This is no act of Kannada pride

By: K M Chaitanya

The three men who carried out a violent attack on a Manipuri student last week were definitely not representing Kannadigas

​Last week’s attack by a mob on three students from Manipur has received widespread coverage in the media. It has been uniformly condemned both in the media and on social networks. I have seen the most severe condemnation of the incident by Kannada speakers on the internet. The mob that attacked the students claimed to be representatives of Kannada identity. This has proven to be a severe embarrassment to Kannada speakers in Bangalore.

I recall an incident that my friend Abhaya Simha, an award winning director of Kannada feature films, told me a few months ago. The incident is as bizarre as it can get. Abhaya Simha was talking to a friend and walking on the road in Rajarajeshwari Nagar. An auto rickshaw pulled up beside him.
The driver got out and physically attacked Simha. Simha asked the auto driver why he was being attacked. To this the driver replied that he is from a prominent group that fights to protect Kannadigas. Simha then retorted that he was a Kannadiga too. “But your Kannada does not belong to Bangalore,” replied his assailthant. Abhaya Simha hails from the coastal part of Karnataka. His dialect is different from what is prevalently spoken in Bangalore. Hence the attack. Simha says there were other auto drivers around. Some egged on the aggressive auto driver while the rest just stood looking. If this incident proves anything, these people who claim to represent Kannada have no idea what it means.
Mukhyamantri Chandru, the former Chairman of the Kannada development authority, recently rued that Kannadigas are now just 30 per cent of the population of Bangalore. But fact is that Kannadigas were never the majority in Bangalore. The city, from its inception had a large population of non-Kannada speakers. Even within Bangalore, there were areas where certain linguistic communities formed the majority.
One of the reasons for the city’s rapid growth was that the temperament of the Kannadigas in Bangalore was as cool as the city’s weather. Those who came to the city felt it was hospitable. Unlike many other cities, you could speak your language and still manage to communicate with the local populace.
I was born in this city. By the time I was 10, I could speak at least four languages. A few of my neighbours spoke Telugu. I loved their food. So I picked up Telugu. When Doordarshan first happened in Bangalore, most of the content was in Hindi. Besides, Hindi was compulsory in schools at that time. So I learned to speak, read and write Hindi. Being born a Kannadiga, I spoke the language. But in my school, which followed the CBSE syllabus then, Kannada was not taught as one of the languages. There was Sanskrit, there was English and there was Hindi. The school did not think it was important to include Kannada as one of the languages. So my father put me in a school that had state syllabus just so that Kannada was part of my syllabus. I first learnt to read and write Kannada in my eighth grade.
Which is perhaps why a Kiran Mazumdar Shaw, who has made this city her place of transaction, can tweet against renaming the city to its original name of Bengaluru. She does it with the confidence that the most she will face is some verbal ire on cyber space. It is when incidents like last week happen that most people, especially Kannadigas like me, begin to worry. Because whoever they are who carried out that attack, they were definitely not representing Kannadigas.