Linguistic Movements and Political Heterogeneity: Rethinking Unification Movement across British and ‘Princely’ Karnataka

Abstract

Subsequent to the Partition of Bengal in 1905, the consolidation of linguistic identities and movements emerged as an important assertion of core democratic values, positing that governance must be in a language intelligible to the majority. Like other linguistic movements in late-colonial India, the Karnataka Ekikarana (Karnataka unification) movement did not proceed with a spatially uniform logic nor followed a uniform temporality in realising its objectives of uniting Kannada speakers from disparate sub-regions. Attempting to reconcile elite literary ambitions, popular aspirations and political differences, the movement shifted gears through several phases as it worked across multiple territorial jurisdictions and political systems, including the demarcations of British India and princely India.

Focussing on the period between 1860 and 1938, the present article examines the heterogeneous nature of the unification movement across British-Karnataka and two Kannada-speaking princely states, namely, Mysore in the south and Jamakhandi in the north. It explores the ways in which the ruling family of ‘model’ Mysore sought legitimacy in embracing their Kannada heritage; in contrast, the Jamakhandi rulers resisted any concession to Kannada linguistic sentiments. The article shows how, in arriving at monolingually indexed territorial entities, the bridging of ‘internal’ frontiers across these divergent political and linguistic contours proved just as crucial as the claiming of dominance over other language groups within an intensely polyglot world.