Marthanda Varma Defeated the Dutch East India Company at Colachel in 1741, Built a Drilled Army With Eustachius De Lannoy, Brought the Small Kingdoms of Southern Kerala Under Travancore and Dedicated It to Padmanabhaswamy in 1750

Colachel is a port town in Kanyakumari district of Tamil Nadu, about 68 km south of Thiruvananthapuram, and it is where Travancore’s army under Marthanda Varma defeated a Dutch East India Company force in 1741. According to the Kerala Legislative Assembly’s profile of the state, the Dutch “met with a crushing defeat at the hands of King Marthanda Varma of Travancore in 1741”. PTI reported that the Madras Regiment of the Indian Army commemorated the battle at the Colachel War Memorial on 31 July 2025, which it counted as the 284th anniversary.

Sources disagree on the date, on how large the fight was, and on how Eustachius De Lannoy, the Dutch officer who later commanded Travancore’s army, came into Travancore’s service. This article gives each version under its author’s name. They agree on the result and on what followed. Marthanda Varma, king from 1729 to 1758, brought the small principalities of southern Kerala under Travancore, and in January 1750 he made over the kingdom to the deity Sree Padmanabha and ruled it as the deity’s servant.

A king of 23 and the houses that opposed him

V. Nagam Aiya’s Travancore State Manual of 1906, a history written for the state’s government, says Marthanda Varma succeeded his uncle at 23 and took the throne in 1729. The Supreme Court’s judgment of 13 July 2020 gives his life as 1706 to 1758 and his reign as 1729 to 1758.

Aiya describes a kingdom with no organised departments and weak finances, where the heads of eight Nair houses, called the Ettuvittil Pillamars, and the local chiefs were “more or less independent” on their own estates. In the Kerala High Court’s 2011 judgment, as the Supreme Court reproduces it, the Pillamars and the Brahmins who managed the Padmanabhaswamy temple plotted to put the previous king’s son on the throne, and Marthanda Varma won the protracted fight that followed.

Why the Dutch came to a pepper coast

The Dutch East India Company bought pepper and cloth on the Malabar coast from its base at Cochin. Van Imhoff, the Dutch governor of Ceylon, visited Cochin in 1739 and reported to Batavia on 6 July. Aiya quotes the report: the king of Travancore had become so powerful that the other kings of the coast looked on him with jealousy and apprehension, and he deserved “some chastisement for his insolence”.

A. Galletti translated the Company’s Malabar records in 1911, and his notes follow the Dutch letters. The Company took up arms for the kings of Kayamkulam and Quilon, whom Travancore was attacking, and its first campaign ran from 18 October 1739 to 8 June 1740. The Dutch occupied Colachel in January 1741. Galletti, citing a secret letter to Batavia of 12 May 1741, gives the aim as taking the whole country from Colachel to Cape Comorin and making a Dutch province of it, “as it is the most beautiful district in Malabar and all the cloth places are there”.

Galletti puts the Company’s whole field force in May 1741 at 350 Europeans and 400 Malays, of whom only 400 to 500 could be used in the field. No reinforcements seem to have arrived that year, he adds, and the Company was also fighting a war in Java.

The battle as Travancore’s historians tell it

In Aiya’s telling, the Dutch landed at Tengapatnam, Cadiapatnam, Midalam and other places in the south while the Travancore army was in the north fighting Kayamkulam. The country between Colachel and Kottar fell to them without a fight, he says, and they prepared to take Padmanabhapuram, Marthanda Varma’s capital. The king reached it in time to stop that, raised a fresh regiment of Nayars, and was joined by his Dalawa, or chief minister, Rama Iyen, with the army from the north.

The battle came in the Malayalam month of Karkadagam in 916 M.E., which Aiya renders as 31 July 1741. Dutch troops retreated to their ships and left their fortifications and their dead. Travancore took 24 prisoners, 389 muskets, a few cannon and a large number of swords, and the Dutch fleet went back to Cochin.

The historian K. M. Panikkar dates the battle to 10 August 1741. In his account the Dutch had fortified Colachel, held the coast from Cape Comorin to that port and were advancing on Padmanabhapuram when Marthanda Varma attacked with a new army that included cavalry. P. C. Alexander’s 1946 history also begins the battle on 10 August, says the Travancore troops outnumbered the Dutch, and says the Dutch had no cavalry.

What the Dutch letters say

Two letters from Quilon, dated 15 August and 9 October 1741, are cited in Galletti’s notes. According to them, the Company’s small garrison at Colachel was attacked and surrendered on 7 August, after a red-hot ball set off a barrel of gunpowder and the fire burned the stockade and the whole rice supply. Galletti adds that this incident is the one Shungoony Menon and other Travancore historians present as the victory of Colachel.

On the outcome, the Dutch records match Travancore’s. Gollenesse, the Company’s commander on the Malabar coast, wrote in 1743 that his troops were losing men without reinforcement and were “forced to yield to the superior power of the enemy”, leaving him master of the field, in Galletti’s translation. Stavorinus, a Dutch naval officer who recorded the Company’s history at Cochin during a visit in the 1770s, says the troops were compelled to surrender their fortresses in Travancore and abandon the field. Adriaan Moens, governor of Malabar, called it in 1781 a ruinous war “in which the Company lost so many men and so much money”.

To Panikkar, Colachel was the first great blow struck at Dutch arms in Malabar, and he adds that, like Plassey, the fight itself was hardly a big battle.

De Lannoy: prisoner or deserter

Among the prisoners were two men of note, Aiya writes: Eustachius De Lannoy and a second officer he calls Donadi. Marthanda Varma gave both high military posts. De Lannoy became known in Travancore as the Valia Kappithan, the Great Captain. First he drilled a special regiment of sepoys, Aiya says, then built forts, magazines and an arsenal at Udayagiri, and reorganised the army on European lines. The army’s strength, in Aiya’s figure, rose to 50,000, which Galletti repeats with the words “said to have”. Panikkar, who calls the second prisoner a Frenchman named Doncaud, says De Lannoy was a Fleming taken with 23 other Europeans.

De Lannoy died in June 1777 at the age of 62 and was buried at Udayagiri. In Aiya’s translation, his tomb inscription says he served the king “for nearly thirty-seven years”.

The Dutch record tells it differently. Moens, in Galletti’s translation of his memoir, says Lanoy and Duyvenschot were sergeants in the Company’s service who could not rise further, saw less able men promoted over them, and went over to Travancore, “first the one and then the other”. Moens blames the desertion “as strongly as possible”. A secret letter to Batavia of 26 October 1741 reports that Travancore had made the deserter Sergeant Duyvenschot a general and that 300 to 400 of the Company’s men were in the enemy’s service. Galletti dates De Lannoy’s Travancore service from 1740 to 1777, a year before Colachel. Aiya and Panikkar place his capture at the battle and do not mention desertion.

The small kingdoms that became Travancore

Aiya’s Manual lists the states Marthanda Varma took. Attingal came by a treaty that Aiya says was inscribed on a silver plate. Quilon, Elayadathu, Kayamkulam, Ampalapuzha, Tekkumkur and Vadakkumkur followed after campaigns, and Aiya names De Lannoy among the commanders. Quilon’s annexation is dated 1742 and Kayamkulam’s 1746, after about three years of war. Cochin ceded the Karappuram tract in 1753, in Aiya’s account, and signed a treaty of friendship at Mavelikara in 1757.

The Dutch signed a treaty of their own at Mavelikara. Aiya says Batavia approved the draft on 18 October 1748, that the Company undertook to keep to a strict peace and to stay out of disputes between Malabar’s princes and Travancore, and that Travancore agreed to supply pepper while the Company supplied arms and ammunition. Aiya writes that William Logan observes this treaty gave the coup de grace to Dutch influence in Malabar.

How the Pillamars’ plot against the king ended is also in Aiya’s pages. The conspirators were executed, their property was confiscated, and their women and children were sold to coastal fishermen as slaves, in his words.

The deed of 1750

On the morning of 5 Makaram 925 M.E., January 1750, Marthanda Varma went to the Padmanabhaswamy temple with the heir-apparent, his family and his chief minister, according to Aiya. He laid the state sword before the deity on the Ottakkal mantapam, the stone porch before the sanctum, made over the whole territory to the temple’s trust, and ruled afterwards as the deity’s vassal, styling himself Sree Padmanabha Dasa, servant of Padmanabha. Aiya calls it a stroke of policy meant to consolidate his gains and secure his position.

A different reading comes from a book by Princess Aswathi Thirunal Gouri Lakshmi Bayi, published by Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, which the Supreme Court reproduces. She dates the act to 19 or 20 January 1750 and writes that the weight of the lives lost in his wars, which she compares to Arjuna before Kurukshetra and Ashoka after Kalinga, moved him to give up what he had won. In her account he placed the crown, the royal umbrella and the sword on the mandapam, received the sword back from the high priest, and directed that later conquests be surrendered to the deity as well. The title Padmanabha Dasa, she adds, already went to the royal family’s sons from the age of one.

The deed, translated in the judgment, transfers the lands between the Thovala fort in the east and the Kavana river in the west “to endure as long as the Sun and Moon shall last”. Kerala Tourism says Marthanda Varma also renovated the temple. According to the amicus curiae’s report quoted in the judgment, the idol was consecrated in 1739.

Justices Uday Umesh Lalit and Indu Malhotra held on 13 July 2020 that “the Managership or the Shebaitship of the Temple continues with the Family”, and set up an administrative committee chaired by the Thiruvananthapuram District Judge. In May 1949 a covenant joined the kingdom with Cochin in the United State of Travancore and Cochin, a step the judgment records. Our Kerala profile covers what followed, and our piece on Patel and the princely states covers the wider integration.

The claim of a first, and the pillar at Colachel

A Defence release, quoted in PTI’s report on the 2025 ceremony, says the victory made the House of Travancore “the only Asian military power to ever have defeated a leading European sea power at sea and land”. Historians, PTI adds, describe it as the first victory of an Indian force over a well-armed European power.

Panikkar and Alexander word it more narrowly. Panikkar’s phrase is the first great blow to Dutch arms, and Alexander’s is the first serious blow the Dutch had suffered in Malabar. The fighting, as Aiya, Panikkar and Alexander describe it, was on land and at the fort, with the Dutch leaving by ship. Britannica records that Zheng Chenggong’s army of more than 25,000 men landed in Taiwan in April 1661, and that after a nine-month siege the small Dutch garrison there capitulated.

Marthanda Varma raised a Victory Pillar near the beach at Colachel, PTI says, and at the memorial on 31 July 2025 Colonel Avinash Kumar Singh, commanding officer of the Madras Regiment at Pangode Military Station in Thiruvananthapuram, laid a wreath.