These seven districts had two political histories that never met. Five of them lay inside the Nizam's dominions, where the Indian National Congress had no standing, and where the Hyderabad State Congress was declared unlawful within weeks of being formed in 1938 and stayed banned until April 1946 — so organised nationalist politics existed here for barely a decade, and mostly in the form of satyagraha and arrest. Ballari, ceded to the Company in 1800, was an ordinary Madras Presidency district with ordinary Congress politics. The best-documented resistance on this plateau is older than either strand: the Bedar chiefship of Surapura in 1857–58, and the fighting at Koppal in June 1858. Named individual biographies from the Nizam's Kannada districts are thin in the record, and that thinness is a direct consequence of how briefly organised politics was permitted here.
The Surapura rising1857–1858
The Bedar chiefship of Surapura, on the Krishna in the present Yadgir district, acted against the East India Company during the rebellion in the north under its raja, Venkatappa Nayaka.
परिणाम: The chiefship was extinguished in 1858 and its raja did not survive the year.
The action at Koppal fortJune 1858
Bhaskar Rao Bhave of Nargund took Koppaldurg fort and killed the commander of the force sent against him. Mundargi Bhimarao and Hammige Kenchanagouda fought in the same rising.
परिणाम: Bhimarao and Kenchanagouda were killed at Koppal in June 1858 and the fort was retaken.
The Hyderabad State Congress satyagrahaOctober – December 1938
The Hyderabad State Congress, formed in 1938 and outlawed under a Public Safety Act of 6 September that year, formed a Committee of Action and began a satyagraha on 24 October. An Arya Samaj and Hindu Mahasabha satyagraha began the same day as a separate campaign.
परिणाम: The State Congress suspended its agitation on 24 December after about three hundred activists had courted arrest. The ban on the organisation was not lifted until April 1946.