Journey
Mysore & Travancore
Two southern states that modernised early and were dealt with differently. Mysore under Haidar and Tipu built the first Indian navy and rocket artillery the Company had met and was conquered for it; Travancore beat a European fleet, surrendered its kingdom to its own deity, and survived as a protectorate.
Stops (8)
- Mārtānḍa Varma · Mārtānḍa Varma — the state assembled
He made Travancore out of a scatter of chieftaincies in the 1730s and 1740s, broke the Nair militia's hold on it, beat a Dutch Company force at Colachel, and then in 1750 surrendered the whole kingdom to Padmanabhaswamy and ruled as the deity's servant — the most unusual constitutional act in Indian history.
- Colachel · Colachel, 1741 — the Dutch defeat
Travancore's forces beat a Dutch East India Company detachment on the Kanyakumari coast and took its commander Eustachius De Lannoy prisoner — who was then employed to modernise the Travancore army and did it for thirty years. One of very few clear Asian victories over a European naval power in the period.
- Padmanābhapuram Palace · Padmanābhapuram — the timber palace
The Travancore seat, and the masterpiece of south Indian timber architecture: a complex of halls, corridors and courtyards in jackwood and teak, with a polished floor of egg white, lime, burnt coconut and river sand, and a council chamber whose windows are glazed with coloured mica.
- Padmanābhaswāmī, Thiruvananthapuram · Padmanābhaswāmī — the sovereign deity
The temple to which Marthanda Varma surrendered his kingdom, with Vishnu reclining eighteen feet on Ananta and six sealed vaults beneath — one of which was opened under Supreme Court supervision in 2011 and found to hold gold, gems and coin on a scale nobody had expected.
- Srirangapatna / Srirangapattana · Srīrangapatna — the island capital
An island in the Kaveri holding the Ranganatha temple, the Daria Daulat summer palace with its Pollilur murals, Tipu's mausoleum, and the walls the Company stormed in 1799 — a Vaishnava island shrine that became the fortress capital of a Muslim dynasty without the temple's worship stopping.
- Mysorean rocket artillery · The rockets
Iron-cased rockets fired from massed batteries and wheeled launchers, with a range of about two kilometres and five thousand men to serve them — the first metal-cylinder rocket artillery used in war anywhere. Seven hundred were taken to Woolwich in 1799, where Congreve reverse-engineered them.
- Ṭīpū Sultān · Ṭīpū Sultān — four wars
He fought the Company four times, built a navy and a state trading system, sent embassies to Istanbul, Paris and Kabul, and died on the breach at Seringapatam in 1799 rather than negotiate. He is also among the most contested figures in Indian public memory, and both records — the resistance and the persecutions — exist.
- Mysore Palace · Mysore Palace — the restored dynasty
The Wadiyars, displaced by Haidar Ali, were put back by the Company in 1799 as subsidiary rulers, and the palace as it stands is Henry Irwin's Indo-Saracenic rebuilding of 1912 after the wooden one burned — stained glass from Glasgow, cast-iron columns, and a Dasara procession that continues Vijayanagara's Mahanavami.