Kannada gottu: Belonging in Bengaluru

Speaking the local language is asafety net for migrant workers in a linguistically-charged metropolis, but learning it in a classroom is not an option for many

Maitreyee Boruah

A file picture of a Kannada class conducted by a teacher under the aegis of the Kannada Development Authority in Bengaluru.

BENGALURU, Karnataka: Noor Ayesha, a 27-year-old teacher at a learning centre for migrant workers and their children in Bengaluru’s Thirumenahalli locality, steps into the tin-sheet classroom each morning, meticulously wipes the whiteboard clean and writes Kannada Kagunita, in a neat hand. 

Kannada Kagunita combines consonants and vowels in the Kannada script to form syllables. Following her instructions, students read in a chorus: Ka Kaa Ki Kee.... As they repeat the syllables, the fundamentals of Kannada sounds like a song, especially to a non-Kannada speaker, and a playful one at that capable of crossing the barriers of language.

In her three years as a teacher, Ayesha, a graduate, had prioritised teaching the Kannada Kagunita to students. “It is fundamental to reading and writing Kannada, the building blocks to form words. It is the best way to learn and speak Kannada,” she said.

It is however not the mother tongue of her 50-odd students aged between three-16 years. The students, children of informal migrant workers, attend classes in two batches; the morning batch for children aged between three and six years, while the evening one caters to the 10 to 16 age group.  

“The children speak mostly Bengali and Hindi at home. I teach them enough Kannada to be able to hold a conversation with a native speaker. Also, the younger kids will join formal school and Kannada is the medium of instruction in the government-run schools. I do not want them to feel lost and alienated among children who are fluent in Kannada,” she added. 

Noor Ayesha teaching her students to read aloud the Kannada syllables at the learning centre in Bengaluru's Thirumenahalli. Maitreyee Boruah/The Migration Story

The learning centre is run by Sangama, a Bengaluru-based NGO working with migrant labourers. Around 350 metres from the centre is a settlement of around 70 families who live in shelters made of plastic and cardboard; a few have tin roofs and plywood walls. It is home to a mixed population where residents speak Bengali, Hindi, Tamil, and Telugu. 

“It is mini-India,” said Shazia A, 35, a local activist who helps migrant workers access healthcare, education for children, and essential food items from public distribution outlets.

As much as Ayesha wants adult migrant workers to attend Kannada classes, most of them don’t owing to work. “They are waste collectors who work from morning to evening. After collecting waste, they segregate it into biodegradable and non-biodegradable components. They cannot miss work to learn a language,” said Shazia.

Shaikh Azizul, 30, is one such waste picker. He came to Bengaluru eight years ago from Munsirhat in Howrah, West Bengal. "Kannada swalpa swalpa barutte (I know a little bit of Kannada),” he said sitting on a mound of waste glass. He wants to speak fluent Kannada. “But where is the time? I work through the day to earn 400 rupees,” said Azizul.

Shaikh Azizul came to Bengaluru eight years ago and works as a waste picker. Maitreyee Boruah/The Migration 

Rubina Begum, 27, a fellow villager, chimed in, “I speak Bengali. I learnt Hindi before coming to Bengaluru three years ago. I did not know people spoke Kannada here.”

Rubina Begum, also a waste picker, is keen to learn Kannada Maitreyee Boruah/The Migration Story

Migrant workers and the language debate

Ayesha and Shazia observe that speaking Kannada is intricately linked with the safety of migrant workers, even as many of them unwittingly find themselves in the middle of a ‘brewing language war.’ In the last few years, India has witnessed several instances of strife centred on the language issue. The acrimony between speakers and non-speakers of local languages in States such as Maharashtra and Karnataka had at times turned violent. Migrant workers, most often non-speakers of the local language, find themselves vulnerable in such a scenario.

Language, noted experts, has always been a sensitive issue in a multilingual country, and the Central government’s purported measures to ‘impose’ Hindi across the country is perceived as a threat to regional languages by many States, especially in South India. According to the Census 2011, more than 19,500 mother tongues are spoken in the country.

Karnataka has an estimated 20 lakh migrant workers and about half of them live in Bengaluru, the State capital, engaged in its IT and real estate industries. The influx of migrant workers to Bengaluru over the decades has set off multiple incidents related to language. Dubbed as the ‘Hindi-Kannada row’, public spats often begin with the local people demanding a migrant speak in Kannada, or the migrant asking the local person to speak in Hindi. These incidents often unfold in public spaces. The 2025 directive of the State government mandates extensive use of Kannada in governance, business and education. Disputes stemming from the non-compliance to the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike rule mandating that commercial signboards have 60% of its text in Kannada are common.  

Sunil Kumar, 30, from Burmu village in Ranchi, Jharkhand, has been running a paan shop in Marathahalli in Bengaluru for seven years. He learned Kannada within two years of being in the city. “At least 400 customers visit my shop every day and most of them speak Kannada or Hindi. I talk to my Kannada patrons in the local language as I want them to feel comfortable and return to my shop. I picked up the language by constantly talking to people in Kannada,” said Kumar. He added that his Kannadiga friends helped him with the basic grammar and pronunciation of Kannada words. “Even if I am wrong at times, I am not afraid to speak the language. The intention matters to the local speakers,” he added.

Purushothama Bilimale, Kannada scholar and author told The Migration Story that blue-collar workers easily learn the language as they regularly interact with people. “But the white-collar workers, who spend most of their time inside offices, struggle,” he said.

Language as sentiment

Languages, observed Bilimale, have a sentimental value. “Every language is about local cultures, traditions and practices. To assimilate in a local milieu, a person should know the intermediate level of the language or dialect practiced in an area,” he said.

Bilimale, also the chairperson of the Kannada Development Authority (KDA), a government body entrusted to promote the language and ensure its widespread use, blamed State governments for not doing enough to teach local languages to migrant workers triggering the language debate. “Migration is a natural and constitutionally protected phenomenon. No one can prevent anyone from relocating for employment, education, love, or marriage. Bengaluru, the Silicon Valley of India, attracts significant investment, leading to an increased demand for workers and migrant workers,” said Bilimale.

Social activist R Kaleem Ullah told The Migration Story that linguistic struggles are complex and affects the least privileged the most. “It is not black and white,” said Ullah, 49, who has been working with migrants in the slums of Bengaluru for 25 years. Language strife coming out in the public often involve what he calls the ‘privileged migrants’.

“We all love Kannada. But no language can be learnt under the shadow of violence. It has to be taught with mohabbat (love),” he emphasized and observed that a poor migrant comes to Bengaluru desperate to earn money and feed children. “It is good if they manage to learn the language, but if they cannot, let love reign supreme. Do not attack a migrant worker for not knowing Kannada; a poor person cannot afford to learn Kannada in a classroom even if it is free as he/she has to work almost 14 hours a day to earn around 6,000 rupees a month,” he said. Several incidents of harassment, he noted, are faced by poor migrants such as ragpickers, domestic helps, and loaders. “Earlier, it was Tamil migrants; now, the Bengali-speaking migrants, especially Muslims, are attacked the most in Bengaluru. Poor migrants everywhere in the country are facing violence, eviction and food scarcity. They are almost invisible. All they want from the city is two square meals,” he said. 

Several pro-Kannada groups have been dubbed ‘militant’ for the propensity for violence in their bid to ‘safeguard local culture.’ KN Munirajagowdru, a member of the Karnataka Kannada Rakshana Vedika, a pro-Kannada group, told The Migration Story that violence of a few individuals did not define their cause. 

“We aim to preserve and promote the Kannada language and Karnataka’s rich cultural heritage. Our mission is to safeguard the linguistic rights of Kannada speakers, raise awareness about the importance of the language, and foster a sense of pride among Kannadigas,” he said and added that the group does not subscribe to violence and condemn those who resort to it. 

Munirajagowdru, however, has a question: “What is wrong with learning Kannada? Why is there so much resistance?”

He underscored that migrant workers would find themselves in a more advantageous position if they know the local language. “We cannot expect the local people to know Hindi or English when they interact with vegetable and milk vendors, and salespersons,” he said.

Learning Kannada

Kannada scholar Bilimale pointed out that the KDA holds free in-person Kannada Kalika (learning) classes based on a curriculum designed by him. At least 22 such centres are present across Bengaluru. Each class has 30 students and they are taught Kannada for 36 hours across three months. 

The course, said Bilimale, encourages students to listen to Kannada words. “We do not want to teach Kannada the traditional way where a teacher writes on the blackboard and gives lectures. In our classroom, students are active participants,” he said. To learn the intermediate level of Kannada, he added, students are taught to connect nouns with pronouns. “We also teach them verbless sentences as Kannada has many of those.” Such a student would know 40% of the language, he said. “Kannada is a very accommodating language as it lets words from other languages be part of it,” said Bilimale.

The scholar, however, admitted that the number of students from the marginalised section in the KDA classrooms was minuscule. “We need to expand and promote our classes among the working-class population.”

There is no dearth of innovative spaces online to learn Kannada. There are fun  exercises as well on social media where the language is taught through short videos, a word, an emotion or a sentence at a time. The first online attempt to teach migrant workers was by Kannada Gottilla in 2014. Anup Maiya, the founder member who is a software professional from Karnataka, began by teaching his friends and acquaintances Kannada over the phone. Later Maiya, along with 10 software professional friends, went on to start Kannada Gottilla. “Most of our classes are conducted over WhatsApp. The beginner’s course fee is 400 rupees. Corporate houses invite us to teach Kannada. We used to hold open houses earlier where anyone could come and attend classes for free,” said Arpit Kumar CP, operations and finance head at Kannada Gottilla. About 35,000 people, most of them officegoers and students, have been taught the language by Kannada Gottilla, he claimed.

Kannada gottilla means ‘I don’t know Kannada.’ Local people think the migrant population bandy the term to avoid learning Kannada. “Local people took it upon themselves to teach their migrant friends Kannada. So, now we encourage people to say Kannada gottu (I know Kannada),” said Nagasimha Rao, who runs the Chagaletti Children’s Library near Bengaluru. 

Children, the future

The migrant children studying at the Government Lower Primary School in Thirumenahalli, Bengaluru, have learned to speak Kannada. Maitreyee Boruah/The Migration Story

At the Government Lower Primary School, Thirumenahalli, Mahadeva C, headmaster, said at least 25 students were children of migrant workers. “They can all read, write and speak good Kannada. The medium of instruction is Kannada, and the children have shown great interest in learning the language. At home, they speak Bengali and Hindi,” he added.  

A 2021 study titled ‘Education and Nutrition among the Migrant Construction Workers’ Children—A Case Study of Bengaluru City’ observed a high preference for Kannada-medium education among the majority (56%) of respondents. A smaller percentage (12%) attended English-medium schools, while a still smaller group of children studied in Urdu and Tamil-medium schools. At least 87% of the children went to government schools. 

Six-year-old Anushka Ram, a class one student at the Thirumenahalli school, is from Jajuara in Muzaffarpur, Bihar, and is the daughter of daily wagers who live in a settlement close to school. “Namaskara (Hello). Hēgiddīya (How are you)?” she asks. Her friends burst into laughter, but soon respond with “Nanage Kannaḍa gottu (I know Kannada).”

Anushka Ram (centre), a student at the Government Lower Primary School in Thirumenahalli, with her two friends; she speaks Kannada at school and Hindi at home. Maitreyee Boruah/The Migration Story

Headmaster Mahadeva said, “I am proud of my children. They are our future.”

Child rights activist Nandini G works with the children of migrant workers in the informal settlements near KR Puram in Bengaluru. “All the children attend government-run Kannada medium schools where they learn the language. We conduct Kannada lessons for the adults once a week. Teaching a new language takes time, especially when they are illiterate.” Nandini, though, has picked up Bengali and Nepali from the migrant workers. “It is a two-way process,” she smiled.

With linguistic identities being examined threadbare, activist Ullah asserted the need to look at the big picture. If Bengaluru were to be the sky, he said, then there are 107 stars in it, which is the number of languages spoken in Bengaluru, the most in India. “That makes Bengaluru truly cosmopolitan. Kuvempu, the greatest Kannada poet, taught us to live in harmony with nature and each other. We should not destroy that beauty and richness by fighting over languages,” he said.

Maitreyee Boruah is an independent journalist who reports from Assam and Karnataka.