The Last Ward: How Karwar Got Its Name, and Its Language

Cross the Kali river bridge into Karwar from Goa and very little changes. The food is the same fish curry, the language in the street is the same Konkani, the churches have Portuguese names and the temples are to Goan goddesses. Only the number plates change. There is a reason for that, and it is in the name of the town.

Kade-wada: the ward at the end

Karwar is an anglicised spelling of Kadwad, which is Konkani: kade, last, and wada, ward or neighbourhood. The last ward — meaning the southernmost Konkani-speaking village on the coast. Under British rule it was spelt Carwar. The name is a description of a language boundary, written by the people on the far side of it.

Baithkol: the bay of safety

The older name for the place was Baithkhol, from the Arabic bait-e-kol — the bay of safety. Arab traders had been coming here for pepper, cardamom and muslin for centuries, and the harbour earned the name honestly: hills shelter it on the land side, islands on the sea side, the four-fathom line lies close in, and the tide moves only a metre and a half to two and a half metres. Karwar's working port is still called Baithkol, and the fishing boats still land there.

The town is younger than any of this

There was no Karwar town before 1857. There was a creek, an English trading factory six kilometres inland at Kadwad village — opened in 1638 by the Courteen Association, merged into the East India Company in 1649 — and a scatter of hamlets: Kodibag, Baad, Sunkeri, Shirwad, Binaga, Kajubag, Habbuwada. After the Rebellion of 1857 the British split Canara in two, sent the south to the Madras Presidency with its headquarters at Mangaluru, and built a new headquarters town for the north on this bay, attached to Bombay. It was laid out deliberately, like Panaji or Dharwad, which is why a town of this size has a grid and a sea wall.

Bombay, not Bengaluru

For the next ninety years Karwar looked north. Families here married into Bombay. Marathi-medium schools opened. Marathi films were released in the town and Marathi drama troupes from Bombay and Poona toured every year. Then in 1956 the states were redrawn on language, Goa was still Portuguese so no Konkani state was possible, and Konkani-speaking Karwar went into Mysore State.

What happened next is the part worth knowing. When Marathi speakers began to claim Konkani as a dialect of Marathi rather than a language, it was disputed here, hard — the Konkani conferences of the 1950s and 60s that helped establish Konkani as a language in its own right were held partly in this town. And it was Konkani-speaking leaders from Karwar, led by P. S. Kamat, who argued before the Mahajan Commission that Karwar belonged in Karnataka. Both Maharashtra and Goa have said otherwise since. The town settled the question itself, twice, in its own language.

What it means for a visitor

Practically: Kannada is the state language and is understood everywhere, Hindi and English will get you through, and what you will actually hear is Konkani. The kitchen follows the language — coconut and cashew in the gravy, ginger and turmeric, garlic only sometimes, and mackerel, sardine, seer, prawns, clams and crab off the boats at Baithkol. Karwar is not a version of Goa. It is the other end of the same place.