In any discussion on underdevelopment or backwardness, we often dwell on figures around growth, per-capita income and human development indices such as education and employment, among others. We use these indicators to categorise a region, community or any social unit as backward. In the case of Karnataka, any discussion on regional imbalance will inevitably lead us to the backwardness of north Karnataka. Numerical evidence as listed above will be called forth to establish the region’s state of underdevelopment. Calls will be made to the state to do more to address these regional disparities.
The Nanjundappa committee’s findings and recommendations will be highlighted. The latest data on the meagre allocation and release of funds by the state and its poor use by regional government agencies will be presented. This is a pattern we are all familiar with and have often used as well, to argue that successive state governments have neglected north Karnataka. These discussions on backwardness also sometimes make stray references to the ‘origins’ of underdevelopment. Often, they are made without any substantial historical evidence. Granted that the primary aim of these discussions is not to trace the histories of backwardness, but if we pay close attention to these passing references, they reveal widely accepted popular narratives—narratives that do not quite stand the test of historical scrutiny.
This historical commonsense in the case of Hyderabad-Karnataka (or Kalyana Karnataka as it is called now) claims that the origin of the region’s backwardness is the ‘feudal’ and ‘Islamic’ rule of the Nizams of Hyderabad-Deccan. For example, in one essay on regional development, one scholar argues that the feudal nature of the Nizam state killed the ‘enterprising spirit’ of the people of Hyderabad-Karnataka, and thus, development did not take place. Other scholars argue that ‘unlike Maharajas of Mysore’, the Nizam state did not undertake any welfare work at all.
In this essay, I will not dwell much on the truth of these assertions, except to say that many of the development initiatives in agriculture, industry, education and infrastructure undertaken by the Nizam state were very similar to those undertaken in other princely states as well as in British India. Measures to deal with agricultural indebtedness, improve agricultural productivity, and expand educational facilities were introduced by the Asaf Jahi state and there is much documentation to substantiate this claim. If such evidence of a developmental state in Hyderabad-Deccan does exist, then why is it that this is not widely known?
This is the politics of history writing. What narratives gain circulation and what is forgotten, neglected, and subsumed are critical to how we frame our present. To understand this question of regional imbalance in the case of Karnataka, we need to understand how and at what point north Karnataka began to be framed or represented as backward. We need to historicise these narratives of backwardness because it is this representation of the region as backward that continues to impact how it is viewed and treated by the contemporary Karnataka state.
To historicise, I will examine the period leading to Karnataka’s formation in 1956. Specifically, we need to return to the debates within the old Mysore state about the idea and possibility of Karnataka and how leaders in this princely state framed the region of north Karnataka. The reason to focus on debates in Mysore is because this region has dominated the direction that the state’s histories, administration and governance have taken, to the exclusion of other regions. For example, if one of the most widely known historical claims is that Karnataka traces its lineage to the Wodeyars of Mysore, how did it become so? Why are the regimes of colonial and Asaf Jahi rule equally not a part of the history of Karnataka? Why are these histories merely relegated to district gazetteers? This was no accidental exclusion but has its beginnings in the debates within the old Mysore state and how its leaders understood the imminent arrival of Karnataka.
North Karnataka, and here I refer to the Kannada-speaking regions of the Bombay and Madras Presidencies, has a place in historical narratives around the formation of Karnataka in as much as it is recognised as the place where a demand for a separate Karnatak state was first made. But what were the contours of this proposed entity called Karnatak? As late as 1948, the demand did not include Mysore state and was restricted sometimes to only Kannada-speaking regions of Bombay and Madras Presidencies and Coorg and other times included even the princely states of Jamakhandi and Mudhol. In various publications by organisations demanding ‘unification’, the argument was made that the region had enough wealth, resources and linguistic homogeneity to merit a separate administrative existence.
A Karnatak state would unleash the potential of the region, which had until then been repressed, they argued. An all-Karnatak province that included Mysore could potentially come together in the future but that did not mean the Karnatak could not be carved out as a separate province now. Even the Nehru committee report of 1928 accepted the viability and self-sufficiency of the Karnatak province.
In the 1950s however, this began to change as the idea of a Karnataka that included Mysore as well began to gain more ground. It was at this point that a fact-finding committee, also known as the Seshadri Committee, was set up to determine to what extent the ‘areas to be added’ to Mysore fell short of ‘Mysorean standards’. The underlying assumption behind setting up the fact-finding committee was of course that Mysore was developed, a model state even, and it needed to know ‘the burden’ it was taking on if Karnataka were to become a reality.
Even before the actual formation of Karnataka, we see the beginning of the dominance of the Mysorean perspective on Karnataka. Although the report did show that in some respects, Bombay-Karnataka and Hyderabad-Karnataka fared much better than Mysore, the conclusion drawn from the report was that becoming part of Karnataka was a bad deal for Mysore. Opponents argued that Mysore did not deserve or need to take on these backward areas and witness the decimation of the progress it had achieved or the Mysorean culture it had nourished. They also contested the formation of Karnataka on the grounds that the new province would be too large and unwieldy. Mysore had achieved the progress it had because of its compactness, they said.
Even those who supported the formation of Karnataka did so with the attitude of benevolence or patronage. For instance, freedom fighter and member of the Mysore state Assembly, UM Madappa cited the industrial advancement of Mysore to argue that this had been made possible due to good administrators. “If we can govern this well because of skilled administrators, why are we shying away from taking on more responsibility and stating that we cannot govern? There are no such cowards among Kannadigas!’ declared Madappa.[1]
Kengal Hanumanthaiah, the then Chief Minister of Mysore and a supporter of the formation of Karnataka, declined to name the state Karnataka and argued that Mysore had ‘compromised with the idea of taking in nearly 90 lakhs of people into one administrative unit with ours’.[2] Hanumanthaiah’s framing of Mysore as a predecessor to the new Kannada state was a viewpoint shared by many of his colleagues in the Assembly. Speaker after speaker framed the reorganisation of territory as other parts joining Mysore, being ‘added to Mysore’ leading to Mysore’s expansion. Within Mysore, there was little to no acknowledgement that to form Karnataka was to form a territorial unit based solely on language which had no precedence in history.
Arguments for this so-called expansion of Mysore often revealed a colonising attitude. For instance, Hanumanthaiah, in his speech in the Assembly during the debate on the SRC report, claimed that if the Bijapur Sultans had earlier captured some of Mysore’s territories and extended their rule over Bangalore, “now the Bangalore Sultanate will extend to Bijapur.” Another legislator AN Rama Rao claimed that Mysore was only ‘getting back’ what it had lost after Tipu Sultan’s fall. He said, “Dewans after Dewans tried to get parts of Mysore which were lost after the fall of Tippu… We could not get a single harbour. Now Raidurg, Bellary, Madakshira, Kollegal, Mangalore and some other parts which were lost after the fall of Tippu are to be restored to Mysore.”
For him, it was the historic responsibility of Mysore to “impart education, correct them and help them as best as we can, to see that they become as refined as we are.” He also argued that Mysore youth, educated and trained in arts, crafts, and sciences, could now go out to these areas and not only find employment but also work at developing these areas. From this colonising perspective, the Kannada-speaking parts held immense possibilities for capitalist expansion for Mysore and opened employment opportunities for Mysore’s youth.
However, it is pertinent to point out that these kinds of self-aggrandising statements did not go without contestation. Some legislators pointed out that Mysore had its share of backward areas, Malnad and Chamarajanagar being two such areas. Gulbarga and Raichur were so agriculturally rich that they could solve Mysore’s perennial food crises easily. The income the state could net from these areas was much more than was being acknowledged, they argued. For this set of legislators, both Mysore and Karnatak had achieved some measure of progress, although in different sectors, and that neglect by the state did not add up to a backward people.
People from the Kannada-speaking regions of Bombay and Madras Presidencies also contested the idea that to form Karnataka was to expand Mysore. These articulations and opposition to Karnataka emanating from Mysore also propelled some to call for forming a Kannada state even without Mysore. In a perceptive comment on the ways in which the formation of the Karnataka state was being articulated—i.e. with Mysore as the nucleus, and other parts ‘merging’ with Mysore to form an ‘expanded’ Mysore state or Vishala Mysore—Manick Rao, a lawyer from Raichur, stated: “Merger must be ruled out… We want to be part of a healthy and strong Karnatak comprising all its component parts resulting in the absorption of Mysore in that bigger Karnatak. We want to play an honourable part in building a province long cherished and to the formation of which we have a historic and political right. It should be clear that shrinkage of Hyderabad cannot mean expansion of another state which cannot be a whole Karnatak in conception or formation.”
However, these perspectives, which held possibilities for mutual respect and equitable distribution of resources and development efforts, did not find much traction as the state began to form. The discourse of the backwardness of Kannada-speaking areas was so strong that by the time of the States Reorganisation Committee, it was no longer held that the Karnatak region was self-sufficient and viable. This shift in discourse around the Karnatak province from a neglected but self-sufficient entity to a poor and underdeveloped one was primarily the result of Mysorean insistence on its own developed status and the ‘burden’ that it would have to bear to take on these backward areas and raise it to the ‘Mysorean standard’.
These discourses had very real implications when it came to making decisions on who would govern the state. The inter-state ministerial committee which had been set up to effectuate the integration of the different Kannada regions into one state had chosen officers from Mysore for most of the senior posts of secretaries and divisional commissioners. This move caused dissatisfaction and criticism from Congressmen outside Mysore because they saw this as a bid to retain the princely state’s administrative set-up entirely, offering no space for ICS and IAS officers from outside the erstwhile state. Given that one of the consistent grievances of advocates of Karnataka from the Kannada parts of the Bombay Presidency was the lack of its people in the administration, this must have felt like yet another betrayal. The decision not to increase pay scales for officers of the new state and to retain Mysore’s payment structure (which was among the lowest in the country), it was believed, also had kept officers from opting for the state.
Over a year later, discontent was still present, as one newspaper report shows. The opinion among those from Karnatak areas was that the old Mysore administration was not capable of handling the task of integration and made them feel like unwelcome ‘outsiders’ who were being forced to fit into ‘an inferior and outmoded administrative machinery’. For old Mysore officers, those from the Karnatak areas were ‘regarded as “intruders” disturbing their status, power and prestige’. These administrative tussles and the unresolved issue of seniority among officials created such dissatisfaction that nearly all senior officials from Bombay-Karnataka apparently asked to be ‘repatriated’ to Bombay state.
Even in the 1980s, a committee set up by the Karnataka Legislative Assembly found that recruitments were disproportionately in favour of those from old Mysore areas, particularly Bangalore district. The districts of Bidar, Belgaum, Bijapur, Kodagu, Dharwar, Gulbarga, Uttara Kannada, Raichur, and Dakshina Kannada were not ‘adequately represented’ in Groups A, B, and C of the state government services. Even in 2002, the Nanjundappa committee found that Hyderabad-Karnataka was poorly represented in government services, with recruits from the region accounting for only 12 % of gazetted posts and 8% of non-gazetted posts. Bangalore division, on the other hand, accounted for 47% and 45% of gazetted and non-gazetted posts. Further, the committee’s analysis of the growth trajectories of different districts of the state between the years 1960 and 1999 showed the worsening or stagnant position of districts from north Karnataka and Hyderabad-Karnataka and dramatic improvements in the position of Bangalore district.
All of this brings us back to the question of the politics of history writing, what narratives gain salience and what is cast aside. In the case of Karnataka, the uncritical and widespread acceptance of its formation as ‘ekikarana’ (integration) as a dismembered nation being finally put together has obscured much else that was taking place in the period of the 1950s. In particular, the debates around how Bombay and Hyderabad-Karnataka were viewed within Mysore, the Mysorean assumption that they were to take on leadership in the new state and the dominance of Mysorean bureaucracy have not been considered as serious matters of enquiry.
Activists from non-Mysore regions have repeatedly pointed out that their regions remain neglected and hence backward because of the ‘attitude’ the state and its bureaucracy have towards their regions. Rather than dismissing this as simply an ‘attitude’ that can be changed with more funds and the announcement of more development boards and schemes, we need to understand how this has influenced the political imagination of development. The question for us all is to what extent the promise of inclusive development within the linguistic state has succeeded. If we are still debating the regional imbalance question 67 years later, perhaps it is time to pause and see why the linguistic state has not met its founding aspirations.
(The Kannada version of this article appeared in a special issue of the magazine Nyaya Patha.)
Swathi Shivanand is Assistant Professor at the Manipal Academy of Higher Education, Manipal. She is a founding member of the Khidki Collective. Views expressed here are the author’s own.
The article has been updated in response to additional inputs.