364. ‘Kināra’ origin of ‘Canara’

The coastal districts of Karnataka were popularly known as “Canara districts” during Portuguese and British administrations in the region. The original Canara district was bifurcated into North Canara and South Canara. During the British regime, the North Canara was part of the Bombay Province and South Canara of Madras Province. The term Canara has been quite favourite with many locals as you can still come across name plate like Canara Motor Service, Canara Transport, Canara College, Canara Coffee or Canara Book shop etc.

Some of the people did not appreciate the term, “Canara” beginning with a foreign sounding C. They introduced the term “Kanara” that made “South Kanara” and “North Kanara” which were often abbreviated to “SK” and “DK” respectively. In the due course of time, nativity lovers, preferred to translate the terms “North Kanara” and “South Kanara” into chaste Kannada words such as “Uttara Kannada” and “Dakshina Kannada”respectively. With passage of time some administrators felt that Dakshina Kannada district is too large to handle and they carved out a separate Udupi district out of the former Dakshina Kannada district.

This is all are part of our history and heritage which most of are aware.

Now how the term Canara came into being?

Kināra districts

Many of us tend to believe that the term “Canara” means “Kanara” or “Kannada” because of the transformation of words along the passage of time. The general opinion is that Portuguese and the British because of their faulty pronunciation of Indian words and eventually corrupted the native words by introducing terms like Canara. While this opinion is partly true it has been found that the origin of Canara was not Kannada but less known Kināra.

Perooru Jāru

Tulu language activist and writer,    Perooru Jāru in his   booklet,    “Tulunaadu, notes that while Mysore Tiger Tippu Sultan annexed   the coastal districts to his kingdom, (during later part of 18^th Century CE) he referred   to the coastal region as the Kināra. The term Kināra in Hindi and Urdu means the coast.

However, the Portuguese contenders who were vying for capturing the coastal region were not comfortable with the pronunciation of the word Kinara which unfortunately was corrupted to stylish,   “ Canara”! 

Canarese
The Kannada language was printed in the form of a news paper and also as a dictionary for the first time by Basel Mission Press in the 'Canara' region at Mangaluru and accordingly it seems that the Britishers preferred the name of 'Canarese' for the Kannada language !

On the whole, this case should serve as an recent example of how place names and regional names change their original form, content and meaning as a result of cultural transitions as well as unintentional mistakes during the course of time.

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Kināra: a word analysis

The word ‘kināra’ is composed of two ancient root word units or morphemes. The prefix ki is an ancient   spatial indicative affix, denoting an area. Nāra is another ancient word which means water. Therefore, kināra is sea beach or river bank; in other words, an area by the side of a water body. The ancient word exists in many of the languages.

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