Chapter five
After 1834 Coorg was governed as a small non-regulation province, first under the East India Company and then directly under the Crown. Its size was modest; the paperwork it generated was not, and much of what can be said about the nineteenth century comes from it.
Administration
Coorg was administered as a separate charge, at times attached to Mysore, with a Commissioner or Chief Commissioner seated in Mercara — the anglicised Madikeri.
Existing structures were kept where they were useful. Nad and village headmen continued to collect revenue and settle small disputes, now answerable to a district officer rather than a raja. Kodava landholding was recognised in a distinctive form of tenure, and the community's right to carry arms was allowed to continue — a privilege later confirmed by exemption under Indian arms legislation.
The 1837 rising in Amara Sullia showed how thin the new authority was in the western lowlands. It was suppressed, and afterwards the administration concentrated on roads, survey, forest reservation and revenue settlement, which together opened the highlands to planters.
Shade-grown coffee, the crop that reorganised Kodagu's land and labour.
Commissioned illustration for this project.
Illustrative image, not a historical photograph.
Economy
Coffee had been grown in the region before the annexation, but from roughly the 1850s European planters and then Kodava landowners expanded it rapidly. Forest was converted to shade plantation, migrant labour arrived from the plains and from Malabar, and Kodagu's fortunes became tied to a commodity price set elsewhere.
Paddy remained the food crop and the social anchor; coffee, pepper and cardamom became the cash. Kodagu is still one of India's principal coffee districts, which is why the nineteenth-century plantation map is legible on the ground today.
Sources & Further Reading
Reading the record
A source can be the best we have and still be an interested party.
Chronology
February – April 1834
DocumentedA large Company force enters Kodagu from several directions. The campaign is brief; Chikka Vira Rajendra is deposed and the kingdom annexed in April 1834.
Friction had grown from around 1830, and the Raja's detention of a British emissary, Kullapalli Karunakaran Menon, gave Governor-General Lord William Bentinck his immediate pretext.
1837
DocumentedAn armed uprising across Kodagu, Sullia and Dakshina Kannada — Arebhashe, Kodava and Tulu participants together — twenty years before 1857.
Resentment at the 1834 deposition and at new revenue demands drove the revolt. Regional historiography treats it as an early anti-colonial rising; recent academic surveys review the competing readings.
1850s – 1900s
DocumentedColonial planters and Kodava landholders convert forest and shola margins to coffee, restructuring land, labour and trade.
1867
Colonial AccountR. A. Cole, Superintendent of Coorg, publishes the first formal grammar of Kodava Takk.
Sources & Further Reading
Full bibliography1868 – c. 1930
DocumentedBorn in Kirundadu village, Virajpet taluk, Appachcha Kavi becomes the first dramatist to write in Kodava Takk.
Sources differ on his birth date: 13 or 21 September 1868.
1924
DocumentedNadikerianda Chinnappa's collection of Kodava folksongs, customs and lore appears in Kannada script — among the earliest extensive folklore collections in any Indian language.
Sources & Further Reading