The Battle of Arni

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I suppose I should introduce myself, though truly, you’ve been using me for centuries without ever asking. I am Carnatic—yes, the one you keep invoking in music halls, war histories, and the occasional overenthusiastic tourist brochure. I’m the ghost of a region that everyone claimed to know but no one really bothered to define properly. A sort of geographical hand-me-down.

I wasn’t born with a clear shape. In my early days I was simply a stretch of Tamil-speaking plains, temples, tanks, rice fields, and an Arcot governor who tried very hard to act like a Mughal even when everyone knew the Mughal Empire was coughing its last. Perso-Indian scribes called me Qarnātak. Europeans tried “Carnatique,” “Carnatic,” “Karnatic,” and every spelling mistake imaginable. They renamed me so often I sometimes forgot who I was supposed to be.

The locals, of course, ignored all this. They had better things to do—like farming, temple festivals, and inventing cuisines that the British would later fail to understand. No one in the villages woke up saying, “Ah yes, how lovely to be a proud inhabitant of the Carnatic today.” I was a bureaucratic nickname, a colonial pet-name, a label used mostly by people with maps, armies, or trade accounts. But names, like unwanted relatives, have a habit of sticking around.

My moment of loud relevance arrived in the mid-18th century, when Europeans decided to use me as their personal boxing ring. The French whispered sweet imperial nothings in Pondicherry. The British in Madras whispered louder because they were bad at subtlety. The Nawab’s court in Arcot tried to maintain dignity while becoming a magnet for European ambition. Everything tangled into one long melodrama with myself as the backdrop.

Then came 3 December 1751—the Battle of Arni. Oh, what a day. I felt like a stage actor forced into a fight scene I did not audition for. Clive, young, restless, and overconfident (a combination the British later perfected), dragged his men across thirty miles of my fields. Raju Sahib waited with cavalry, sepoys, French regulars, gunners, and the kind of determination that deserved a better ending.

My rice paddies, usually innocent, became tactical traps. Cannons boomed. Horses panicked. Sepoys marched in crisp lines even though half of them were probably internally questioning all life choices. But by evening Clive won. Unfortunately for me, that victory marked the beginning of the British treating me less like a thriving land and more like a strategic stepping stone. After Arni, I stopped being a region and became a résumé point in the rise of British India.

And yet Arni is dear to me. Infuriating, yes, but unforgettable. It stamped my name onto global history, even if the villagers remembered it mostly as “that time everything burned.”

Not long after, the British tidied me away into the Madras Presidency—administrators have a strange desire to make everything square-shaped. I became a faint label, a historical footnote. Madras grew bigger; I grew fainter. Then came a fresh tide—identity. Cultural, linguistic, political. Tamil rose with a voice stronger than any cannon that had fired at Arni. The region reorganised itself not around my old ghostly name but around living Tamil memory. Madras Presidency dissolved into something with heart: Tamil Nadu.

Meanwhile, to the west, Kannada lands reclaimed their ancient name and strutted forth as Karnataka. Imagine my surprise. For centuries, Europeans had confused me with those lands. Now they stood tall with their proper identity while I faded gracefully like an old actor whose scenes were cut in the final edit.

And yet—I am still here. That is why I’m speaking today.
On this anniversary of Arni, I’m inviting you to complete a task that history left unfinished:
Remember me not as a war trophy, but as a layered memory—Tamil, Deccan, colonial, postcolonial—all tangled together in one stubborn word.

I am not asking for resurrection. Just recognition.
If memory, identity, and political power are instruments, then I have been played like a veena in the hands of emperors, traders, nawabs, colonisers, and finally the people who reclaimed the land from all of them.

And through it all, I’ve developed a sense of humour. You have to, when your name ends up attached to both a classical music tradition and a set of wars caused by Europeans who couldn’t pronounce you.

So here I float, a mildly sarcastic ghost, amused that you remembered me at all.
Keep saying my name, and I’ll keep watching from the folds of your maps.

After all, a ghost only fades when forgotten. And you—you haven’t forgotten.