Making history : Karnataka's people and their past Volume 2

255 Pages·2004·5.292 MB·English

by  Saketh Rajan (Saki)

MAKING HISTORY
Karnataka's People and their Past
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1. Raji in the rain at the Nagar fort

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This book

is dedicated to the fond memory of

Comrade HR Rajeshwari

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MAKING HISTORY

Karnataka’s People and their Past

Volume II

Colonial Shock, Armed Struggle
(1800-1857)

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Vimukthi Prakashana
Bangalore
2004

First Edition
1,000 Copies
2004

Vimukthi Prakashana

Price: Rs 150

This book outlines the development of Karnataka history from the time of British conquest of Karnataka in 1799
till the War of Independence in 1857.
On what basis did the British partition Karnataka? What was the content of the Subsidiary Treaties the British
signed with different kings? How did the British consolidate their rule without upsetting the social order of
feudalism? Why did the local landlords support British rule? Did the British check or did they contribute to caste
oppression? What was the nature of the new state the British established? What was the impact of British
colonialism on the broad masses? What was the political response of the masses of Karnataka to British
domination? How and why did the people conduct armed struggle to fight the British? What was the political thrust
of the peasant insurgencies that shook Karnataka during this period? Did Karnataka really show up prospects for a
bourgeois democratic revolution?
Basing on a wide range of primary and secondary sources this book makes an analytical narrative of all these and
many more questions. Contrary to biased history writing, it makes a comprehensive and objective presentation of
the people’s history of Karnataka, adopting the methodology of Historical Materialism.
This book is a sequel to the first volume, which traced Karnataka history from the first signs of human habitation
till the time of British conquest.
The third volume is to explore into the impact of British colonialism on Karnataka from 1858 to1947.

Copies available at:
Bellichukki Pustakalaya
Opposite Sheshadripuram Post Office
BANGALORE 560 020

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PREFACE
In the Preface to Volume I of Making History, it was said that this book had more than just
one author.
As Volume II prepares for print I am compelled to tell about one such author who remained
anonymous.
Such a revelation should have been a matter of joy. But the circumstances brim with
emotions of an opposite kind.
Raji, as she was known to those who were close to her, was killed by police on 20 March
2001 in the forest of Kothapalli in Vishakapatnam district of Andhra Pradesh. She was captured
that afternoon by a 20 member detachment of the Special Task Force, tortured for more than four
hours and finally shot from the back of her head.
There were two children who saw all of this from behind a bush. They were dumbfounded
by the barbarity. They could not eat for the next three days. But when they finally spoke, they
said one thing of her. It was remarkable. She had stood her ground. As she was mauled, this
soft-spoken woman in her forties was outrageously defiant. She hailed the revolution from her
dying lips.
Raji had passed her test as a revolutionary in flying red. She defied her assassins to live
beyond them.
The volumes of Making History are indebted to this coffee complexioned and short statured,
yet, abundantly tall and graceful heroine of the oppressed.
Raji has her modest place in the writing as well as in the making of history.
She was the first to lend her patient ear to the pages of the first and second volumes. As the
parts were written out, she would hear them read. It did not matter to her if it was late on a
wintry night. Or, if it was in the epicentre of a sultry summer’s afternoon. She would have her
senses glued. Then she would make her observations. Raise questions or pose her points. That
way she left her imprint on these pages. Noiselessly and unadvertised.
The production of Volume I owes a lot to her. Ugh! Drab office work. That is how many
would dismiss it. But she was perennially enthusiastic. She set the pages on the computer. She
doctored the viral infections and tailored the illustrations to precision. As the book rolled out of
the press and the jacket neatly tucked in its glistening sleeves, Raji had graduated as a DTP
beautician.
Volume II had caught her imagination. The armed struggles waged by the people of
Karnataka in the early decades of the nineteenth century were a point she would often have me
ponder about. We could not resist the contagion. We decided to relive these precious moments
from our popular past. We caught the bus to Nagar. There we saw what was left of the famous
fortress that served as a flash point for the historic Nagar peasant insurgency. A few months
later we squeezed some time for Nandagad. We spoke to the people about Sangolli Rayanna.
As we talked with the toilers, they gave us accounts, pointed about his escapades, guided us
around and treated us to food in their huts.
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Raji spotted the smouldering fire that burnt in their hearts.
I asked her if Rayanna kindled something deep inside them. She blew away decades of ash
with her warm breath. Then, pointing to the red glow of the embers, she said that new
generations of those very same masses were stirring to re-enact them across the forests and
plains of Nandagad and Nagar.
As I shook hands with her in January 2001, it was the last I saw of her. She was in olive
green. Her rucksack was firmly strapped onto her back. In it she had empty tapes, empty
notebooks and unexposed film. She carried no firearm. She was a non-combatant. Comrade
Rajeshwari held out her clenched fist in farewell.
There are two facts about the past and future of Indian history which the Kannada and
Telugu nations share among them. To unravel best the prospect of the bourgeois democratic
revolution, one has to venture into Karnataka’s past. In the period of Haidar and Tipu and in
their Kingdom of Mysore, the Indian high road to the old democratic revolution had been laid.
One could already catch a glimpse of the maturation of conditions, of an imminent storm against
the system of feudalism. Later in Nagar and around Nandagad the masses stormed those very
gates of heaven. They illustrated through popular war against feudalism and colonialism that
they desired democracy and liberation. These were simmering embers that Raji had deftly
picked up and placed in the first and second volumes of Making History.
But she aimed for more. She desired to relive the past only so as to enact the future. She
desired that it was not enough just to see the prospect of the bourgeois democratic revolution.
Her intellect was not insipid. She wanted to see and share the living popular experience of the
proletarian democratic revolution.
If Karnataka’s past demonstrated the possibility of the old democratic revolution, the
people’s war raging in Andhra Pradesh brilliantly lit up the prospect of the new democratic
revolution.
Raji had seen the past. She wanted to see the future. She chose to visit the villages of
Andhra Pradesh where new democratic people’s power was being forged. She wanted to study
it, record it and broadcast its prowess among the masses of Karnataka.
She interviewed scores of people. She recorded revolutionary songs. She made copious
notes of what she had read and heard. She took photographs of the oppressed adivasis and of
their hope, the young guerrilla fighters in green.
On March 20, she sat beneath a tree. She was pouring over her diaries. Shots rang out. She
hid in the thicket. But they got their filthy hands on her. Then it was short work. Bullets burnt
through her brains. Blood was on her cheek. It oozed from her mouth. She could not rise to
protect her notebooks. Raji rested on the forest floor like a carefree child. Her curls were
disheveled. They would remain unkempt forever.
Today she is in deep sleep.
Volume II of Making History is dedicated to her. But as this volume is read, the sleeping
Rajeshwari will awaken her readers. In her we catch a glimpse of the glorious past. But not just
that. She comprehensively epitomizes the future too. As the revolution rages across our land,
the fascist rulers and their state will discover more and more that the memories of the dead are
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not as easily erased from the hearts and minds of the living. That is what history—the history of
class struggle, is also about.
Raji learned this lesson well. She reminds us of it always, only because she generously gave
away the one most precious thing she had when it was asked of her—her pulsating life—for the
cause of the oppressed.

Saki
1 November 2002

{Note-Page numbers mentioned here not match with this format as this file is created by
joining all fragmented files of book format }

List of Tables

Table 1: Tax Free Lands in Bombay Karnatak 41
Table 2: A Select Sample of Inams Granted to Landlords of Bombay Karnatak 42
Table 3: Purnaiah’s Pillage of the Public Fund 69
Table 4: Issue of Inams and Jodi in the Mysore Kingdom from 1800-1831 71
Table 5: Amount Spent on the Management and Repair of Tanks (in Rupees) 75
Table 6: Takavi Loans to Ryots 77
Table 7: Number of Religious Institutions in 1801 and 1804 in the Mysore Kingdom 89
Table 8: Expenditures of the Mysore Kingdom towards Charitable Institutions 89

List of Figures

1. Raji in the rain at the Nagar fort1 viii
2. Map of Karnataka in India2 8
3. Map of India in 17973 10
4. Map of India in 18404 11
5. Map of India in 18575 12
6. Map of Tipu Sultan’s Mysore Kingdom after the Third Anticolonial War of 17926 16
7. Map of Tipu Sultan’s Mysore Kingdom before the Third Anticolonial War of 17927 17
8. Map of the Mysore Kingdom gifted to the Wodeyars of Mysore in 18008 18
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9. Map of the Mysore state as it was handed down to the Wodeyars by the British in
18009 19
10. Map of fragmented Karnataka in 185810 20
11. British colonialists with Indian landlord and bondsmen in attendance11 37
12. Map of river basins of Karnataka12 76
13. Map of districts under the control of Dhondia Waugh13 144
14. Fateh Haidar, Tipu Sultan’s eldest son14 147
15. Mohiuddin, Tipu Sultan’s fourth son15 148
16. Map of early resistance movements 1799-180016 155
17. Map showing anti-British struggles led by palegaras17 158
18. Kittur ruins18 162
19. Kittur ruins19 163
20. Sangolli Rayanna on horseback20 174
21. Map of some offensives carried out by Sangolli Rayanna’s forces21 175
22. Map of districts influenced by the guerrilla war led by Sangolli Rayanna22 176
23. Shrine at the spot where Sangolli Rayanna and his comrades were hanged23 181
24. Banyan at the grave of Sangolli Rayanna bearing ritual flags and festoons24 182
25. Map of districts influenced by the Nagar peasant war25 184
26. Map of the first campaign led by Annappa, Lt Col Rochfort and Lt Col Wolfe26 200
27. Map showing a select list of attacks made by guerrillas as reported by the different
Amildaries from 27 October 1831 to 8 January 183227 207
28. Entrance of the Nagara fortress28 212
29. Ruins of the palace in Nagara29 213
30. Map of districts influenced by the guerrilla war led by Kalyanaswamy30 226
31. Map of chief centres of peasant (koot) rebellion 1830-183131 228
32. Map of the chief centres of the rebellion of Kalyanaswamy 1834-183732 229
33. Map of South Canara district in 186033 230
34. Satellite imagery of forest vegetation in Karnataka34 236
35. Map of districts of Karnataka influenced by peasant guerrilla warfare from
1829-183735 239

Notes on List of Figures
1 Saki
2 mapsofindia.com
3 Shyam Bhat
4 ibid
5 ibid
6 tipusultan.org
7 based on ibid
8 ibid
9 mysoreonline.com
10 HS Gopal Rao
11 William Dent and his Brother, John and an Indian Landlord, Anand Narain, (circa 1790), by Arthur
William Devis
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12 karmic.in
13 Saki
14 tipusultan.org
15 ibid
16 Shyam Bhat
17 Saki
18 Saki
19 ibid
20 A contemporary paining at the shrine by the graveside of Sangolli Rayanna in Nandagad
21 Based on Appendix II
22 Saki
23 ibid
24 ibid
25 ibid
26 ibid
27 Based on Appendix III
28 ibid
29 ibid
30 ibid
31 Shyam Bhat
32 ibid
33 ibid
34 Ministry of Environment and Forests, Government of India, Forest Survey 1999
35 Saki

INTRODUCTION

Unlike its predecessor, Volume II of Making History tells of a brief period from our past.
It talks of little more than the first five decades of colonial conquest of Karnataka which shocked
the social formation into submission.
But it also pulverized historiography into dishing out stereotypical myths. It lit a halo
around the Rajas of Mysore who ascended the throne by dint of British conquest. “Benign”,
“enlightened”, “liberal”, “patriotic”, “philanthropic”… The hyperbole is unending. But Part I of
this volume will reveal from the very correspondence and statements of the Mysore royal family
and from an evaluation of the struggles of the time that they were no more than puffed up
puppets of the Raj. They were anything except what these epithets sought to present them as.
Amusing but true, they called themselves slavishly as the “sons of the Company”. History has
its way of taking ironic jibes.
The alliance between colonialism and feudalism as manifested in the Subsidiary Treaty
between the Raja of Mysore and the British was reflective of a wider and universal alliance
between the class of big landlords and British colonialism. The British, as this Volume will
reveal, were meticulous in forging such an alliance. This was no accident. Rather, it was
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