Tag Archives: chinna marudhu

1801: Periya and Chinna Marudhu

Posted on by

On this date in 1801, the brothers Periya Marudhu and Chinna Marudhu were hanged from the highest bastion of the fort of Tirupattur by the British — penalty for declaring the kingdom of Sviganga free from the British Empire.

The British East India Company had in the late 18th century established the foundation for the eventual Company Raj controlling India.

Sviganga was a small state only a few decades independent before the Company gobbled it up in 1790. But it proved more proud in its resistance than the Anglos might have expected. The widowed queen Velu Nachiyar put up a furious fight against the British in the 1780s, noted for its pioneering use of the suicide bomber: a Dalit woman who turned herself into a ghee torch and plunged into an enemy armory with explosive effect.

Velu Nachiyar died about 1790, leaving her patrimony to the administration of the Marudhu brothers. (The name is also rendered Marudu or Maruthu.)

The British policy was to rule India indirectly via arrangements with just such local elites. The pre-existing South India administrative class of Palaiyakkarars, better known to the British by the Anglicization “Polygars”, for instance, were simply bought off and put to tax collecting on behalf of the East India Company instead of domestic sovereigns.

These subcontinental subalterns did not prove to be quite as eager for the British yoke as the new hegemon might have hoped. They mounted a sequence of rebellions from 1799 to 1805 in a bid to claw back their autonomy. The British suppressed these risings only with considerable difficulty; an unnamed officer of the 73rd, in a letter published by the London Times on Jan. 7, 1802, paid the tribute of a colonist to his foes: “the Polygars are a race of people who inhabit the jungles and hill parts of India; they are braver than the generality of Indians, and cannot be said ever to have been conquered.”

The Marudhus joined this rebellion, allied with the Polygar Oomaithurai and leading a force pegged at upwards of 2,000. Finally besieged at Kalayar Kovil, the brothers found their fortress reduced and plundered by the British, and themselves delivered into enemy hands for exemplary justice. (Other captives, like Oomaithurai, were hauled further afield for punishment; Oomaithurai was executed on November 16 of the same year at Panchalankurichi.)

On this day..