Michelle Sindha Thomas
GOD’S OWN COUNTRY | THE HOUSE OF TRAVANCORE 1706-1900
I: MARTHANDA VARMA
Prince Marthanda Varma was born in 1706 in the “Place of Prosperity”—Thiruvithamcode, later anglicized to Travancore. By the time he was born, the medieval political structure of Kerala was eroding. The Malabar coast had been fractured into many small dominions, with the southern plains governed by his father, the Rajah of Travancore. The once-powerful, ancient Travancore dynasty was perpetually undermined by threats from neighboring kingdoms and the aristocracy controlled land, temples, and politics, leaving their king powerless; he died when his son was only one year old. Under the care of his mother, the queen, Marthanda Varma grew up full of pride and righteous indignation, early on resolving to restore the House of Travancore.
Marthanda Varma reclaimed royal authority by force, inducing fear in the noble clans who had dominated the landscape for generations. He aimed to end aristocratic interference by any means necessary, bringing in Tamil mercenaries to intimidate and exert violence against the feudal lords. He was unconcerned by tradition—perhaps as one who had lost his father and a nuclear family structure early in life—announcing himself as the enemy of the aristocracy, breaking their precious conventions, slaughtering his own cousins when they failed to align with him, making it clear that he would eliminate those who would not acknowledge his supremacy. He executed those who had sided with his cousins on grounds of conspiracy at court, in one swoop bringing down 42 noble houses, halting any notion of opposition and eradicating feudalism from within his realm. He then initiated a military campaign, taking over branches of the Travancore family dynasty before moving north to dominate every kingdom and principality in his path. By 1752, Marthanda Varma reached the “lords of the sea”—the Zamorin at the port of Cochin.
The Zamorin grew to prominence in ancient times by maintaining trade relations from west Asia to China, presiding over the spice trade in Cochin and the ports of northern Kerala. They were savvy diplomats who made their territories especially hospitable to traveling merchants, easing along trade with strategic appointments. Channels for Arab trade were smoothed by Muslim port commissioners who supervised customs on behalf of the Zamorin, fixing the prices of commodities and collecting fees due to the treasury. Merchant guilds were encouraged in Zamorin territories, including those formed to benefit sailors from southeast Asia, and one organized to support west Asian Jewish, Muslim, and Christian merchants.
Since the 1500s, however, outbound shipping on the Arabian Sea had been devastated by Portuguese patrolling squadrons looking to raid and loot departing fleets. The Zamorin were continuously engaged in battle with Portuguese marauders and, in an effort to destabilize them, sought alliance with the Dutch government—promising trading facilities, storehouses, and a fort at the port of Calicut in exchange for military aid. A Dutch fleet arrived in 1604, marking the start of a Dutch presence in Kerala. A decade passed, during which they proved themselves fully unworthy allies, failing in their promises and focusing instead on their own business interests. The Zamorin appealed next to the British, who arrived in 1615. The British swiftly drafted a treaty of trade, under which they would aid the effort to expel the Portuguese from Fort Kochi and Fort Cranganore—in exchange for a factory at Calicut. They immediately exploited the situation, aggressively staking their own claims on trade; the Zamorin shut down their factory only one year later. By the 1650s, Kerala had become hapless host to a revolving door of Portuguese-Dutch-French-British visitors-turned-colonists vying for dominance in a now 150-year-old tug-o-war. In 1661, the Zamorin joined a coalition led by the Dutch, who were beginning to surface as the dominant foreign presence. Together they embarked on a series of campaigns into the 1700s until, finally, just as the west Asian merchants had been pushed out by the Portuguese, the Portuguese were fully supplanted by the Dutch.
Marthanda Varma realized that Dutch power in Kerala was rooted in their flourishing spice trade at the port of Cochin—so he strategically set out to conquer spice-producing territories supplying goods to Cochin. He moved closer and closer to the heart until 1741, when he defeated Dutch forces at the Battle of Colachel. During this battle, in an intriguing turn of events, a number of Dutch soldiers, including the Franco-Dutch Captain Eustachius De Lannoy, defected to Travancore. Marthanda Varma employed him to modernize the Travancore army, introducing new firearms, infantry, cavalry, artillery, and European war tactics to the effort, fashioning 50,000 men into a war machine. De Lannoy’s strategies aided Marthanda Varma in the expansion of his kingdom north into Zamorin territory to establish the boundaries of what would become the modern state of Kerala.
By 1743, Marthanda Varma had secured the western ports and spice producing districts of Quilon, Kayamkulam, Thekkumkur, Vadakkumkur, and Purakkad. He required a license for trade in Travancore, declaring a royal state monopoly on black pepper and other prized export goods, ensuring native control of resources and ocean trade, delivering a deathblow to Dutch commerce: any merchant participating in trade outside these parameters faced execution. To further limit European interference, Marthanda Varma granted assistance and patronage to the native Christian mercantile community, elevating them to administrators of his new order. The Christians, in turn, actively supported Marthanda Varma’s military campaigns and Travancore soon broke the Dutch stranglehold on the Malabar coast forever.
In a widely publicized ceremony, Marthanda Varma dedicated the kingdom of Travancore to the god Vishnu, declaring that he would rule from this point on only as vice-regent—to God.
This announcement inspired hope and pride in his most pious constituency but also launched a preemptive barb at would-be opposers: Any move against the king would be, effectively, a move against God, calling forth divine wrath. Bold offensive moves on the part of Marthanda Varma or his successors could be framed as efforts to preserve the kingdom of God. Ever since this dramatic dedication, Malayalis declare that they are of “God’s Own Country”—sometimes with great reverence (as in the case of Nani who told us that it would be very difficult for us to learn Malayalam as teenagers; it was the angels’ tongue, she said, originating in God’s Own Country), sometimes tongue-in-cheek, eyes rolled to heaven (in the case of Mama and Papa when lamenting the petty politics of Kerala society, the heat, the wet, the bumper-to-bumper traffic.
Trivandrum became a prominent city during the reign of Marthanda Varma, and still serves as the Kerala state capital. As the king expanded his dominion, conquering chiefdoms up the coast, artists and scholars from annexed regions migrated to Trivandrum, cultivating it into a cultural center. Marthanda Varma gave patronage to a variety of art forms and appointed artists including Ramapurathu Warrier and Kunchan Nambiar as court poets. He fortified the kingdom, undertaking irrigational works, building roads and canals to ease travel, encouraging selected foreign trade channels under native management. Even as he modernized the kingdom, however, Marthanda Varma recognized the persistent threat of colonialism, observing British ascent in key cities across the subcontinent. He learned from the example of the Zamorin: they had taken a hostile position against early European colonists and lost not only their kingdom but their entire way of life. Marthanda Varma decided to cooperate with the British to avoid losing all he had built on behalf of his people, or worse, decimation. He instead crafted a collegial relationship with the British, India’s new rulers, and by means of strategic policies and alliances he shielded Kerala from the sharpest impact of the struggle that would overwhelm India for centuries to come.
In 1758, before his quiet death, Marthanda Varma issued seven injunctions for political survival to his heirs, including a mandate that relations with the British East India Company should be maintained at any risk, that transparency and full confidence with them should be maintained, and that full confidence should be placed in support of the alliance. Marthanda Varma's visionary policies protected Kerala and set a precedent continued by his successors, who offered Malayalis the rewards of modernity and a living standard superior to other parts of India—directly reflected in the educational levels, health and wellness, and environmental stewardship of present-day Kerala. The long reign of Marthanda Varma’s immediate successor, Rama Varma, from 1758–1798, is considered a golden age during which he retained territorial gains, encouraged social development, and increased material prosperity in Kerala. New concepts such as communism and radical social reforms were explored, along with an encouragement of religious and ideological variety; while the royal family were devout Hindus, they donated land and material for the construction of Christian churches and Muslim mosques. In the name of progress, however, many of the distinctions that marked Kerala as unique from the rest of India were abandoned by a people who looked to the future and increasingly outward for inspiration. The growing British population of administrators, missionaries, and settlers imposed a Victorian morality upon the traditional Kerala lifestyle. In parallel, revolutionaries forging resistance to British cultural domination urged Indians to set aside regional allegiances in favor of a unified national identity, a key weapon in their common struggle for independence.