Wodeyar Dynasty

The Wadiyar dynasty (formerly spelt Wodeyer or Odeyer, also referred to as the Wadiyars of Mysore), is a late-medieval/ early-modern South Indian Hindu royal family of former kings of Mysore from the Urs clan originally based in Mysore city.

As Maharajas of Mysore, the Wadiyars ruled the Kingdom of Mysore from the late 1300s until 1950. Members of the Wadiyar dynasty and the Urs clan have also been royal advisers as Diwans to their reigning siblings, cousins, nephews, or distant relatives. Some members have also commanded army divisions as ''dalvoys'' (commander-in-chief) for their reigning monarch.

During the late 14th century, the family was originally ''poleygars'' (Kannada for garrison) defending the regions in and around Mysore town for the Vijayanagara Empire, their feudal overlords. With the fall and decline of the empire in the 17th century, the Wadiyars declared independence when Raja Wadiyar seized the nearby town of Srirangapattana, the seat of Tirumala, Sriranga II's viceroy, in 1610. Between 1766 and 1799, when Hyder Ali and Tipu dictated the kingdom, the Wadiyar rulers as maharajas were largely nominal without any actual powers. After Tipu's execution in 1799, the British Crown which was ruling India at that time restored the kingdom back to the Wadiyars under a subsidiary alliance. After India's independence from the Crown, the ruling Maharaja Jayachamaraja Wadiyar ceded the kingdom into the newly formed Dominion of India.

Name

In Kannada, the common noun ''odeyaru'' (ಒಡೆಯರು; anglicised ''wodeyar'' or ''wadiyar'') is the plural form of the singular ''odeya'' (ಒಡೆಯ) which means ''lord'' or ''lordship''. The first poleygar and raja of Mysore, Yaduraya, assumed the term as his titular proper noun.

In Kannada, the common noun ''arasa'' (ಅರಸ; anglicised ''urs'' or ''ursu''; anglicised plural ''ursus'') means ''ruler'' or ''king''. Members of the Wadiyar dynasty hail from the Urs clan; upon incarnation or by heredity, they assume the title ''Wadiyar'' and their immediate family therewith, the latest instance of its happening with the present head of the Wadiyar family Yaduveer Wadiyar upon coronation in 2015.

History

The Wadiyars trace their ancestry to Lord Krishna. Legend has it that they arrived from Dvārakā. However, historians like P. V. Nanjaraj Urs, Shyam Prasad, Nobuhiro Ota, David Leeming, and Aya Ikegame instead suggest that the Wadiyars were local feudal lords who adopted puranic legend to claim themselves as direct descendants of the legendary Lunar Dynasty.

Vassal fiefdom

The Wadiyar dynasty started when Yaduraya, a garrison leader (''poleygar''), was made the prefect of Mysore and the surrounding regions his overlord Harihara II of the Vijayanagara Empire in 1399. With this, Yaduraya assumed the title Raja and the honorary surname Wadiyar. He and his successors ruled the fiefdom of Mysore as rajas under the vassalage of the Vijayanagara Empire until around 1553.

Independent kingdom

The Vijayanagara Empire disintegrated in 1565. With the fall of the empire, Mysore became an independent kingdom, the first independent king being Timmaraja Wodeyar II, the great-great-great-grandson of the founding ruler Yaduraya. Thimmaraja's nephew Raja Wodeyar I expanded the borders of the kingdom. In 1610, he moved the capital from Mysore to nearby island town of Srirangapattana on the river Kaveri, which provided strategic protection against military attacks. Raja Wadiya's cousin and successor down the line Kanthirava Narasaraja I expanded the frontiers of the kingdom to Trichy in present-day Tamil Nadu. The kingdom reached its peak under Kanthirava's grand-nephew Devaraja Wodeyar II, who reformed the administration of the kingdom by dividing it into 18 departments (called ''chavadis''); he also introduced a coherent system of taxation.
File:Rajawodeyar.jpg, Maharaja Raja Wadiyar who started Mysore Dasara
File:Kanthirava.jpg, Maharaja Kanthirava Narasaraja I was referred to ''ranadheera'' (valiant on the battlefield)

Sultanate

From 1760 to 1799, the rule of the Wadiyar dynasty was essentially nominal, with real power firmly in the hands of the Commander-in-chief and later self-proclaimed sultan, Hyder Ali, and his son and successor Tipu. The two, ruling the sultanate from Srirangapattana, expanded the kingdom aggressively.
File:"Hyder Ali," a steel engraving from the 1790's (with modern hand coloring).jpg, Hyder Ali, the commander-in-chief who usurped to power
File:TipuSultan1790.jpg, Ali's son Tipu, the Sultan of Mysore
File:Indian Mysore Kingdom 1784 map.svg, The Kingdom of Mysore under Tipu

Independent kingdom in a subsidiary alliance

After Tipu's execution at the end of the Battle of Srirangapattana during the Third Anglo-Mysore War led by Duke Arthur Wellesley in 1799, the Crown restored the Kingdom to Wadiyars under a subsidiary alliance requiring an annual pay as subsidy to the Crown. The capital was moved back to Mysore. The four-year-old boy Krishnaraja Wadiyar III, son of the last Wadiyar king, Chamaraja Wadiyar VIII, was anointed as the Maharaja of Mysore.

In 1831, on a specious plea of non-payment by Krishnaraja Wadiyar III, the kingdom was placed under a British commission that lasted from 1831 to 1881. Mark Cubbon and L. B. Bowring are among the well-known commissioners of the period.

In 1868, upon Krishnaraja Wadiyar III's demise, his five-year-old adopted son Chamaraja Wadiyar IX became the heir to the throne. When in 1881 he attained the age of majority, through an act of parliament, the British Parliament once again transferred power back to the Wadiyars. The maharaja changed the English spelling of their royal name from Wodeyar to Wadiyar and assumed the title ''Bahadur''. He established the Mysore Representative Assembly; for the first time in India, democratic experiments were being conducted in Mysore.

Chamaraja Wadiyar IX's son and successor Maharaja Krishnaraja Wadiyar IV earned great fame as a saintly king (''rajarishi''), and his kingdom was hailed as ''Ramarajya'' by Mahatma Gandhi–as an ideal kingdom comparable to the one ruled by the Lord Rama.

Krishnaraja Wadiyar IV's nephew, successor, and the last reigning king of the Wadiyar dynasty, Jayachamarajendra Wadiyar, ruled from 1940 until 1950. Upon India's independence from the British crown in 1947, Jayachamarajendra Wadiyar ceded his kingdom into the new temporary Dominion of India but continued as Maharajah until India became a Republic in 1950.
File:Krishnaraja Wadiyar III, Maharaja of Mysore.jpg, Maharaja Krishnaraja Wadiyar III during his latter years
File:Gold pagoda of Krishnaraja Wodeyar.jpg, Golded coind during Krishnaraja Wadiyar III depicting Shiva holding his attributes of a trident and a deer, with his consort Parvati seated on his lap. The obverse reads: ''Sri Krishnaraja'' in Sanskrit
File:Chamarajendra Wadiyar X with his children.jpg, Maharaja Chamaraja Wadiyar X with his children
File:Maharajah of Mysore and Princes 1887.jpg, Crown prince Yuvaraja Krishnaraja Wadiyar IV with two other Indian princes
File:Maharani Vani Vilasa with grandson Jayachamarajendra Wadiyar.jpg, Rajamate Kempananjammanni Devi with grandson and future king Jayachamarajendra Wadiyar

Dissolution of the kingdom

Jayachamarajendra Wadiyar became the rajapramukh of the renamed Mysore State from 1950 to 1956. After the reorganisation of Indian states on a linguistic basis in 1956, he was appointed Governor of the integrated Mysore State (present Karnataka State), a post which he held until 1964. He was then appointed Governor of Madras (now Tamil Nadu) for two years.

The Indian Constitution continued to recognise him as the Maharajah of Mysore until 1971, when titles and privy purses of maharajas were abolished by the Government of India under Indira Gandhi. The maharajah died in 1974.

His only son Srikantadatta Narasimharaja Wadiyar became the head of the family; he was a member of the Indian Parliament.

Upon Srikantadatta Wadiyar's demise 2013, his widowed wife Devi Pramoda Wadiyar adopted Yaduveer Wadiyar, who was anointed as the maharaja of Mysore and the head of the family in 2015.
File:Jcrw1.jpg, Jayachamaraja Wadiyar with Elizabeth II
File:Srikanta Wadiyar of Mysore.jpg, Srikantadatta Wadiyar holding a private durbar during a Dasara festival
File:Yaduveer Krishnadatta Chamaraja Wadiyar.JPG, Yaduveer Wadiyar, the present head of the Wadiyar dynasty

Residences

Mysore Palace has been the official residence of the Wadiyars for most of the family's recorded history. Briefly, Srirangapattana was also the seat of the Wadiyars. By the early 1900s, Bangalore had seen significant infrastructural development and had become a secondary residence for the Wadiyars at the Bangalore Palace.
File:Mysore Palace Morning.jpg, Mysore Palace is the traditional seat of the Wadiyars in Mysuru
File:Bangalore Mysore Maharaja Palace.jpg, Bengaluru Palace, the Wadiyars' residence in Bengaluru
File:Jagan mohan palace2.jpg, Jaganmohan Palace served as a temporary residence in the early 1900s when the old Mysore Palace burnt down

Alamelamma's Curse

With a declining Vijayanagara Empire, in 1610 Raja Wadiyar conquered the fort of Srirangapattana from Tirumala, the Vijayanagara viceroy stationed there. Tirumala is said to have retired to the nearby town of Talakadu with his two wives. At about the same time, Tirumala suffered from a terminal disease; his condition deteriorated and he eventually died.

One of his wives was Alamelamma, a staunch devotee of Ranganayaki, the consort of Lord Ranganatha, the presiding deity of the famous Adi-Ranga temple in the island fortress of Srirangapatna. Alamelamma had a large amount of jewellery, including a fine nose ring studded with a large pearl. As a widow, customs forbade jewellery on her. She frequently lent the jewels to the temple of Ranganayaki. Every Tuesdays and Fridays, Ranaganayaki's idol would be decorated with the jewellery, returned to Alamelamma's safe custody for rest of the week.

On one instance, the temple requested the king's soldiers to fetch the jewels from Alamelamma as has become a practice. An approaching king's emissaries, headed by Chief Courtier Ramanath Molahalli, seems to have scared her off. To escape an ill-presumed imminent wrath of the king, she ran over to a cliff overlooking the Kaveri river into the whirlpool and cursed before plunging to her own death, "may Talakadu become a barren expanse of land, Malangi turn into a whirlpool, and may kings of Mysore never beget children to all eternity" (Kannada: ತಲಕಾಡು ಮರಳಾಗಲಿ, ಮಾಲಂಗಿ ಮಡುವಾಗಲಿ, ಮೈಸೂರು ದೊರೆಗಳಿಗೆ ಮಕ್ಕಳಿಲ್ಲದೆ ಹೋಗಲಿ; transliteration: talakāḍu maral̤āgali, mālaṃgi maḍuvāgali, maisūru dŏrĕgal̤igĕ makkal̤illadĕ hogali).

Alamelamma's idol

Learning of this accident, the king felt repentant and had an idol of Alamelamma made in gold, installed it in the palace, and worshipped it as a deity. To this day, the idol can be found in Mysore Palace. The king's only surviving son, Narasaraja Wadiyar, died (believed to be an effect of the curse in folklore).

The Dasara festivities inside the palace end on the evening of Navarathri with a formal pooja to Alamelamma. Another interesting part of the story is that the Alamelamma temple is under the care of her legal heirs. Strangely, these priests/caretakers appear to be cursed by the same curse, following the same pattern afflicting the Wadiyars.

Talakadu and Malangi

Talakadu and Malangi are two small towns near Tirumakudalu Narasipura on the banks of the Kaveri where the river takes a bend. To date, most parts of Talakadu lie under sand, and the village of Malangi is slowly eroding due to whirlpools. Talakadu's temples lie buried in a vast expanse of sand and are dug up and exposed every 12 years. At Malangi, on the other hand, the river is at its deepest. Whether these phenomena appeared only after Alamelamma's curse in 1610 is a matter of conjecture.

Lineage

From Raja Wadiyar's death in 1617 to that of Maharaja Devaraja Wodeyar II in 1704 (there were four rulers in between), the kingdom was ruled by the surviving descendants of Raja Yaduraya, but none could beget an heir. The sole exception to the curse was Devaraja Wodeyar II's deaf and mute son Maharaja Kantheerava Narasaraja Wodeyar II. He was succeeded by his son Maharaja Krishnaraja Wodeyar I, who ruled from 1714 to 1732. With him, Yaduraya’s direct lineage came to an end. Since the incident, a reigning Mysore king never had a child and has since adopted his nephew, cousin, or a relative.

Contributions

The Wadiyars were patrons of fine arts, fostering a number of famous musicians, writers and painters. Their contributions to music and literature has rendered the city of Mysore a cultural centre of Karnataka.

See also

* Diwan of Mysore
* Karnataka
* Kingdom of Mysore
* Maharaja of Mysore
* Mysore
* Mysore State
* Srirangapatna
* Talakad

References

External links

The Wodeyars of Mysore (1578 A.D. to 1947 A.D.)

Mysore – Imperial City of Karnataka









{{Mysore topics

History of Karnataka
Karnataka society
Kings of Mysore
Dynasties of India
Hindu dynasties