In Search of a Forgotten Queen
A little piece of history handed to me, knowing that history fades into nothingness when unrecognised.
There once was a queen and then there wasn’t. Indian history does not do justice to all its characters. Does it really matter? I have no answer to that question. I can find reasons to say yes, reasons to say no, and everything in between is just a matter of perspective.
History fades with time, this much is true. It is buried under the present forever carrying its mammoth weight. As it changes hands we find bits and pieces of it missing, scattered across the vast world.
My father once told me that all the land we call home— was given to the family by a king in exchange for a woman from the family he wanted to take as his queen. Fair enough, my next question was obvious. Who was she? Did she have a name? But nobody could tell me who she was with surety.
How can a woman cease to exist after such a dramatic exchange of land, enough to host a community thriving on those very lands today? How could there be no living memory of her. The question haunted me for many years, it still does. Her identity, her life was bartered for survival. History can be wildly unforgiving.
To be a Queen of Coorg
Generations later long after kings and queens, somewhere in 2017, I would sit in a national library in London on the rainiest of afternoons, perusing the pages of a book on Chikka Virarajendra and his rule in Coorg, a controversial time in the history of the place. The name — Palanganda Devaki — jumped out at me. It felt too good to be true, but it is not often that one gets to share a surname with a queen. When I learnt of where she came from — Kantha-Murnad, I was almost certain my father’s half-baked story of a king who chose a woman in our family for a queen, might be hers.
Myth or not, I had so little of her story to go on. All the history books talked of our Kings, their contributions, their failings, their life and death with an obsessive fascination for men in power. Women were perhaps too “complicated” to be historic.
Unsurprisingly, I have no regal portraits to share of her, no recollections of her story before marriage. Like most women had in her time in order to survive, her identity was tied to her marriage and so was the entirety of her life.
Hers is neither a story of love, power or victory, history remembers her as a widow who chose to end her life with her husband’s. Lost in the tangles of palace intrigue, of succession and ambitions of the kings and heirs around her. I should perhaps be thankful, unlike some of the other queens, her maiden name still found a mention.
I chanced upon her story as I read about battles over succession within the Haleri dynasty, family members who sought the throne. Linga Rajendra II ascended as the King in 1811, overstepping his twelve-year-old niece Devammaji in the line of succession.
Linga Rajendra II ruled Coorg until 1820. It is no secret that kings often had multiple wives. During this time, his love for hunting was famous. On a hunt in Kantha-murnad, he decided to take Palanganda Devaki for his wife, in return writing off a significant portion of land in the valley to her family.
Records neither tell us how old she was, where she came from, or what she looked like. They brush past it quickly, moving on to more dramatic affairs. What we do know that she was the King’s second wife and chief queen. They had two daughters - Muddammaji and Devammaji.
Her life came to a tragic end in 1820, when the 45-year-old king died, seeing no future for herself, she is believed to have consumed powdered diamonds and died by suicide as accounts suggest. She was buried alongside Linga Rajendra II at Gaddige, the royal cemetery near the Omkareshwara Temple in Madikeri.
Keeping History Alive
This piece neither brings her story to light, nor does it do it justice. It is the tiniest scratch on the surface I can make. That is the larger project underway — to add texture to her femininity. I have yet a lot to dig up and as I set off on the quest to do so, I write this as a humble reminder to myself.
We all come from somewhere and our stories are not meant to be written off. The solitary point that links us two women, staring at each other from two far ends of time — the past and present is that maiden name we share. If we remember her, we must remind ourselves of the other lost queens of Coorg — Mahadevammaji and her daughter Devammaji (not to be confused with Devaki’s daughter).
Once in a while, I gaze upon the same valley, the fields and the forests my father had told me about, the boundaries of which are shared between families of the clan. I cannot fathom how many generations and how many lives found livelihood, found opportunity and home in the lands that is the telling memory left of her.
There is so much to be owed to her, and yet we barely remember her. There is this undeniable nagging suspicion that I cannot help but voice — had she been a man, would her history have been better remembered? Probably. A simple nudge tells me that there is still work to be done by the historian and the reader.
The only way forward perhaps is to remember those we tend to forget, and pay it forward.
Sources:
Rice, Benjamin Lewis (1878). Mysore and Coorg, a gazetteer
Richter, G (1870). Manual of Coorg- A Gazetteer of the natural features of the country and the social and political condition of its inhabitants.
Bumpus, J (1857). Coorg and its Rajahs
Mögling, Herrmann (1855). Coorg Memoirs: An Account of Coorg and the Coorg Mission.
Venkatesa Iyengar, Masti (1984). Chikkaveera Rajendra
Mookonda, Kushalappa (10 January 2017). "The set-up of Kodagu's royal cemetery". Deccan Herarld.