Velu Nachiyar and the Retaking of Sivaganga in 1780, Eight Years After a Company and Nawab Force Killed Her Husband at Kalaiyar Kovil

By 1780 the kingdom of Sivaganga, in what is now southern Tamil Nadu, was back under its own royal house, eight years after a force of the Nawab of Arcot and the East India Company had killed its king at Kalaiyar Kovil. The Sivaganga district administration and the Press Information Bureau (PIB), the Government of India’s media arm, both record that his widow, Velu Nachiyar, regained it.

She was born on 3 January 1730 and died, by one official date, on 25 December 1796. The records differ on how the recovery happened and who held authority afterwards, so each version below carries its source.

The Ramnad princess who trained like a prince

The Sivaganga district website says she was the only child of Raja Chellamuthu Vijayaragunatha Sethupathy and Rani Sakandhimuthal of Ramnad. A PIB feature of 14 August 2014 says the couple had no male heir, so she was brought up like a prince. It lists weapons training, martial arts including kalari (a South Indian fighting art) and stick fighting, horse riding, archery and the study of war strategy, and calls her a scholar in many languages.

She married Muthuvaduganathaperiya Udaiyathevar of Sivaganga, whose reign the district site dates from 1750 to 1772. They had a daughter, Vellachi Nachiyar. Sivaganga was a palayam, a chiefdom under a hereditary chief, and the Nawab of Arcot claimed it owed him tribute.

June 1772: two columns close on Kalaiyar Kovil

K. Rajayyan, a University of Madras historian, sets out the campaign in his 1974 study of the poligars (the palayam chiefs) of Tamil Nadu, using the Madras government’s own records. The Nawab’s troops entered Sivaganga in January 1772 and took the port of Tondi. In May a combined force of the Nawab and the Company under Joseph Smith marched on Ramnad, the queen’s birth kingdom, and stormed its fort on 2 June.

Allegations of unpaid tribute and of sheltering robbers in the woods were the justification the Nawab and the Madras government gave for the campaigns. Rajayyan calls them claims made to justify what had already been decided, and says the two chiefdoms were not in real subjection to the Nawab.

Smith advanced on Sivaganga from the east and a second officer, Benjour, from the west. The king had set up barriers on the roads, dug trenches and placed posts in the woods around Kalaiyar Kovil. The Nawab’s son, Umdut ul Umara, who directed the operations, told the king to pay one lakh (100,000) rupees. The king left his capital for the woods instead.

The two columns joined at Sivaganga town on 21 June and took two outposts near Kalaiyar Kovil the next day. Then the king’s minister, Tandavaraya Pillai, sent word to the Nawab’s son that he was ready to settle. Smith wrote to Benjour in English to halt. Sivaganga’s troops intercepted the letter and held it without understanding it. Benjour pressed on and fought the main Sivaganga force on 25 June.

The king fell with many of his followers, and the invaders plundered the town and took jewels worth 50,000 pagodas, a gold coin. The district website, a statement made in the Lok Sabha in 2008 and the British Library’s account all give 25 June 1772 for his death. The PIB feature adds that his second wife was killed too and names the attackers as British soldiers and the son of the Nawab of Arcot.

Eight years at Virupakshi, under Mysore’s eye

The queen, her daughter and Tandavaraya Pillai reached Virupakshi near Dindigul, according to the district website. The Marudu brothers joined them there. Chinna Marudu became her minister and Vellai Marudu her commander in chief.

Who sheltered them is the first point on which the official pages differ. The district history page says she and her daughter lived under Hyder Ali’s protection. The district’s page on eminent personalities names Gopala Nayakkar, the chief of Virupakshi. The Dindigul district website joins the two accounts. It says Gopal Nayak aided the queen and the Marudu brothers, and that they stayed in the fort with Hyder Ali’s permission. The PIB feature says she formed an alliance with both men to attack the British.

Dindigul was Mysore’s ground. The Dindigul site says the Mysore ruler sent Hyder Ali there in 1755 and that by 1777 he was Mysore’s effective ruler, with his own governor in the fort. Rajayyan adds that Tandavaraya Pillai asked Hyder Ali for help to restore the dead king’s house and that Hyder promised it. The minister died within months, and in Rajayyan’s account the Marudu brothers then took the lead.

1780: the rising and the return

In 1780 Hyder Ali’s army attacked Arcot, at the start of the Second Mysore War. Rajayyan writes that the Marudu brothers obtained a small force from Syed Sahib, who commanded the Mysore troops at Dindigul, and swept the Nawab’s territories up to the gates of Madurai. Sivaganga’s people joined them in large numbers, and the Nawab’s garrisons in walled towns could not hold.

He describes Marava fighters of the period, armed with pikes and small guns, looting Company camps and throwing rockets into forts held by the Nawab’s troops. The rocket corps of Hyder Ali’s son is the subject of Tipu Sultan and the Mysore rockets.

The Tamil Nadu pages put the queen at the centre of the outcome. The district history page says the widow queen succeeded her husband in 1780 and gave the Marudu brothers power to run the country that year. It adds that the Nawab ordered that she and the brothers could return and rule on condition of paying kist, the annual tribute. The PIB feature says she fought with the help of her allies, won, and ruled the regained kingdom for a decade.

A different arrangement appears in Rajayyan, who cites the Company’s 1800 correspondence on the permanent settlement of the southern palayams. In his account the rebels proclaimed Vellachi, the late king’s daughter, as ruler, with the Marudu brothers as ministers. His account of the rising, in the scanned text of the book, does not name the queen. The sources do not settle who held authority from day to day.

In Rajayyan’s account the peace came later. After the brothers retook posts held by the Nawab in November 1789, the Nawab agreed to a peishkush (annual tribute) of three lakh rupees, and Vellachi’s husband, Wodaya Tevar, took the rajahship. In 1791 the Madras Council cut the tribute to 1,75,000 rupees. The district website records that Vellai Marudu was executed on 24 October 1801.

On her death, the district’s personalities page gives 25 December 1796. Its history page says the exact date is not known and puts it at about 1790, and the PIB feature says only that she died a few years after 1780.

Udaiyaal, Kuyili and the women’s army

Of everything in the story, the women’s army is the best known and the thinnest in documents. The British Library’s Untold Lives blog, republished by Scroll.in on 26 August 2024, says Velu Nachiyar and her daughter escaped in 1772 because Udaiyaal, a village woman, refused under questioning to reveal their hiding place and was killed. The queen later raised a women’s army and named it after her, the blog says. In 1780, it says, the army’s commander Kuyili entered the Company’s weapons store disguised as a village woman and set herself on fire, destroying the arms and ammunition.

The News Minute, on 3 January 2017, gives a different account of Udaiyaal. It says the army was named for an adopted daughter of the queen who died fighting the British, and that some say Kuyili was an adopted daughter too. The same article calls Kuyili the first person to use a human bomb.

Neither article cites a document. The Women’s Studies department of Alagappa University says in its January 2024 newsletter that there is not much historical evidence about Kuyili and that her story has come down through oral tradition and songs. The scanned text of Rajayyan’s book does not mention Kuyili, Udaiyaal or a women’s regiment. This article therefore reports the women’s army and the attack on the store as tradition, with the sources above, and not as documented events.

What “first” rests on

The PIB feature calls her “the first ever woman from a royal family to have challenged the mighty British Empire”. It quotes Prof. Sanjeevi as saying she revolted 85 years before the Rani of Jhansi. A Tamil Nadu government release of 19 September 2025, as quoted by DT Next, says she took on the British about one hundred years before Jhansi’s queen. Counted from the dates in the sources, 1772 is 85 years before 1857 and 1780 is 77.

No independent study that tests the word “first” is among the sources consulted for this article. Rajayyan describes the 1772 campaign as the Nawab’s, with a Company force fighting alongside it. Rani Chennamma of Kittur took on the Company in 1824, and Rani Lakshmibai of Jhansi lost her kingdom to the Company in 1853 and fought it in 1857.

The stamp, the memorial and the mascot

On 4 March 2008 N. S. V. Chitthan, then the Lok Sabha member for Dindigul, asked the government in a written statement to issue a commemorative stamp and first day cover in her honour. The PIB feature records that the stamp was issued on 31 December 2008. On 11 March 2002 the member for Sivaganga had asked the Union government for help in developing the Sivaganga palace of Rani Velu Nachiar as a tourist spot.

The Sivagangai Municipality’s tourism page for the Tamil Nadu government says the Velu Nachiyar memorial block was inaugurated by the state’s Chief Minister on 18 July 2014. The PIB feature, dated 14 August 2014, was filed for that year’s Independence Day.

The Prime Minister’s tribute on her birth anniversary on 3 January 2023, as PIB published it, says she resisted colonialism and worked for the welfare of society. On 19 January 2024 the Khelo India Youth Games opened in Chennai with Veera Mangai, the name by which she is fondly called, as the mascot. According to the ministry’s explainer, the Prime Minister said it was unprecedented for a real-life personality to be chosen as a mascot.

On 19 September 2025 Tamil Nadu’s Chief Minister unveiled her statue at the Gandhi Mandapam complex in Guindy, Chennai, installed by the state’s Information and Public Relations Department at a cost of Rs 50 lakh, Press Trust of India reported. The Prime Minister’s tribute of 3 January 2026 says she rose against colonial oppression and asserted the right of Indians to govern themselves.