150 Rupees 150th Birth Anniversary of Kavi Muddana

Kavi Muddana — full name Muddana Venkataramaiah — was a 19th-century Kannada poet best known for his work *Ramaashwamedha*, completed around 1895. He wrote in the Kannada literary tradition shaped by his mentor, the far more celebrated M. S. Putina, and remained somewhat in that shadow during his lifetime. India's commemorative rupee program has issued hundreds of portrait coins since the 1960s, and regional literary figures increasingly appeared in that catalog from the 1990s onward as state governments lobbied New Delhi for recognition of vernacular cultural heritage.