1763 onwards
DocumentedHyder Ali of Mysore turns towards Kodagu
After absorbing Bednur, Hyder Ali begins a series of campaigns to bring the Kodagu hills under Mysore's control.
Chapter three
The Mysore conflicts
In the second half of the eighteenth century Kodagu was drawn into the wars of Mysore. The kingdom was occupied, its ruling family imprisoned, and its recovery came only through alliance with the English East India Company — the alliance that would later cost it its independence.
Occupation
Hyder Ali and the loss of the hills
DocumentedMysore's expansion under Hyder Ali reached the Kodagu frontier in the 1760s and 1770s. Forts changed hands repeatedly; garrisons were installed, expelled and reinstalled.
Kodagu's value to Mysore was strategic rather than economic: the passes through these hills linked the Mysore plateau to the Malabar coast. Control of Kodagu meant control of the route, which is why the campaigns were persistent out of all proportion to the country's size.
Resistance was decentralised — ambushes on columns moving through forest and defile rather than pitched battle — and that pattern became central to how Kodavas later described their own military tradition.
1785
The captivity
DisputedUnder Tipu Sultan large numbers of Kodavas were deported and held at Srirangapatna. The event is documented; the numbers are not.
Figures given in different sources range from a few thousand to seventy thousand or more. The highest come from Company-era accounts and Tipu's own correspondence, both written to impress readers — one with atrocity, the other with success. Modern historians treat the largest numbers as implausible against any reasonable estimate of Kodagu's population at the time.
What is not in doubt is that the deportations, forced conversions and reprisals of this period left a lasting mark on Kodava memory, and that survivors and escapees formed the core of the force that restored the Haleri line.
A remembered wrong does not need an inflated number to be real.
Recovery
1790s: alliance and restoration
Dodda Vira Rajendra escaped captivity, gathered support in the hills and, with Company backing during the wars against Tipu, recovered the kingdom. A treaty relationship followed. Kodagu emerged intact and nominally independent, but tied to a power whose interest in the passes was the same as Mysore's had been.
Sources & Further Reading
Full bibliographyChronology
Events of the Mysore period
1780 – 1788
DocumentedMysore occupies Kodagu
Kodagu is held under Mysore administration for most of the 1780s, with repeated Kodava revolts and repeated suppression.
1780s
DisputedDeportation of Kodavas to Seringapatam
Kodava rebels were deported and imprisoned at Seringapatam during Tipu Sultan's suppression campaigns. The commonly repeated figure of 60,000–70,000 captives is doubted by historians.
That the deportations happened is not in question. The scale is. The very large numbers descend from early British and missionary accounts rather than contemporary administrative records, and are widely regarded as inflated. This archive reports the event and flags the number rather than repeating it as fact.