How coastal Karnataka was saffronised: The story of rise and rise of Hindu nationalism in syncretic South Kanara

Editor’s note: This is the opening essay of an 18-part series on the contemporary history of Hindutva in coastal Karnataka. The series features interviews, videos, archival material and oral histories gathered over a period of four months. 

Read other articles of the series here

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For more than three decades now, South Kanara has gained a reputation as the Sangh Parivar’s laboratory. People unfamiliar with this region of coastal Karnataka believe it is responsible for the growth of radical right-wing organisations like Hindu Yuva Sene, Bajrang Dal and Ram Sene, which propagate a form of divisive, hate-fuelled politics , using love jihad and gauraksha as instruments of coercion. These people are wrong. And theirs is a simplistic view of a multi-layered culture whose contemporary history, especially one that saw dramatic transformation beginning the 1980s, has never been formally recorded .

To understand this stereotyping it is important to trace the beginnings of Hindu Nationalism in South Kanara.

The story opens in the 1800s when the future vanguards of Hindutva in the region — the Saraswat Brahmins — organised themselves as a group that for the first time in the history of the coast carried the word Hindu as its label. This mobilisation did not seek the othering of the region’s Muslims, as it does today. Instead, it was a response to the Basel Mission, which the Brahmins saw as an invidious conversionary force in South Kanara. It is also pertinent to contrast the region’s indigenous practices with cultural ideas introduced to the coast by various political forces following Independence.

And to do this, we must focus on a stretch of coastline from Kasargod in Kerala to Kundapur, 90km to the north of Mangaluru. That is what this 18-part series on the saffronisation of the region sets out to do. It was assembled following four months of interviews, the study of recorded and oral history, sifting through local news reports and examining regional political forces, and cultural and religious practices.

South Kanara is a thicket of religions , oral traditions , and cultural practices. Of the five languages that are common here — Tulu, Beary, Konkani, Kannada and Koraga — three are mostly unheard of outside the state. For the rest of the country, religion in this part of India mostly means the powerful mathas of Udupi or the Manjunatha temple at Dharamasthala. But very few people who speak of the coast pay importance to homegrown practices like Deiva worship (also referred to as Bhuta Aradhane) — the deification of ancestors, which is vital to three-quarters of its population.

Even fewer people have understood that it is crucial to study these traditions to determine the role played by hardline Hindutva here. This tug of two cultures — one indigenous and the other imported — is central to the making of the region’s identity, and constitutes the spine of this series.

The stories that give south Kanara’s society its structure begin with the oral narratives , or Paddanas. They speak of Tulu society’s feudal practices, caste-driven hierarchies, and the importance of agriculture to the region. This last aspect of Paddana tradition tells us why and how Hindutva entered this region: after Independence, raita sanghas (farmer organisations) held elaborate agitations seeking ‘land for the tenant’ — it led to the Karnataka Land Reforms (Amendment) Act of 1974 which broke the traditional landholding patterns to the extent that smaller landlords emerged; this brought in money, strengthening smaller communities; although opportunities in the area remained marginal, causing a flow of migrants to Mumbai and the UAE.

The agrarian nature of the region was crippled. This also meant that Deiva Aradhane, in which everybody from the village took part, lost its primacy. Deiva Saanas, where people went to worship, was neglected as the 70s saw a drop in cash flow. The practice of Deiva Aradhane was itself dismissed as barbaric and regressive.

A vacuum was created in the region — no clear political direction was evident, which resulted in a crippling identity crisis. During this period, a national programme of re-building the Ram Mandir in Ayodhya , spearheaded by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, turned into a dominant movement with the Bharatiya Janata Party lending its political weight to it. While most of the South Indian states remained unaffected by the politics of the Hindi belt, the VHP tramped into Karnataka on the ground laid by another Hindu-nationalist outfit, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. The man at the helm of both these organisations in the state was Vishwesha Teertha Swamiji of Pejawar matha in Udupi .

The 80s witnessed these new forces disrupting non-Brahmin sects in coastal Karnataka. One of the most successful methods employed was to capture spaces common to non-Brahmins, like Deiva Sanas and youth clubs. Narrative traditions were the next target. This was a far easier task, considering much of the region’s history was transmitted orally, a custom that stood little chance against the printed word.

Meanwhile, consolidation of castes within the region provided sinew to this movement; groups that had traditionally dominated and skirmished with other clusters within South Kanara’s social hierarchy banded together against a shared enemy, their efforts funded by remittances from an entire generation of locals who had travelled to the ‘Gulf countries’ in search of work. Brahmin priests took the place of local preachers. Bhutas became incarnations of Shiva and Vishnu. National gods turned primary, and local deities secondary. A babel of communities was syncretised as political Hindu.

The three organisations that marshalled this movement into place — VHP, Bajrang Dal and Hindu Yuva Sene — adopted a strategy that had succeeded brilliantly in other parts of the country; the introduction of an enemy from within the region, which, in South Kanara, were the Muslim Bearys, a merchant community that has thrived in coastal Karnataka for more than fifteen centuries. To aid them in these operations , several schemes were devised. Of them, love jihad and gauraksha would lend the template for a national franchise.

Fissures were quick to develop: Muslims who took part in various village-level activities, like Deiva Aradhane and temple fairs, began to withdraw from such celebrations. Dargahs no longer attracted an inter-faith audience. Resistance followed: the period between 1993-2006 saw the growth of a movement from within the Muslim community. Organisations like Karnataka Forum for Dignity, which many Muslims claim added to the polarisation, emerged. The KFD started off as an organisation to work for Muslims being illegally arrested and victimised by these activities but once it transformed into Popular Front of India, it began to mirror the Sangh by taking to violence and policing Muslim women .

South Kanara was propelled into the national consciousness, and infamy: Hindu vigilante groups carried out public attacks against Muslims suspected of smuggling cows, churches were vandalised ; women, both Hindu and Muslim, became unwitting subjects of male “protectionism” . Outsider-insider, alien-native, enemy-ally — gripped South Kanara as the dominant binaries.

And yet, none of this offers a true picture of this swathe of Karnataka. It only makes apparent that no formal record of South Kanara acknowledges the extent to which cultural beliefs and practices flow back and forth between its various communities, or the doggedness with which shared the tradition and inter-faith conventions continue to mark their lives. Where Bobbariya , a Beary deiva, is seen as the protector of the sea-faring moghaveeras, or where many faithful, spanning religions, make vows and pray to Hazrath Saidani Bibi Sahiba at her Dargah in Mangaluru.

This series records the region’s stubborn refusal to jettison its past, and political Hindutva’s obstinate determination to erase coastal Karnataka’s primary identity. It only follows that to tell the story of one without accounting for the other would do a disservice to both.