Kannadiga

The Kannadiga are the Dravidian people of the Karnataka plateau; their Kannada tongue has roughly fifteen hundred years of unbroken literary history. The first Kannada kingdoms were the Kadambas and Western Gangas, who raised Kannada to an administrative language; the Halmidi inscription of 450 is its earliest known record, and the modern script descends from fifth-century Kadamba script.

Jain poets flourished under the Rashtrakutas from the eighth to tenth centuries, and in the twelfth century Basava led his Virashaiva movement. The Chalukyas and Hoysalas carried this culture across the Deccan.

In 1336 Harihara and Bukka founded the Vijayanagara Empire, the age's greatest Kannada state, with its capital at Hampi, which Deccan sultanates sacked after Talikota in 1565. Afterwards the Keladi Nayakas held Ikkeri, the Wodeyar dynasty built Mysore, and Maratha armies overran the north after 1674. Hyder Ali and his son Tipu made Mysore a major power, until Tipu fell in 1799 and the Kannada lands were divided among the British, Mysore and Hyderabad.