered as it had been by the Kannada-speaking rulers of the Wodeyar dynasty since the 14th century. In the latter half of the 18th century, Hyder Ali and Tipu Sultan expanded Mysore to include more Kannada-speaking regions, only to lose them again in the aftermath of the Fourth Anglo-Mysore war. The spoils were divvied up between the East India Company and its allies, like the Nizam of Hyderabad and the Marathas, in 1799.
In 19th-century British records, the six Kannada-speaking regions of the Deccan were classified as Bombay Karnataka (part of the Bombay Presidency), Hyderabad Karnataka (Nizam’s territories), Madras Karnataka (Madras Presidency), Coorg, Mysore, and miscellaneous princely states like Mudhol, Jamkhandi and Savanur. Nearly two-thirds of what is today Karnataka fell outside the bounds of the kingdom of Mysore.
Following the fall of the Marathas in 1818, British officers setting up schools in erstwhile Maratha territories naturally leaned towards Marathi as the medium of instruction, only to find to their surprise that in certain districts, like Dharwad, Belgaum, North Kanara and Bijapur, it was not Marathi but Kannada that was the lingua franca. Small wonder, then, that the earliest stirrings of rebellion against linguistic (and consequently economic) oppression began in Dharwad, with the founding, by eminent educationist RH Deshpande in 1890, of the Karnataka Vidyavardhaka Sangha, for the protection of Kannada and the unification of the Kannada-speaking regions.
Circa 1907, inspired by Madhusudan Das’ movement for a state based on language that began in Orissa in 1895 and the rage against the 1905 Partition of Bengal, which cleft Bengali speakers in two, Dharwad journalist Aluru Venkata Rao launched the Kannada Ekikarana Movement. He also published, in 1912, his magnum opus on the glorious history of Karnataka until the fall of Vijayanagara, Karnataka Gatha Vaibhava, which was instrumental in getting people to rally for the cause. One of the wonderful fallouts of the Unification Movement, championed all along by writers, was the establishment of the Kannada Sahitya Parishat in Bangalore in 1915.
The road to unification would prove to be a long, hard one, with even past allies like the Mysore administration turning against it – unkindest cut! – unwilling to take on the burden of the economically backward and arid northern regions. But public aspiration proved too strong. On the first of November, 1956, Mysore was ‘reorganised’, bringing great joy to Kannadigas everywhere. Happily, Aluru Venkata Rao, hailed as ‘Kannada Kulapurohita’ (the high priest of Kannada), lived to see the day. On the same date in 1973, the state adopted the name Karnataka.
To this day, the Kannada Sahitya Parishat dedicates itself to the promotion and celebration of Kannada. As for Rao, his memory lives on in the main thoroughfare in Kalasipalyam called AV Road. (It used to be called Albert Victor Road after Queen Victoria’s grandson, which proved very convenient when its name was changed to Aluru Venkatrao Road – same initials!).
(Roopa Pai is a writer who has carried on a longtime love affair with her hometown Bengaluru)
