A Prakasam village called Thimmasamudram

Thimmasamudram, a village in the Prakasam district of coastal Andhra Pradesh, is the kind of settlement that rarely draws the attention of the wider country. Fields, a tank, a cluster of houses, a few generations of families whose horizons ended at the nearest market town. It was here, on 15 June 1953, that Kambhampati Hari Babu was born to Venkateswarulu and Seethamma. At the moment of his birth the region still lay inside the old Madras State. The Telugu-speaking districts were reorganised into Andhra Pradesh only in 1956, and Prakasam district itself was carved out as a separate revenue unit as late as 1970. In one lifetime, then, the village saw the map around it redrawn twice over, and it eventually sent one of its own sons to two of the country's Raj Bhavans.

Very little of that future would have seemed likely in the 1950s. The Prakasam country is harder than the fertile deltas that lie to its north and south, drier, more dependent on an uncertain monsoon, historically a land of rain-fed farming, tobacco, quarry stone and seasonal migration in search of work. For a boy from such a place, formal education was the only dependable ladder, and Hari Babu climbed it with method. He moved north to Visakhapatnam, the port city on the Bay of Bengal that would become the fixed point of his adult life and the constituency that first sent him to Parliament.

The engineer who became a teacher

At Andhra University in Visakhapatnam he took a bachelor of technology degree in electronics and communication engineering. He did not stop there. He went on to a master of technology and then to a doctorate in the same discipline, completing the whole of his higher education at the one institution. It was an unusually thorough academic apprenticeship for a man who would spend his later decades in electoral politics, and something of it survived the transition: a habit of working from briefs and figures, a certain professorial patience, an instinct for structure over slogan.

He joined the faculty of the university that had trained him and taught there for the better part of two decades, rising to the position of associate professor. That career ended by his own decision rather than by superannuation. In 1993, at the age of forty, he took voluntary retirement from the university in order to give his whole working time to political organisation. It was a considerable gamble. The party he had attached himself to, the Bharatiya Janata Party, was then a marginal presence in Telugu politics, squeezed between a dominant Congress and the Telugu Desam Party founded a decade earlier.

Organiser, legislator, member of Parliament

Hari Babu's rise came through the machinery of the party rather than through inherited standing or wealth. He was brought into the Andhra Pradesh state executive committee of the BJP in 1991 and served on it until 1993. From 1993 until 2003 he held the far more demanding post of general secretary of the state unit, a full decade of touring districts, building booth committees and negotiating alliances at a time when the party's Telugu vote was thin and mostly urban.

Electoral success followed in 1999, when he won the Visakhapatnam-I seat in the Andhra Pradesh Legislative Assembly and served as a member of the House until 2004. In 2003 he was made the leader of the BJP group in the state legislature, an assignment that required a very small bench to hold a large government to account on the floor.

His national moment arrived in 2014, the year Andhra Pradesh was divided and Telangana became a separate state. Contesting from the reorganised Andhra Pradesh, he won the Visakhapatnam parliamentary constituency and took his seat in the sixteenth Lok Sabha, serving as its member from May 2014 to May 2019. In June of that same year he was additionally entrusted with the leadership of the state party as president of its Andhra Pradesh unit, a post he held until May 2018. Those were fraught years in Andhra politics, dominated by the consequences of bifurcation, the building of a new capital, the fate of the state's share of institutions and revenues, and the long argument over special category status.

Two Raj Bhavans

In July 2021 Hari Babu was appointed Governor of Mizoram, and he was sworn into office on 19 July of that year in Aizawl. Commentators in both regions noted the symbolism: he was the first Telugu speaker, and the first person from the reorganised Andhra Pradesh, to hold that constitutional office in the north-eastern state. Mizoram is a small hill state with a distinct political culture, a largely Christian population, autonomous district councils in its southern belt and a long international frontier. A governorship there is not a ceremonial retirement but a post that rewards patience, listening and cultural literacy. He remained in Mizoram until 2 January 2025.

The next day he took a second oath, this time in Bhubaneswar, becoming the twenty-eighth Governor of Odisha on 3 January 2025 in succession to Raghubar Das. In that capacity he is the constitutional head of a large eastern state, the authority who summons, prorogues and addresses its legislature, and the formal head of a number of its public institutions. It is an office that combines ceremony with a quiet reserve of constitutional responsibility, exercised most visibly at moments when the ordinary political process is under strain.

What the village can claim

Hari Babu is married to Kambhampati Jayasree. His public identity, though, has been built less on family than on a sequence of institutions: a village school, a state university, a party organisation, a legislature, a Parliament, and finally the constitutional office of Governor. It is a trajectory that belongs to a particular kind of post-independence Indian career, in which a technical education served as the passport out of a small agrarian settlement and public life supplied the second act.

For Thimmasamudram the significance is simple and durable. A village in a district better known for drought than for distinction produced a man who taught engineering to two decades of students and then represented a great port city in the national Parliament before serving as the constitutional head of two Indian states in different corners of the country. Villages seldom get monuments. What they get, occasionally, is a name that travels, and a reminder to the children still in their schools that the distance between a Prakasam field and a Raj Bhavan gate is not infinite.