The village of Sangolli, set among the black-soil fields of Belagavi district in northern Karnataka, gave both a name and a temperament to one of the most stubborn soldiers ever to stand against the East India Company. Sangolli Rayanna was born in that village on 15 August 1798, into a family of ordinary cultivating stock, and he carried the village name with him for the whole of his short life. He never ruled a kingdom, never held a title of any grandeur, and left behind no palace or written testament. What he left instead was a memory so durable that two centuries later the people of the Belagavi countryside still speak of him as though he had walked their fields last season.

A soldier of Kittur

Rayanna came of age in the shadow of Kittur, the small but proud principality that lay a short ride from his village. Kittur was one of hundreds of Indian states then being drawn, one by one, into the widening administrative net of the Company. Rayanna entered its service and rose to become a senior military commander under Rani Kittur Chennamma, the queen whose refusal to submit to Company demands turned a minor succession dispute into a full confrontation. His authority was earned rather than inherited. He was valued for his knowledge of the terrain, his ability to move men quickly through broken country, and his standing among the cultivators and herders of the surrounding villages, who trusted him in a way they never trusted a distant court.

The crisis came in 1824. When the Company refused to recognise the queen's chosen heir and moved to take Kittur under its own control, Chennamma resisted, and Rayanna fought in the rebellion that followed. The rising is remembered for the boldness of its opening, when Kittur's defenders inflicted an early and humiliating reverse on the Company's forces. But the imbalance of resources told in the end. Kittur was overwhelmed, the queen was taken, and the state was absorbed. Rayanna himself was arrested, held, and then released — a decision the Company would have cause to regret. He returned to a countryside that had been changed: his own lands were largely confiscated, the old order was dismantled, and a new revenue administration began pressing on villages that had no way of paying what was asked.

The rising of 1829

For several years Rayanna lived under the new dispensation, and then chose to fight it. In 1829 he launched an insurgency across the Kittur country with an aim that was clear and openly declared: to place Shivalingappa, the boy Chennamma had adopted as her heir, on the throne from which the Company had barred him. It was a restoration in name, but in practice it became something broader — a rebellion of the countryside itself.

His method was the one available to a commander without an army or a treasury. He avoided pitched battle and struck instead at the machinery of the new administration: Company offices and administrative buildings, detachments of British troops in the field, and the local treasuries where revenue collected from the villages was held. He funded the campaign by levying contributions on landlords and by taking what he found in the treasuries he raided. His recruits were drawn overwhelmingly from the peasantry, men whose grievance against Company taxation was immediate and personal; the campaign was fed by their food, hidden by their silence, and guided by their knowledge of every ravine and cattle track in the district. Among his allies was Gajaveera, a leader of the Siddi community, whose support widened the rebellion beyond any single caste or village network.

For the better part of two years the insurgency held. It could not be defeated in open combat because it never offered open combat, and it could not be starved out because the villages that sheltered it were the very people the Company needed to govern. In the end it was broken not by force but by betrayal and stratagem. In April 1830 Rayanna was captured, and Shivalingappa was taken with him.

Nandagad

Rayanna was tried and sentenced to death. On 26 January 1831, near Nandagad in Belagavi district, he was hanged from a banyan tree. He was thirty-three years old. The execution was meant as a demonstration, staged in the open so that the surrounding villages would understand what resistance cost.

What happened afterwards turned the demonstration inside out. An associate is said to have planted a banyan sapling on his grave. That sapling grew, and it stands to this day — a living marker of a man the Company had intended to erase. A stambha, a memorial pillar, was later raised at the site, and Nandagad became a place of pilgrimage for people who came not to mourn a defeat but to salute a refusal.

The long afterlife

Rayanna's memory survived first in the least official way possible: in song. Ballads carried his story through the villages of the Belagavi country for generations before any historian or official body took an interest, and much of what is still felt about him — the loyalty, the flair, the refusal to accept that a treaty could extinguish a homeland — comes down through that oral tradition rather than through archives.

Formal recognition followed much later. Kannada cinema turned to him twice, in the 1967 film Kranthiveera Sangolli Rayanna and again in the large-scale 2012 production Krantiveera Sangolli Rayanna, directed by Naganna with Darshan in the title role, which introduced him to an audience far beyond Karnataka. A bronze equestrian statue stands near Bengaluru City railway station, showing him mounted and in motion, and in 2015 the station itself was renamed Krantiveera Sangolli Rayanna Bengaluru Junction — so that his name is now spoken, unremarkably and constantly, by travellers who may know nothing of him at all.

That is a fitting outcome for a man whose strength was always the ordinary countryside. Rayanna belongs to the long line of local commanders who resisted the Company's expansion in the decades before the great rising of 1857, and who are too often remembered only as a prelude to it. His campaign was not a prelude. It was a village soldier's decision that a confiscated homeland was worth his life, taken with full knowledge of the arithmetic, and it is that decision — more than any battle he won or lost — that Sangolli still keeps.