Resistance on this coast begins three centuries before the national movement and has nothing to do with it. The Chowta rulers of Ullal fought the Portuguese through the middle of the sixteenth century over who set the price of their pepper and rice. The next armed episode is the rising of 1837, three years after the East India Company deposed the raja of Kodagu, which drew cultivating households out of the ghat foothills at Sullia, Puttur, Bellare and Nandavara — a revolt of the interior, not of the port. Congress politics arrived only in the 1920s, and when it arrived it came bound up with social reform rather than separate from it. The people this coast remembers spent as much of their lives on schools, hostels and women's relief as on satyagraha, and two of the movement's best-known women were born in Mangalore.
The Ullal engagements with the Portuguese1555–1570s
A sequence of attacks on and by the Chowta rulers of Ullal after they refused Portuguese tribute and terms of trade. Portuguese accounts record an action in 1555, the plundering of Mangalore in 1557, and a battle in 1568 in which their commander João Peixoto was killed and prisoners were taken.
परिणाम: Ullal was eventually taken and its ruler imprisoned. The episode is carried in Yakshagana and folk song far more fully than in any archive, and the two should not be read as the same source.
The rising of 18371837
Three years after the annexation of Kodagu, Gowda, Bunt, Kudiya and other households from Amara Sullia, Bellare, Puttur, Nandavara and the Kodagu border country took up arms against the East India Company and moved down from the ghat foothills. Guddemane Appaiah Gowda is the leader most consistently named.
परिणाम: The rising was put down by Company troops. It is remembered on this coast as the Amara Sulliada Swatantrya Sangrama and belongs equally to the record of Kodagu.
The Depressed Classes Mission and the Panchama schoolsfrom 1897
Kudmul Ranga Rao founded the Depressed Classes Mission at Mangalore in 1897 and opened schools for children of the depressed classes at Kankanadi, Bannanje, Mulki, Udupi, Attavara and elsewhere, providing a midday meal and a daily allowance to families so that children could be spared from work.
परिणाम: The schools became the model most often cited for this kind of work in the south, and Gandhi referred to Ranga Rao's example when he wrote about it.