A Disputed Adoption at Kittur in September 1824 Ended With the Collector of Dharwad Dead on 23 October and Rani Chennamma in Bailhongal Fort

On the morning of 23 October 1824, St John Thackeray, the East India Company’s Principal Collector and Political Agent at Dharwad, was shot outside the gate of the fort at Kittur, a small state in what is now Belagavi district of Karnataka. Six weeks earlier, on 11 September, the state’s ruler had died, and the Company had refused to recognise the boy the court said he had adopted as his heir.

The dead ruler was Shivalingarudra Sarja. Rani Chennamma was the second wife of his father, Mallasarja, which made her his stepmother, the word the Gazetteer and Thackeray’s own report use for her. The record is thick on the Company’s side and thin on Kittur’s, so each claim below is tied to the account it comes from.

A state the Company had recognised

Kittur’s hereditary chiefs, called desais, held the country around Kittur, Sampgaon and Bidi under a string of overlords, among them Haidar Ali and Tipu Sultan of Mysore and then the Peshwa. The Bombay Gazetteer of 1884 records that when the Peshwa’s rule ended in 1818, the Company raised the Kittur lands to the rank of an independent state. Sadashiva Wodeyar, in a biography published by the National Book Trust, dates the agreement to 28 July 1818 and says it set a yearly tribute of Rs 1.75 lakh and took Khanapur away from Kittur.

Mallasarja had ruled from 1782 and died in 1816. His son held the throne in poor health, and Wodeyar writes that Chennamma ran the state in practice. The Gazetteer says that by October 1824 she “had lately claimed the management of the state.” It also notes that in 1822 the Company rebuked Shivalingarudra for sheltering bands of robbers, a charge Wodeyar calls a pretext.

Two accounts of 11 September

The Company’s version is in the Gazetteer, in Thackeray’s letters and in a printed account by a British writer who signs himself G. H. B. A servant of the Kittur court reached Thackeray at Dharwad on 12 September with a letter dated 10 July announcing an adoption, though the letter itself said the child had been adopted only that day. The civil surgeon sent to Kittur found the ruler dead and judged from the body that he had been dead for hours. Thackeray noted that the ruler had never applied for leave to adopt, had said nothing about it when they met in May, and had signed the letter in a hand unlike his usual one.

The Gazetteer says Thackeray’s inquiries showed the ruler died on the night of 11 September and that court officials admitted putting a pen in the dead man’s hand. On 24 September Thackeray’s superior, William Chaplin, forwarded a report from the Company’s manager at Kittur that three senior servants had taken Rs 2.5 lakh and three caskets of jewels from the treasury.

Wodeyar tells it differently. Drawing on a Marathi letter in a private archive at Bailhongal and a letter printed in the Government of Karnataka’s History of Freedom Movement in Karnataka, he says Shivalingarudra picked a boy named Shivalingappa, son of Balappagouda of Mastmaradi, in June. The ceremony took place about 2 p.m. on 11 September and the ruler lived roughly twelve hours more. Wodeyar adds that Kittur’s 1818 covenant never required the Company’s permission for an adoption, and that Hindu law lets a widow adopt.

Thackeray reported on 14 September that about six weeks earlier he had had a proclamation on adoption read out before the envoys of the neighbouring chiefs, so that all would know what made an adoption legal. The principle that an heir needed the Company’s consent was already in force, then, long before Lord Dalhousie’s Doctrine of Lapse, and Rani Lakshmibai of Jhansi lost her kingdom to the same argument in 1853.

The Bombay government’s instructions of 25 September, quoted by Wodeyar, left a door open. If the boy proved descended from the desais who held the country before Tipu’s conquest, a defective adoption could be overlooked. Colebrooke’s biography says Mountstuart Elphinstone, the Governor of Bombay, advised exactly that. The Gazetteer reports that Thackeray’s inquiry into the family tree found no such descendant alive, so the adoption was disallowed.

Guards at the treasury

Thackeray went to Kittur on 14 September, sealed the treasury, which he guessed held eight or nine lakh rupees, and proposed two joint managers, one for the Company and one for the family. He wrote that “All is quiet” and that he expected to manage the country without military assistance.

By 21 October he had put Company sepoys at the gateways, and he asked the headmen for a bond making them answerable for the treasury. The Gazetteer says they refused without the orders of Chennamma, and that on the 22nd the women of the family again declined to see him. Wodeyar adds that Thackeray ordered the boy sent away from Kittur.

Chennamma and the dead ruler’s widow wrote to Chaplin on 11 October, in a translation Wodeyar prints: “The tyranny exercised here is becoming intolerable.” The child, they wrote, could not be sent away, because “If he be sent away, it will not be proper for us to remain.”

The fort gate, 23 October

On the morning of the 23rd, the artillery officer sent to relieve the guard at the fort found the gate locked. Thackeray called up guns under Captain Black and gave the garrison a deadline to open it or see it blown in. The accounts differ on the wait, which is twenty minutes in the Gazetteer and two half-hours in the Asiatic Journal. The Journal says Thackeray compared the chiefs inside to “a set of rebellious school-boys, who would be frightened into obedience.”

The accounts also differ on what happened next. The Gazetteer says the garrison made a sally, took the guns and cut down the gunners. The Asiatic Journal says Black’s men blew open the gates and walked into heavy fire from the walls, from more than two thousand matchlockmen by its count. Both say Thackeray rode towards the fort and was shot, and both say his body was cut down. Black, Lieutenant Sewell and Lieutenant Dighton of the Madras Horse Artillery were killed or fatally wounded, and Sewell lived until 5 November. Thackeray’s two assistants, Stevenson and Elliot, were taken prisoner.

The Journal speaks of “several privates” among the dead. Wodeyar puts the British dead at nearly eighty and names Sadhunavar Balappa of Amtur as the marksman who shot Thackeray, claims that the Gazetteer and the Journal do not carry.

On Chennamma’s part, the Company’s papers are careful. Elliot wrote on 24 October that the leader was the commander, Sardar Gurusiddappa, who acted in the name of the dowager. The Gazetteer says Gurusiddappa led and that Chennamma had stirred up the spirit behind the attack. It adds that when they saw the result they were alarmed and protected their prisoners. Wodeyar’s Chennamma directs the fight from the ramparts.

The fort falls in December

The Company brought troops from several stations under Lieutenant-Colonel Deacon. A proclamation offered a free pardon to anyone who surrendered by a set date, with the principals excepted. The prisoners were released on 2 December, and on the 3rd the Company’s troops attacked an advanced post. In the Gazetteer’s tally the attackers lost three killed and twenty-five wounded, among them John Munro, a sub-collector, who the Dharwad memorial says died on 11 December of a wound taken at the fort.

On the morning of 3 December, Chennamma and the dead ruler’s widow wrote to Chaplin, in Wodeyar’s translation: “we committed no aggression until we had been attacked by you in the first instance.” The Asiatic Journal records that the garrison capitulated on the night of 4 December and that the Company’s troops took the fort on the morning of the 5th, so accounts give either date for its fall. Wodeyar says Chennamma tried to slip out of a gate with two other women of the family and was caught.

Estimates of the garrison range widely. The Gazetteer says the fort was thought to hold about 5,000 men, Elliot wrote “upward of 5,000”, and Stevenson had heard 10,000. Elphinstone, in a minute that Colebrooke summarises, judged that the leaders “sinned in ignorance” of Kittur’s relation to the Company.

The lapse and the ladies of Bailhongal

The Gazetteer states that Kittur lapsed to the Company, which split it into three sub-divisions with 280 villages and 72 hamlets and a revenue in 1825 of about Rs 3.3 lakh. The women of the family, it says, were given liberal provision and kept under watch in Bailhongal fort. Wodeyar puts their pension at about Rs 40,000 a year in all.

Colonel James Welsh of the Madras army saw the aftermath in 1828. He found the palace two-thirds ruined and wrote that Thackeray had “forced the possessors into rebellion, by an attempt to coerce them with very inadequate means.” He also wrote: “The Princess who took an active part in the defence of the place is a prisoner, with her daughters or nieces, at Bylehoongul.”

Chennamma died in Bailhongal fort. Wodeyar gives the date as 2 February 1829 and says she was buried there with military honours, while Feminism in India and other popular accounts say 21 February. The year and place are not in dispute. The Gazetteer adds that when officials later moved the late ruler’s widow from Bailhongal to Dharwad, a thousand men gathered at Anegol to stop it, and that she died at Dharwad in July, “supposed by poison.”

Sangolli Rayanna’s rising

The Gazetteer’s account of a second rising begins in early 1829. Its leader was Rayappa, a village watchman at Sangoli and a retainer of the Kittur desais, who had been pardoned for his part in 1824 and whose service land had since been confiscated. He took the boy said to have been adopted, started with about a hundred men by burning the revenue officer’s building at Bidi, and gathered perhaps a thousand. By day they stayed in the hills and by night they raided. The Gazetteer calls the raids plunder and says the revolt aimed at restoring Kittur’s independence.

The Company’s officials won it by treachery. Two local men, put forward to join Rayappa, travelled with him for a fortnight, and a watchman seized him while he bathed. He was hanged at Nandgad and buried where he had chosen, and a banyan tree beside the grave is now shown as the one that grew from his body, with a temple under it. The Gazetteer says the outbreak lasted about four months.

Wodeyar names him Sangolli Rayanna, lists him among the Kittur commanders in the 1824 fighting, and calls his campaign guerrilla war in 1829 and 1830. He gives the hanging as 28 December 1830. Live History India says 26 January and puts the end of his campaign in 1831. The Gazetteer gives no date for the execution.

Wodeyar says Shivalingappa, the boy at the centre of the dispute, tried to raise Kittur again in 1837, in 1845 and during the rising of 1857.

What the record rests on

Wodeyar says in his introduction that there was “scanty record” of Chennamma in Indian sources and that ballads take liberties with fact. His main evidence is correspondence in the India Office records in London, much of which he reproduces. The Company’s side is in the Gazetteer, Colebrooke and the Asiatic Journal, all written by British authors or drawn from British papers.

The Department of Posts issued a stamp in her name on 23 October 1977, according to a Rajya Sabha reply of 25 April 2000. The Rashtrapati Bhavan photo library records President Pratibha Patil unveiling her statue in the Parliament House Complex in New Delhi on 11 September 2007.