Place · Nayaka hill fort · India
Chitradurga Fort
Also known as Chitradurga, Chitradurga (Nayaka)
Seven concentric walls of dressed granite blocks laid without mortar among natural boulder outcrops, so that the fortification and the geology are hard to tell apart. The Nayakas of Chitradurga held it from the sixteenth century and Haidar Ali took it in 1779, after two earlier attempts had failed.
- Date
- 16th century – 1779
- Function
- Military & resistance
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 14.233, 76.400
Worth knowing
The fort has a rainwater system of interconnected rock-cut tanks that never ran dry through any siege, which is why it held so long. Onake Obavva, the wife of a guard, is said to have killed Haidar's infiltrators one by one with a wooden pestle as they came through a rock cleft; the cleft is shown and she is a state icon.
Connections (2)
- CampaignBangalore Fort, Bengaluru
Chitradurga's seven mortarless granite walls among natural boulders resisted Haidar Ali twice before falling in 1779; Bengaluru's mud fort he rebuilt in stone himself from 1761 and Cornwallis stormed in 1791. Mysore's expansion is a sequence of Nayaka forts taken and then modernised, and the Company's conquest is the same sequence run again thirty years later.
- CampaignOnake Obavva
Onake Obavva's 1779 defence of the Chitradurga Fort against Hyder Ali of Mysore's siege took place at the Chitradurga Fort gate's narrow kindi (water-channel) opening, where she single-handedly killed over 50 Mysore soldiers with an onake (rice pounder) as they crawled through one by one. Her husband Mudda Hanuma was the fort's water-channel guard; the episode has become central to Karnataka's narrative of peasant women's heroism and is commemorated at the Chitradurga Fort's Obavvana Kindi memorial.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Chitradurga Fort”. Mysore Gazetteer, ed. C. Hayavadana Rao (1927), vol. V; Archaeological Survey of India, Bengaluru circle records.
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