Nitte is a small settlement in Karkala taluk on the coastal plain of Karnataka, the sort of place that appears on district maps and nowhere else. It now carries a university, a medical academy, an engineering college and a hospital network, and the reason is a man who chose it as the place to spend his retirement and then refused to retire. Kowdoor Sadananda Hegde — born on 11 June 1909 in the nearby village of Kowdoor, in what was then South Canara district of the Madras Presidency — had already been a judge of the Supreme Court of India and the Speaker of the Lok Sabha by the time he turned his attention to Nitte. He gave the village the last decade of his life and, in doing so, changed what it is.

The Coast, and a Legal Education

Hegde grew up in the Tulu-speaking coastal belt, a region with a long tradition of sending its sons into law, banking and teaching. He was schooled at Karkala and Mangaluru, then went to Madras, taking a degree in economics at Presidency College and a law degree at the Government Law College. In 1936 he began practice at Karkala, a country town rather than a metropolitan bar, and later moved to Mangaluru, where he built the reputation that led to his appointment as Public Prosecutor of South Canara district in the late 1940s.

His first public office was political rather than judicial. He was elected to the Council of States — the Rajya Sabha — serving from 1952 to 1957, and in 1954 was part of the Indian delegation to the General Assembly of the United Nations. That combination of legislative and diplomatic experience early in his career distinguished him from most of the judges he would later sit alongside.

On the Bench

In August 1957 Hegde was appointed a judge of the Mysore High Court. Nine years later, in October 1966, he became the first Chief Justice of the newly constituted High Court of Delhi and Himachal Pradesh, an office he held until the middle of 1967. On 17 July 1967 he was elevated to the Supreme Court of India.

His six years there coincided with the most turbulent constitutional period in the republic's history — a running confrontation between Parliament's claim to amend the Constitution without limit and the court's insistence that some limits existed. The confrontation reached its climax in Kesavananda Bharati v. State of Kerala, argued before an unprecedented bench of thirteen judges and decided in April 1973. Hegde was one of the thirteen, and one of the narrow majority whose reasoning produced the basic structure doctrine: the principle that Parliament may amend the Constitution but may not destroy its essential framework. It is the single most consequential holding in Indian constitutional law, and it has held for more than five decades.

A Resignation on Principle

The consequences arrived within days. Immediately after the judgment, the government appointed A. N. Ray as Chief Justice of India, passing over three judges senior to him — Hegde among them — all of whom had ruled against the government's position on parliamentary power. The supersession was widely read as retaliation, and it broke the convention that seniority governed the appointment. Hegde resigned rather than serve under a junior colleague elevated in those circumstances, as did the other two superseded judges. He stepped away from the bench on 30 April 1973. The episode became one of the defining moments in the history of judicial independence in India, and the reason his name is invoked in that debate to this day.

Speaker of the House

He was not finished with public life. In the general election of 1977, held after the Emergency was lifted, Hegde contested the Bangalore South seat on a Janata Party ticket and won. On 21 July 1977 he was elected Speaker of the Lok Sabha, holding the chair until 21 January 1980 through one of the most unruly and consequential parliaments the country has known — a period of coalition collapse, government instability and bitter recrimination over the Emergency years. Presiding over that House required a temperament that few possessed. Afterwards he joined the Bharatiya Janata Party when it was founded in 1980 and served for a time as one of its vice-presidents.

Back to the Village

What he did next is the part his own district remembers best. In 1979 he established the Nitte Education Trust, with the straightforward aim of putting real educational institutions into a rural area that had none. He settled at Nitte and worked at it. From that beginning grew a cluster of colleges and hospitals — institutions in engineering, medicine, dentistry, management and nursing across Nitte, Mangaluru and Bengaluru — several of which carry his name, including the K. S. Hegde Medical Academy. Thousands of students from coastal Karnataka have been educated in a network that exists because a retired Speaker decided that a village was worth building around.

Hegde died at Mangaluru on 24 May 1990, survived by his wife Meenakshi and their children. His son, N. Santosh Hegde, followed him onto the Supreme Court bench and later served as Solicitor General of India and as Lokayukta of Karnataka, where he became nationally known for his investigations into illegal mining. Between father and son, one coastal family supplied the Indian legal system with two of its more uncompromising figures.