In August, noted writer, Kannada professor, and folklorist Purushottam Bilimale served up a familiar refrain in Bengaluru. As the head of the Kannada Development Authority, he reiterated an argument that had been made for several decades. 

“Bengaluru today has more non-Kannadigas than Kannadigas. In several parts of the city, Kannadigas have become refugees,” he said. 

Purushottam might have been trying to capture the resurgent anxiety about the declining prominence of Kannada and Kannadigas, but the available census data contradicts it. Migration data shows that for decades across the country, intra-state migration has been far higher than inter-state migration. This is true of Bengaluru too. 

Yet, with the current census delayed, there is fear that the numbers have changed drastically, leaving these claims open to interpretation. And the idea that Kannadigas are outnumbered in the city continues to persist.

The concern for the primacy of Kannada has existed for around a century, but its contours and targets have changed. In the past 50 years, hostility has been directed at several groups. Starting in the 1960s, Kannada activists and writers, beginning with demands at the Ramotsava festival to feature Karnataka singers over Tamil Nadu artistes, responded to the waning dominance of Kannada in Bengaluru. These efforts extended to cinema, public sector jobs, and calls for prioritising Kannadiga employment, symbolised by the creation of the Karnataka flag. 

Today, it appears, it is directed at the most visibly different outsider – the north Indian/Hindi speaker, particularly an affluent one who is often seen as aggressive and disrespectful of local sentiments. 

Many scholars, however, argue the causes have largely remained constant: the desire for economic mobility and the opposition to the imposition of Hindi language. What started out as a positive movement for the Kannada language has acquired strains of fear and antagonism over time. Besides Kannada’s trajectory compared to other languages in the country, many factors have fuelled this antagonism: the shortsightedness of the state government, the Hindi tilt of the union government, and economic distress caused in agrarian families by the neo-liberalism shift since the 1990s. 

Consequently, the feeling that Kannadigas are outnumbered in their own land persists among a cross-section of people, especially Bengaluru, where Kannada vies for space among other tongues more than it does anywhere else in the state. 

Developments of the past few months capture the range of concerns of the present-day Kannada movement: battles against Hindi-imposition as typified by the move to remove Hindi text from the Metro announcement boards, mandatory Kannada signboards for shops, demands for a bilingual policy, a short-lived law proposing jobs for Karnataka domicile people, the grouse against bank mergers and lack of Kannada speaking staff at banks, and a demand for medical prescriptions in Kannada. 

These battles, which largely play out on social media, invariably turn into ‘Kannadigas vs outsiders’ or ‘Kannadigas vs north Indians’ fights, with everyone pitching in. We’ve heard the arguments before: ‘Kannadigas’ say “respect Kannada and Karnataka or get lost” while ‘outsiders’ claim they made Bengaluru what it is. 

On one side, the narrative is about Kannadiga “tolerance” which allowed ‘outsiders’ to take over. On the other, ‘outsiders’ responded by poking fun at Kannada activists with memes and comparing Bengaluru with other cities, which they claimed were more welcoming. 

“There are so many dimensions to this issue, and each one makes a different culprit visible,” said Chandan Gowda, a sociologist and professor at Bengaluru’s Institute of Social and Economic Change.

Madhu Kumar, a 34-year-old resident of Kengeri, has had several jobs over the years before settling on work as an autorickshaw driver. He is part of a WhatsApp group of fellow autorickshaw drivers that promotes Kannada activism.

He has no animosity towards Hindi-speaking migrants, but he cannot help noticing their presence, particularly in jobs that were once held by locals. “Earlier, construction workers were all Tamilians. Now they are all Hindi speakers. The metro construction sites are filled with Hindi speakers. Brokers control everything,” he said.

Madhu has also noticed that the two-wheelers of many Rapido drivers are registered in other states. “The rides they offer are illegal. We pay taxes for our auto licences. These people should not take away someone’s work, as we suffer a blow as a result. Where are we to go? This situation has risen because we welcome everybody here,” Madhu said.

‘Outsiders’ and ‘our people’

While many Kannada speakers feel that Bengaluru is overrun by migrants and that they are a minority, language and migration data from Census 2011, outdated as it is, shows a more complex reality that defies easy categorisations of ‘migrant’, ‘outsider’ and ‘local’.

Slightly over half of Bengaluru’s population, about 51 percent, is made up of migrants. But the majority are from within Karnataka. Intra-state migrants – referring to migration within a state – form 64 percent of the city’s migrant population and 33 percent of the total population. Migrants from other states form only 18 percent of the city’s population and, even within this group, the majority of people are from Tamil Nadu, Kerala and undivided Andhra Pradesh.

Data from the language census broadly indicates the same pattern. About 42 percent of people in the city list Kannada as their mother tongue, which is an increase from the 1991 Census, when just 35 percent of people declared Kannada as their mother tongue. 

Intra-state migration has been higher than inter-state migration since the 1950s and accelerated after the 1990s – a time that coincided with the start of a countrywide collapse in agriculture, which triggered rural to urban migration. 

Languages such as Tulu, Konkani, Kodava and Dakhni are among the larger linguistic groups in the state besides Kannada. Bengaluru is home not just to these languages but also to Tamil, Malayalam and Telugu speakers who have lived in the city for generations. 

Still, one in five people in Bengaluru is a ‘migrant’, regardless of the language they speak, and is visible enough to keep a historical anxiety alive. 

“The anxiety is coming from the fact that this is the capital city of a state which has an official language. The capital is the heart of a place, and symbolically, you would like Kannada to have centrality there,” Chandan said. 

Despite the noise and vitriol on social media, Chandan said, demands for people to learn Kannada aren’t literal. “It is more that people should be respectful towards Kannada. That doesn’t seem like an unreasonable demand if you consider it in relation to a federal setup.”

Chandan said that the logic is that if one goes somewhere, one is not slighting the language of the place. “We don’t know whether all Kannadigas are perfectly respectful of other languages when they go out. These are empirical questions. But in the imagination, it is always presumed that Kannadigas as a linguistic community are respectful to other linguistic communities, within the state or outside. There is a sense of disquiet that it is not reciprocated.”

The feeling of being slighted becomes “more pronounced” when a Hindi-speaking person is involved, Chandan said, “because there is this idea that Hindi is the national language, that the union government is imposing it, and that people in Karnataka learn it as a third language.Then, it circles back to ‘we Kannadigas know Hindi, but north Indians don’t know our language’, Chandan said. 

Even though Tamils, Marwadis and Gujaratis have very different social histories which prompted migration, many people separate them from the newer migrants that came with the IT boom. 

For Madhu, the autorickshaw driver, anyone who speaks Kannada, regardless of whether their mother tongues are Tamil, Telugu, Dakhni, or Marwadi, are “our people.” 

“People who were born and have lived here all speak Kannada. Avarella nammavare (They’re all our people),” he said. 

The difference in the sentiment, according to filmmaker and Kannada activist Milton Peter, was the advent of technology, which had led to the development of what he called “parallel societies.”

“Apps allow people to book taxis, order groceries, and consume media from their home regions without the need to interact with local residents. They organise their own cultural events, such as garba nights, and know nothing about, say, the Karaga festival. You can live in Bengaluru without ever feeling obligated to learn Kannada. Instead of a melting pot where different groups contribute to a shared identity, you end up with fragmented pockets of communities that remain isolated from one another,” Milton said. 

Dispersed language, shifting targets

While the linguistic identity of a state has been normalised six decades after the reorganisation of states in 1956, the idea of connecting a language with a state was historically non-existent anywhere in India and only gained currency as a response to colonialism, according to Basavaraja Kodagunti, a Kannada professor at the Central University of Karnataka in Kalaburagi. 

“We do find references to Kannada-speaking areas in the 9th century CE Kannada language treatise Kavirajamarga. But historically, the connection between a state’s boundaries and languages like Europe did not exist anywhere in India. The idea of a state based on language began to gain traction after the partition of Bengal in 1905,” Basavaraja said. 

But colonialism provided the spark for languages to develop in certain ways in the three presidencies of Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras that other languages did not have, he said. “Many activities were organised around language in the three presidencies in Bengali, Marathi, and Tamil. So, the identity construction and identity politics of these three languages were slightly different from those of other languages. There was a certain competitiveness between these three presidencies, which added an impetus to the development of the local language.”

The absence of this colonial impetus meant that Kannada was somewhat a late entrant to language politics. The 1924 session of the Congress in Belgaum (Belagavi) changed that. “Congress leaders who were fighting for independence from the British were also working for the unification of Karnataka. They had an independent session where they discussed the need for a state called Karnataka. The Belgaum session got national attention for the cause of the Karnataka state, with even MK Gandhi becoming aware of it.”

Around this time in neighbouring Tamil Nadu, EV Ramasamy Naicker was just beginning to formulate his politics, which would go on to become unique in India’s linguistic history. 

“Periyar (EV Ramasamy Naicker) was a big reason for the language movement in Tamil. He was not only a tall leader, but his thinking was built around the Tamil language. Historical and political developments contributed to the development of a Tamil ideology, which did not happen in the context of other languages, including Kannada,” Basavaraja said. 

According to historian Janaki Nair, the governance of Kannada-speaking areas being divided into five administrative regions – the Madras and Bombay Presidencies under the British, Hyderabad kingdom under the Nizam, Coorg, and Mysore state under the Wodeyars – also contributed to a feeling of insecurity. 

In her book The Promise of the Metropolis: Bangalore’s Twentieth Century, Janaki said that during the colonial period, the competition for Kannada was the “political and literary successes” of Marathi, Telugu, and Bengali. Unlike Kerala or undivided Andhra Pradesh, Kannada never had a widespread library movement during the colonial period, she noted.  

After independence came the recognition that the hegemony of English, associated with science, technology, and capitalism, could not easily be challenged. Simultaneously, geography and demography became increasingly important for Kannada activists.  

The Tamil cultural influence on Bengaluru was quite strong and began to be challenged around the 1960s. Writers Aa Na Krishna Rao and Ma Ramamurthy of the Karnataka Samyukta Ranga began to demand that Ramotsava festivals have singers from Karnataka and not be dominated by artistes from Tamil Nadu. 

There were similar struggles around cinema too, with Kannada activists protesting against the 1963 Tamil film Kanchi Thalaivan starring MG Ramachandran over a purported insult to Kannadigas vicariously through the loss of the Chalukya king at the hands of the Pallava king. Activists and writers were united in their objection to a scene in the film where the Pallava king stamps on the flag of Chalukyas.

By 1964, Ma Ramamurthy, realising that the state had no flag, designed one with two colours, yellow and red. This flag was initially used for the political party, Kannada Paksha, that he started in 1966. Ramamurthy died the following year and the party did not survive, but the flag flourished.

The ire of Kannada activists was directed first against Tamilians and Malayalis over public sector jobs in the 1960s and 70s, against Urdu speakers in the 1990s, and Tamilians during the Cauvery agitations and the kidnapping of actor Rajkumar by forest brigand Veerappan. But these agitations on linguistic lines often had other concerns woven into them, such as land, water, and jobs, Janaki points out in her book. 

From the 1960s up to the 1980s, jobs in the public sector undertakings such as HAL, NAL, BEL, HMT and ITI were the major battleground for Kannada activists who kept track of recruitment policies. 

At the height of the 77-day strike of workers of seven PSUs in March 1981, posters supposedly signed by the Indian National Trade Union Congress appeared, threatening to socially boycott Tamilians and Keralites if they were not expelled immediately. The implication was that the Tamil and Malayali strike organisers were keeping hard-working Kannadigas away from work. The posters forced the strike organisers to clarify that four of the joint convenors of the Joint Action Front were Kannadigas. 

In another instance, in 1973, it was discovered that the newly started Indian Institute of Management was not employing a proportionate number of Kannadigas even though land and other resources had been provided by the state government. 

By the mid-1980s, it was clear that Kannadigas formed the majority of the workforce in PSUs, as information submitted to the Sarojini Mahishi Commission showed. It was formed in 1984 to recommend job opportunities for Kannadigas in Karnataka. Activists and civil society groups have repeatedly demanded over the years that the recommendations of this report be implemented. 

Janaki noted in her book that an excessive focus on the demographic imbalances “is seriously flawed as it is translated into a programme for redressal that turns against minorities in the state”.

In 1984, when the Ramakrishna Hegde government relaxed the compulsory Kannada examination for Class 3 and 4 employees as a concession to Muslim government employees, there was a backlash from the Rajkumar Abhimanigala Sangha, a fan association of actor Rajkumar. The Sangha organised a city-wide bandh, which turned violent, and Muslim and Tamil properties in western Bengaluru were attacked.

A decade later, in 1994, Muslims were targeted again, this time over the Urdu news telecast on Doordarshan. Several people died in police shootings, and many Muslim businesses were attacked. This was an instance, in Janaki’s view, when Karnatakatva flirted with Hindutva. 

"Kannada protagonists in Bangalore and Mysore acted on a version of history which identified Urdu speakers in Karnataka as Muslims, choosing to ignore Kannada’s links with Urdu and indeed Karnataka’s historic encounter with Islam. If the Tamil speaker is envied for an extraterritorial loyalty, for an allegiance to the politics of a neighbouring state, the Urdu speaker is feared for their excessive identity, which guarantees the language a space in governmental discourse despite its lack of territorial location. Both these languages thus survive and even flourish without an official political structure to patronise their community of speakers,” Janaki wrote. 

Language battles played out in the religious sphere too, with the formation of the Karnataka Catholic Christhara Sangha in the 1980s, Janaki said, with Kannada writers and intellectuals such as VK Gokak accusing the Catholic church of not providing services in Kannada and instead offering them in Tamil. 

Race to the bottom

Many economists have shown that India’s turn towards neo-liberalisation in the 1990s ushered in a set of policies that resulted in the breakdown of agriculture across the country, leading to the start of distress migration. This was captured in the Census of 2011, which showed that urban India added more people than rural India for the first time in 90 years. 

Professor and co-director at the Centre for Labour Studies at the National Law School of India University, Bengaluru, Babu Mathew, said that one must keep in mind that census data has shown that intra-state migration is far higher than inter-state migration. “In rural India, agriculture is in distress. Employment opportunities in agriculture and in the non-farm sector have decreased. The only hope for survival lies in urban centres.” 

For employers looking for cheap labour, migrants, whether intra-state or inter-state, and regardless of the type of work they do, are ideal.

Madhu too can see the exploitative tendency of an employer as clear as day. Asked about employers choosing migrants over locals whom they considered “lazy,” Madhu said, “Look, big companies won’t hire us because we will demand leave, food, and higher salaries. But people from other states will not. Our people (locals) will work eight hours. Wouldn't you want to work for eight hours and go home? But migrant workers live on the work site and will work for 12 hours.”

Babu said the desire among employers to hire the cheapest labour was part of the “overall philosophy of the ease of doing business read with the race to the bottom.”

Giving an example of the garment sector in Bengaluru, with which he has worked extensively, Babu said the argument is often made that if the industry has to survive in India, it must compete with Bangladesh, and therefore wages here must be lower than those in Bangladesh, or else the businesses will go to Bangladesh. “This is called the race to the bottom, and it is being used for the purpose of decreasing wages and preventing the improvement of working conditions. As it is, the garment industry has the lowest minimum wage among 100 types of employment in Karnataka.”

But he cautioned that a way must be found to balance the constitutional right to freedom of movement with the right of people to not be exploited by their employers.

Government policy, political posturing

Successive state governments were indecisive and sometimes held on to disastrous language policies. The ill-effects of these decisions are felt even to this day.

Karnataka adopted the three-language formula promoted by the union government in 1968 at a time when it was becoming clear that English was the gateway to economic and social mobility. Under the formula, north Indian states were to teach Hindi, English, and a modern language, preferably a south Indian one, while the south Indian states would teach their respective languages along with Hindi and English. 

Chandan Gowda said that during this time, due to opposition to Hindi, Sanskrit was chosen as the first language in education and Kannada was taught as the third language. In 1972, the then Chief Minister Devaraj Urs made Kannada the first language and Sanskrit the third. When Gundu Rao became the state’s first Brahmin Chief Minister in 1980, he re-introduced Sanskrit as a first language, removing Kannada and English from the first language choices. Faced with a massive backlash and accused of “Brahminical bias,” he appointed Jnanpith awardee VK Gokak to study the language problem. The committee submitted its report in January 1981 and recommended a three-language formula with Kannada as the sole first language. 

However, Gundu Rao sat on the recommendations for some time. His inaction provoked protests in 1982, which came to be called the Gokak agitation. Celebrated actor Rajkumar’s entry into the Gokak agitation gave the Kannada movement, which was until then largely driven by writers and intellectuals, a truly mass character. 

Till today, Karnataka has a three-language policy in primary education, which has left the state government open to accusations of being “soft” and invited unfavourable comparisons with Tamil Nadu’s approach of a two-language policy. 

Prof Basavaraja Kodagunti said that Karnataka decided on a three-language policy at a time when there was a general feeling across the country that such a policy must be adopted. The then-ruling Congress and the local leadership simply fell in line with the union’s policies.

It was never reversed because politicians in Karnataka built their political careers in national parties. “It’s only when a political party turns Karnataka into an ideology that you can call it a Karnataka-centric party. Our politicians cannot think along those lines because of their backgrounds in the ideologies of national parties. So they don’t give much importance to the reversal of the three-language policy,” he said.

Along with this, people in the state have had to deal with what Bengaluru-based activist Shivasundar argued was a bias towards Hindi that was built into the Constitution in Article 351. Successive union governments attempted to push Hindi down the throats of non-Hindi speakers through all kinds of policies. This has only increased under the Narendra Modi-led government since 2014. 

Chandan said that while the BJP promotes Hindi at the national level, the local BJP leaders in Karnataka attempt damage control. “Amit Shah will say we’ll push Hindi, and the local BJP will say something else and confuse everybody. When Narendra Modi comes to Karnataka, he speaks in Hindi, but when he goes to Tamil Nadu, he speaks in English.”

These may be confusing signals, but the BJP is wary that its pro-Hindi plans can actually hurt it, Chandan said. “So it’s trying to do both things: talk about national unity and also Kannada.” 

Even with regard to the hoisting of the Kannada flag, the BJP was caught on the backfoot during its previous tenure. “On the flag, the BJP’s pushback is very clear: all the ministers refused to hoist it in government buildings, but Siddaramaiah did, and that was a big symbolic gesture,” Chandan said.

But it would be a mistake to look at the flag issue in terms of electoral prospects. “Take the Metro signage pushback; did it mean more votes for the Congress in the election that happened afterwards? Did the BJP lose any votes because of that?” 

Chandan said Bengaluru politicians are not likely to make Kannada an election issue. “The city’s MLAs do not want to push for it very strongly because the constituencies are linguistically diverse. Outside Bengaluru, this is not an issue. People talk about it, but it is not something that weighs very heavily on people’s minds.”

An unsettled present

For Ganesh and many other activists, Hindi is not a villain. “The movement is not against other languages per se but is a proactive fight for Kannada rights. While social media has played a significant role in spreading the message, not all the noise online is representative of real issues. Some non-Kannadigas or outsiders may be using the situation for personal gain, such as increasing impressions on monetised tweets, but for genuine Kannada activists, the issues they’re fighting for are much deeper and long-standing,” Ganesh said.

State organising secretary of the Karnataka Rakshana Vedike Arun Javgal says that the “north Indian” media often play up incidents such as the recent one in which a north Indian woman accused an auto driver of slapping her during an argument and ignore more substantial issues such as Hindi imposition and the treatment of the union government of non-Hindi-speaking states. 

“What the auto driver did was wrong; he shouldn’t have talked to a woman like that. But why did an argument on the street become national news?” asks Arun. 

According to him, the delimitation and the drop in the total fertility rates of the southern states would have an adverse impact on these states. 

“From the Parliament to the railway station, there is discrimination everywhere. When our own elected governments discriminate against us, it is not news. But we can’t even call this discrimination because it is built into the Constitution and the union cites that and gets away with it,” Arun said. He also castigated the state’s political establishment for remaining silent on these issues. “Don’t Siddaramaiah, Yediyurappa, and Kumaraswamy know these issues? Do they have the guts to raise their voice against this?”

Arun says that he and others have joined forces with speakers of languages which are clubbed under Hindi in the census. “Today, we are not fighting Hindi imposition. What we want is that all languages get recognition as official languages of the union under Article 343 of the Constitution, and that it becomes the responsibility of the union government to promote all languages under Article 351 and not just Hindi. If we fight to make all languages official, then Hindi imposition will stop.”

Filmmaker Milton Peter, who is also active on social media, fears the Kannada movement needs to be wary of being co-opted by Hindutva activists. “The BJP IT cell tries to highlight any small incident in a non-BJP state. Every small thing from Karnataka has started to become a huge thing because the BJP wants to portray the Congress as the bad guy. We need to stick to linguistic rights and argue from a linguistic rights perspective. Otherwise, things will just move towards xenophobia.”

Although there is no panacea that will assuage the multiple anxieties about the relevance and survival of Kannada, many feel that a bilingual policy, if done right, might be a start.

“I think symbolically a bilingual policy will make a lot of difference. It’s a question of unfairness. If three languages are good for the country, then have it everywhere. Why is it possible for Tamil Nadu and north India to say we will have only two languages? And why are we (Karnataka) under a special obligation to do these things? It’s a fair question to ask,” Chandan said.

Janaki said that there are many issues to address. “Of late, the language of the streets is Hindi. The aggressive push of the current Union government to promote Hindi has undermined even the state’s efforts to sustain and promote Kannada,” she told TNM.

She also said a primary education policy that is “robustly bilingual (in schools and later in workplaces), with no concessions made to elite schools, etc., and the encouragement of cultural skilling in different kinds of workplaces in imaginative ways will go a long way in protecting the future of the language. It will call on those brilliant literary figures who despair about the future of Kannada to develop forms of communication that will enrich public life and private conversations equally, in democratic ways, and not through government fiat.”

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