Person · Travancore maharaja · India
Mārtānḍa Varma
The ruler who made Travancore out of a collection of chieftaincies in the 1730s and 1740s, broke the Nair militia's hold on the state, beat a Dutch East India Company force at Colachel in 1741, and in 1750 formally surrendered the kingdom to Padmanabhaswamy and ruled thereafter as the deity's servant.
- Date
- 1706–1758
- Function
- Authority & administration
- Confidence
- Not assessed
- Location
- 8.245, 77.327
Worth knowing
The Trippadidanam, the surrender of the state to the deity, is the most unusual constitutional act in Indian history: the temple became the sovereign and the king its dasa, which is why the Travancore royal family were the temple's trustees and why the question of who owns its vaults went to the Supreme Court in 2011.
About the place
Placed at Padmanabhapuram, the palace he ruled Travancore from before the capital moved to Thiruvananthapuram. He is buried at Thiruvananthapuram.
Connections (3)
- CampaignDevasahayam Pillai
Devasahayam Pillai was an official of Marthanda Varma's court who converted under Eustachius De Lannoy — the Dutch commander captured at Colachel and then employed to build the Travancore army — and was paraded on a buffalo, tortured and shot at Aralvaimozhi in 1752. The state that had just surrendered itself to a deity read a courtier's baptism as a transfer of allegiance, and the man who converted him was the army's own European commander.
- Imperial administration ofVaikom
Travancore after the Trippadidanam was constitutionally a temple state, and the consequences ran for two centuries: temple entry, the roads around shrines, and who could use them were matters of state law rather than of custom. The Vaikom satyagraha of 1924 and the Temple Entry Proclamation of 1936 are the end of that arrangement, and the proclamation was issued by a maharaja who was formally the deity's servant.
- CampaignColachel
Marthanda Varma had spent a decade building a paid standing army against his own nobility, and Colachel is what it was for. The Dutch had backed Kollam and Kayamkulam against him; after 1741 the Company could no longer install or protect a Malabar ruler, and the Treaty of Mavelikkara in 1753 reduced it to a pepper buyer on Travancore's terms.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Marthanda Varma”. Mysore and Travancore state records; Kate Brittlebank, Tipu Sultan’s Search for Legitimacy (1997); A. Sreedhara Menon, A Survey of Kerala History.
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