Kiran Jonnalagadda’s Blog

In her paper ‘Memories of Underdevelopment’: Language and Its Identities in Contemporary Karnataka (Economic and Political Weekly, Oct 12-19, 1996, pp 2809-2816), Janaki Nair attempts to trace the origins and evolution of Kannada nationalism, seeking to show how its growth has been hampered on various fronts and how it may be increasingly aligning with “strident communal or anti-minority forces,” resulting in “undemocratic resolution of its identity crisis.” This paper may help cast some light on justifications for the recent announcement of Bangalore being renamed to Bengalooru.

While Nair does not provide a general introduction to the larger nationalist movement across the country, that may be gained from “The Thematic and the Problematic”, chapter 2 of Partha Chatterjee’s “Nationalistic Thought in a Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse?”. Chatterjee explains therein that the nationalist movement, which sought independence from colonial power, claimed to speak on behalf of the populations whose support it needed, even while seeking goals that may not have immediate appeal to those populations. The nationalist movement was thus necessarily a bundle of compromises.

While Hindi nationalism has its origins in the 1870s, Kannada nationalism failed to take root until about 1920, when Alur Venkat Rao specifically took on the agenda. Nair notes that this delay was because an administrative identity on which nationalist politics could develop was unavailable. The nationalist movement justified its existence by seeking to embrace modernity and industralisation, but in Mysore state, this agenda was taken up by the state itself, thus severely hampering the conditions in which a public sphere could develop.

The resultant muted political identity, source of the legendary ‘tolerance’ of the Kannadigas to external cultures and languages, is often cited as a distinct advantage over other states, especially with Bangalore becoming an attractive location for integration into the new world economic order.

However, this displacement of cultural nationalism with economic and legal modernisation is “fraught with unexpected anxieties that have violently manifested themselves in the past two decades”. Kannada nationalism is today a beleaguered nationalism since it possesses neither the will nor the resources to combat the hegemonic presence of English as the language of science and global capitalism. Instead, it displaces its demands on the politico-cultural sphere via the state, taking refuge via the linguistic orientation of states, which grants Kannada status of official language of Karnataka.

This is not straightforward either, since Karnataka is unusually rich in the number of languages spoken by its inhabitants, which include Tulu, Konkani and Kodagu as native languages, apart from significant populations of Telugu, Urdu, Tamil and Marathi speakers. Kannada speakers account for only 65% of the state. Nair also quotes figures from other studies, which note that Bangalore has 14% of the state’s population (second ranked Belgaum being a poor 8%), and within Bangalore, Kannada speakers account for only 34%.

Perhaps as a result of this lack of dominance, or perhaps the inability to take on the economic hegemony of English, Kannada nationalism pits itself against other dominated languages, particularly Tamil and Urdu.

Nair here notes the three significant moments of language-related agitations in the last two decades, the Gokak agitation of 1982, the Cauvery agitation of 1991, and the agitation against the telecast of news in Urdu in 1994. From the manner of these agitations, she points out that acts of securing the identity of Kannada by attacks on other linguistic minorities are restricted to regions of high economic growth where minorities are visibly thriving, particularly urban areas like Bangalore and Mysore.

The development of Bangalore as city and its place in the global order make it a site of bitter contention on the plight of Kannada and Kannadigas throughout Karnataka. This may be correlated with contemporary developments, wherein Bangalore is claimed to rightfully belong to the Kannadigas and renamed to make the point, even while the legitimacy and appropriateness of the Kannada version of the name is in question.

Nair divides her examination into four sections, looking at Kannada as the language of Work, Culture, Governance and Religion.

For the first, she points out that the legendary ‘tolerance’ of Kannadigas is a case of reinterpretation of the existence of substantial linguistic minorities, who owe their presence to migration caused by droughts in the farmlands, the availability of jobs in an industrialised Mysore state, and general migration from rural areas to urban centres, all of which have essentially little to do with the Kannadigas themselves. For their part, Tamil workers attribute their presence in the state to their propensity for ‘hard work’. These assumptions about either people continue to persist today.

In the realm of culture, Kannada has never had much hope against an internationally hegemonic language like English, which found traction in India in the absence of a common language across the incipient nation-state. Despite this, Nair notes more than a century of struggle at keeping Kannada as the medium of instruction in schools, lately with the support of bodies such as the Kannada and Culture Department.

Nair also notes the discomfort the Kannada movement has had with Hindi, the language of the larger nationalist movement, including instances of protest at Hindi television programmes and movies being dubbed in Kannada instead of being remade, even as others consider remakes as the death knell for original work in Kannada.

In recent times, these tensions have manifested as the Kannada film industry’s demand for a delay of several weeks on all other language films being released in the state. Nair says such moves may be seen as the coercive rather than persuasive quality of Kannada’s limited reign over the culture of Karnataka.

Nair notes that given the sheer hopelessness of attempting to prop Kannada against other language media, the movement went after an easier target, the official channels of the state.

Given the economic order of the day, with the public sector slowly but surely transitioning into a private sector, the state not just handles administrative functions but is an active interventionist force in this transition, and thus ideally positioned to secure the interests of the Kannada movement. In over 30 years of intervention however, it has failed to do this, resulting in some considering the only viable route being to make Kannada the sole official language, with the school system as a crucial site for that intervention. The Gokak agitation concerned itself with this need. The 1994 agitation against telecast of news in Urdu may be seen as another act of consecration of Kannada as the language of the state.

Nair contends that Urdu speakers solidarity springs in part from the solidarity made available by Islam and is able to exist without the patronage of a state. Kannada envies and fears Urdu’s religious affiliation. Kannada’s own association with Hinduism is naturalised and hence beyond interrogation.

The final section of the paper seeks to explain this naturalisation. This section is the least convincing, for it pegs its explanation around the work of one man, Alur Venkat Rao’s 1917 conception of ‘Karnatakatva’ in his Karnataka Gatha Vaibhava. Alur’s history of Karnataka ends in 1565, when the forces of Hinduism were defeated by the forces of Islam. Despite that the Bahmani and Adil Shahi court cultures in North Karnataka paralleled the court of the Wodeyars, Alur holds them responsible for the decline of Karnatakatva.

While Alur’s work no doubt was meant to rally specific groups to the cause of Kannada, he achieved his cause much in the same way that Shahid Amin has noted elsewhere with Hindi nationalist writers such as Bankimchandra, who had to separate Hindi from Urdu and thereby alienated Islam while attempting to define a Hindi nation. In this manner, the identification of Kannada with Hinduism has become naturalised without an explicit call for their association.

In conclusion, Nair notes that the Kannada movement resembles the Shiv Sena movement quite closely in the kinds of elements it assembles in its self-definition (Hindu, anti-minority and patriarchal) as well as in its aspirations (control of the political machine), while other details vary. Kannada nationalism, like all nationalisms, attempts to produce a solidarity between all Kannada speakers in order to efface the specificities of caste and class, but pits itself against other dominated minorities rather than addressing the causes for its own domination.

There are some concerns with this paper that must be noted:

First, Nair presents the case of Kannada nationalism as a series of causes and effects, a domino effect with only two visible roots: of Mysore state absorbing the nationalist agenda, thereby stunting its growth, and of Alur Venkat Rao’s version of Karnataka’s history having created an other that the weakened movement could pit itself against. The result is compelling but not entirely convincing. Perhaps Nair’s other work throws more light on how the parts fit together (see a review here).

Second, while Nair does not claim it, the paper suggests that North and South Karnataka have independent identities and are largely united only by common language. This becomes clear when she distinguishes between Mysore’s Wodeyars and North Karnataka’s Bahmani and Adil Shahi courts. Yet, the Bahmani kingdom occupied a different (if overlapping) period from the Wodeyars, and the Wodeyars’ Mysore state did not cover all of present day Karnataka. Hence, when she finds cause with the actions of the Mysore state, what of the (then) rest of the Kannada speaking people? How did they develop? Or did their sense of identity tend to align with Maharashtra, perhaps thus providing the backdrop for recent agitations regarding state affiliation in Belgaum?

Third, the linguistic conflicts described in the paper pit Kannada against Tamil, Hindi and Urdu, but what about Kodagu, Tulu and Konkani, languages that are almost entirely contained within the boundaries of the state but aren’t official languages, and therefore have even greater cause for insecurity? If this greater insecurity may be considered reason for the movement to feel secure against them, does this reinforce that the movement has indeed only picked on languages that pose a comparable threat, ignoring the minor and the hegemonic alike?

(This text was written for an assignment at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore.)