Place · Nayaka capital towns · India
Keladi & Ikkeri
The 16th-18th century Keladi and Ikkeri Nayaka kingdom in the Malnad region of Karnataka, a Vijayanagara successor state that controlled the pepper trade from the Western Ghats to the Kanara ports (Mangalore, Bhatkal, Honnavar, Karwar). The Keladi Chennamma (ruled 1671-1697) sheltered Shivaji's son Rajaram during his flight from Aurangzeb in 1690 and successfully resisted Mughal pressure for his handover — the only South Indian ruler to do so. The Rameshvara temple at Keladi (1500) and the Aghoreshvara temple at Ikkeri (1540) are the chief surviving structures. The kingdom fell to Hyder Ali's conquest in 1763. The Keladi Museum at Shimoga preserves the Nayaka archive.
- Function
- Authority & administration
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 14.250, 75.250
Connections (2)
- Trade routeMuziris / Pattanam
The Keladi Nayakas of the Malnad controlled the pepper of the western Ghats and the routes down to the Kanara ports, and fought the Portuguese over the terms on which it could be bought — a successor state of Vijayanagara whose whole strategic position rested on one commodity. It is the same trade that had made Muziris a thousand years earlier, moved north along the coast as the older harbours silted.
- Succession in timeBanavasi
Banavasi and Ikkeri are forty kilometres apart in the Malnad and eleven hundred years apart in time: the Kadamba capital where written Kannada begins, and the Keladi Nayaka seat that outlived Vijayanagara. Both were chosen for the same reason — a defensible forest basin above the Kanara ghats — and the second controlled the pepper trade the first had only taxed.
On these journeys
Sources
History of India — Wikipedia
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