ABSTRACT
This chapter examines with the language-based imagined community and other competing imaginations during that period in Princely Mysore, which was not under direct colonial rule. Thus though there was a notion of a community called ‘India’ operating in Kannada literature, it was limited only to cultural nationalism and did not, at least in Princely Mysore region, translate into a political one. During the colonial situation in India, language-based identities took shape due to the activities of the colonial state, with missionaries in the area of print technology working with language elites, trained in European model of education, chipping in. Some of these identities were competing with the triumphant anti-colonial nationalism as well as language-based nationalism during the colonial days for hegemony but could not succeed in achieving it. Certain pre-colonial communities like the Lingayats were trying to reshape the community in the context of modernity.
