Pazhassi Raja

Kerala Varma, known to history as Pazhassi Raja, was born on January 3, 1753, in the Kannur region of northern Malabar, into the Padinjare Kovilakam (western branch) of the ruling house of Kottayam, a small kingdom in the hilly interior of present day Kerala ^[1]. The family seat at Pazhassi gave him the name by which he became famous. Like other Malabar royal lineages, the Kottayam family followed the matrilineal system of inheritance, under which succession passed through the female line and authority was shared among senior male members of the house ^[2].

His youth coincided with a period of upheaval in Malabar. From 1766 the armies of Hyder Ali of Mysore repeatedly invaded the region, driving many chieftains and members of royal families into exile in Travancore. Kerala Varma chose to remain, and while still a young man he took a leading part in organising local resistance to the Mysorean occupation from the forested country along the Wayanad border ^[1]. This early experience of irregular warfare in difficult terrain shaped the methods he would later use against a far stronger enemy.

During the long struggle against Mysore, the young prince emerged as the effective leader of Kottayam. British records of the period treat him as the principal figure of the kingdom, since senior members of the family had fled south ^[2]. In these years he cooperated with the English East India Company, which was itself at war with Mysore, and Company officers supplied him with encouragement and some material support against the common enemy ^[3].

The relationship changed abruptly after 1792, when the Treaty of Seringapatam ended the Third Anglo-Mysore War and Tipu Sultan ceded Malabar to the Company. Instead of restoring the old rulers, the Company treated Malabar as conquered territory and imposed a revenue settlement of its own design. In Kottayam it passed over Pazhassi Raja and made his uncle, Vira Varma, the instrument for collecting an assessment that local cultivators regarded as ruinous ^[1]. Pazhassi Raja protested that the demands were oppressive and that the Company had broken faith with the family that had fought beside it. When petitions failed, he forbade the collection of revenue in Kottayam, and in 1795 he moved beyond protest into open defiance ^[3].

The first phase of the conflict, often called the Cotiote War in Company records, began in 1793 to 1796 with obstruction and escalated into armed confrontation ^[3]. In 1796 Company troops raided the Pazhassi palace, and the Raja withdrew into the Wayanad hills, from where he organised attacks on detachments and supply lines. His fighters, drawn from Nair militiamen and from the Kurichiya and Kurumba communities of the forests, knew the passes and monsoon tracks far better than the sepoy columns sent against them ^[4].

The campaign went badly for the Company. In 1797 a substantial force moving through the Periya pass was ambushed and cut to pieces, one of the more serious reverses suffered by Company arms in southern India during that decade ^[1]. With a renewed war against Tipu Sultan looming, the Company chose negotiation. A settlement in 1797 restored a measure of the Raja's position and suspended the hated revenue demands, and for a few years an uneasy peace held in Kottayam ^[3].

Peace collapsed over Wayanad. After Tipu Sultan's death at Seringapatam in 1799, the Company claimed the plateau as part of its share of the Mysorean territories. Pazhassi Raja held that Wayanad belonged to Kottayam, and in 1800 he raised the country against the new claim ^[1]. This second war was harder and longer than the first. Arthur Wellesley, the future Duke of Wellington, directed operations in the region during 1800 to 1802 and ordered roads cut through the forests and posts established to pin down the insurgents, yet the rebellion persisted after his departure ^[4].

The fighting reached its widest extent in 1802, when rebel bands stormed the Company post at Panamaram fort in Wayanad and wiped out its garrison. Kurichiya archers under leaders such as Edachena Kunkan and Thalakkal Chanthu carried out the assault, an episode still commemorated in Kerala ^[4]. For the next three years the Raja's followers harassed Company detachments across Wayanad and Kottayam, provisioned by sympathetic villagers despite proclamations that threatened severe punishment for aiding him.

The Company answered with overwhelming resources. It poured troops and the newly organised Kolkar police into the hills, offered rewards for the capture of rebel leaders, and gradually seized the strongholds and supply sources on which the resistance depended ^[5]. By 1805 Thalakkal Chanthu had been captured and executed, key lieutenants were dead or dispersed, and the Raja was being hunted through the border forests with a shrinking band of followers.

The end came in the wet forests near Pulpally in Wayanad. On November 30, 1805, a Kolkar detachment guided by local informers and accompanied by Thomas Hervey Baber, the sub collector of Thalassery, surprised the Raja's small party beside a stream close to Mavila Thodu, near the frontier of Mysore ^[5]. Pazhassi Raja was killed in the exchange of fire. Accounts differ on the precise circumstances of his death, and a persistent Kerala tradition holds that he took his own life by swallowing a diamond ring rather than fall into enemy hands, though contemporary Company reports describe him as shot in the encounter ^[5].

Baber's own dispatches record something unusual for a colonial officer: open respect for a fallen enemy. He arranged for the body to be carried to Mananthavady and cremated with the honours due to a prince, writing that the Raja had been a man whose influence over the people was extraordinary ^[2]. With his death, organised resistance in Kottayam and Wayanad collapsed within months, and the Company completed its hold over Malabar.

Details of the Raja's private life are thinner than the record of his campaigns, as is common for Malabar figures of the eighteenth century. He married Kaitheri Makkam, a woman of the Kaitheri Nair family, and members of her household, including the fighter Kaitheri Ambu, served among his commanders ^[1]. Within the matrilineal Kottayam house he was not the senior most member, and his authority rested less on formal rank than on his standing with the people of the kingdom.

Contemporaries on both sides commented on that standing. Company correspondence complained repeatedly that ordinary cultivators fed, sheltered, and screened his men even under threat of reprisal, and Baber attributed the length of the rebellion to the veneration in which the Raja was held ^[2]. His willingness to arm and rely on Adivasi communities such as the Kurichiyas, who were usually excluded from political life, remains one of the most discussed Pazhassi Raja facts among historians of Kerala ^[4].

Anyone asking who was Pazhassi Raja in Kerala today receives a ready answer: Kerala Simham, the Lion of Kerala. Because his wars against the Company began in the 1790s, more than half a century before the uprising of 1857, he is frequently described as one of the earliest leaders of armed resistance to British power in India, and his campaigns are studied as an early example of sustained guerrilla warfare against a European colonial army ^[1].

His memory is kept in stone and print. His tomb at Mananthavady in Wayanad is a protected monument and place of pilgrimage, and the Pazhassi Raja Museum at Kozhikode, run by the Kerala State Archaeology Department, preserves material connected with the region's history ^[6]. The Pazhassi irrigation project on the Valapattanam river in Kannur carries his name, as do schools and colleges across north Kerala.

Writers and film makers have returned to his story repeatedly. The novelist Sardar K. M. Panikkar treated the rebellion in his historical fiction, and the 2009 Malayalam film Kerala Varma Pazhassi Raja, scripted by M. T. Vasudevan Nair with Mammootty in the title role, brought the Raja's biography to a national audience ^[7]. Among Pazhassi Raja achievements, historians single out his repeated humbling of Company columns, the alliance he forged across caste and community lines, and the example of resistance that later generations of Indian nationalists claimed as their own ^[4].