On October 16, 1799, British East India Company officers led Veerapandiya Kattabomman Nayak, the thirty-nine-year-old Polygar chieftain of Panchalankurichi, to a public gallows at Kayathar in present-day Thoothukudi district. All the Polygars of the region had been summoned to watch. The message was deliberate: defiance would end here.
It did not.
Within eighteen months, a coordinated uprising broke out across Tamil Nadu, Kerala, and the fringes of Mysore. The Second Polygar War, which lasted from 1800 to 1805, became the most serious military challenge to British authority in South India before the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857. It was fought not in open fields but in jungle passes, hill forts, and river crossings. Its leaders came from different regions, spoke different languages, and belonged to different communities — yet for a brief period, they fought as one.
No comments:
Post a Comment