[25] THE ROLE OF LAWYERS FROM KARNATAKA IN INDIA'S FREEDOM STRUGGLE

How to Cite the Article: Shivakumar B M & Omkar P (2026). The Role of Lawyers from Karnataka in India's Freedom Struggle. International Journal of Multidisciplinary Research & Reviews, 5(7),352-362. https://doi.org/10.56815/ijmrr.v5i7.2026.352-362

Abstract

Karnataka's contribution to the Indian freedom movement is frequently narrated through the lens of mass leaders, poets, and revolutionaries, yet one of its most consequential features has been the sustained and multidimensional participation of the legal profession. This paper examines how lawyers trained in the courts of the Bombay Presidency, the Madras Presidency, and the princely State of Mysore emerged as organisers, orators, negotiators, and institution-builders of the national movement in the Karnataka region. Drawing on the careers of figures such as Gangadharrao Deshpande, S. Nijalingappa, Kadidal Manjappa, Nittoor Srinivasa Rau,
Karnad Sadashiva Rao, R. R. Diwakar, and several lesser-documented advocates of the Bombay-Karnataka, Hyderabad-Karnataka, and Mysore regions, the paper argues that lawyers occupied a distinctive structural position: trained in colonial law yet increasingly disillusioned with colonial governance, articulate in both English and Kannada, and possessed of the organisational skills required to build the Congress apparatus at the district and taluk level. The study traces their role across the Swadeshi movement, the Home Rule agitation, Non-Cooperation, Civil Disobedience, the Quit India Movement, the unique struggle for the unification of Karnataka, and
the framing of the post-colonial constitutional order. It concludes that the willingness of Karnataka's lawyers to sacrifice lucrative practice, court arrest, and forfeit their sanads (licences to practise) was not incidental but central to converting scattered nationalist sentiment into an organised regional movement.