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The Tragic Tale of the ‘Gandhi of the South’

ByRoopa Pai
Aug 01, 2023 01:20 PM IST

The column talks about one of the first recruits for the Non-Cooperation movement from Karnataka, a38-year-old lawyer Karnad Sadashiva Rao, the scion of a prosperous family of professionals from Mangaluru

Mahatma Gandhi launched the Non-Cooperation Movement, one of his first experiments with large-scale satyagraha, not in August but on the fourth day of September, 1920, but Independence Day month feels like a good time to bring it up. Not the Movement itself, monumental as it was, but its impact on young and restless Indians who, with their newly awakened nationalistic instincts frustrated by the Rowlatt Act of 1919 (which authorised the police to arrest suspected ‘terrorists’ without reason and imprison them without trial) and their anger stoked by the massacre at Jallianwala Bagh only a month later, were desperately looking for an organised revolt to pour their energies into.

A 38-year-old lawyer Karnad Sadashiva Rao, the scion of a prosperous family of professionals from Mangaluru was one of the first recruits for the non-cooperation movement from Karnataka.
A 38-year-old lawyer Karnad Sadashiva Rao, the scion of a prosperous family of professionals from Mangaluru was one of the first recruits for the non-cooperation movement from Karnataka.

The Non-Cooperation Movement, and its simple brief – a non-violent withdrawal of Indian labour from British-run enterprise – was just such a revolt. One of its very first recruits from Karnataka was38-year-old lawyer Karnad Sadashiva Rao, the scion of a prosperous family of professionals from Mangaluru. By the time of his tragic, untimely death 17 years later, he had contributed so much to the nationalist cause in his theatre of work that he was hailed as the ‘Gandhi of the South’.

As a boy, Sadashiva Rao was generous to a fault. Much to his lawyer father Ramachandra Rao’s annoyance, he often gave away his textbooks and pens to classmates who could not afford them. On her part, his mother,Radhabai, quietly nurtured that unselfish spirit, which he would deploy, often to his detriment, throughout his life.

After graduating from Presidency College, Madras, Sadashiva Rao got a degree in law from Bombay University before returning home to begin his legal practice. All that fell by the wayside, however, as he plunged into the thick of the nationalist movement, building the Congress Party in the state, travelling from village to village to spread the gospel of Gandhiji’s Sarvodaya – the social and economic development of a community as a whole – and creating awareness, at the grassroots level, of Swaraj or self-governance.

Keen to walk the Sarvodaya talk, he founded, with his wife Shantabai, the Mahila Sabha, which worked to rehabilitate widows not only by teaching them vocational skills but also organising their remarriages whenever possible, much to the disapproval of Mangaluru’s conservative community. Not that Sadashiva Rao would let that kind of thing faze him – soon after, he was setting up community kitchens for Dalits outside the very temples that would not admit them. A great believer in holistic education, he also set up a school called ‘Tilak Vidyalaya’ in his own house, where Hindi, spinning, weaving, and handicrafts were taught to keen students, age and caste no bar.

Tragedy struck in 1923, when Sadashiva Rao lost two of his children and his loyal helpmeet Shantabai in quick succession. Distraught, he headed to Sabarmati Ashram for succour and sanctuary, but had to rush back to Mangaluru soon after to set up relief camps, from his own funds, for victims of a terrible flood that had ravaged it. His many stints in prison, where he refused mosquito nets because not all prisoners were entitled to one, weakened his health considerably.

On 9 January 1937, right after he had attended the 1936 Congress Session at Faizpur, where he had uncomplainingly slept in a damp, chilly cottage, Sadashiva Rao, whom the towering Kannada litterateur Shivarama Karanth admiringly called ‘Dharmaraj’ – the king of righteousness, passed on, only 56.

In a strange twist of irony, one of Bengaluru’s most upmarket neighbourhoods – Sadashivanagar – is named after this great philanthropist, whose own considerable inheritance was so diminished at the time of his death that there wasn’t even enough left to cover the funeral rites.

(Roopa Pai is a writer who has carried on a longtime love affair with her hometown Bengaluru)

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