Marthanda Varma
Marthanda Varma succeeded to Venāḍ in 1729 and spent his reign destroying the power of the noble houses and temple corporations that had constrained his predecessors, annexing the neighbouring principalities northward, and building a standing army drilled on European lines under the Flemish officer Eustachius De Lannoy.
In 1741 at Colachel his forces defeated a Dutch East India Company expedition and captured De Lannoy, who then entered Travancore service and modernised its army. Colachel is among the very few instances of an Indian state defeating a European force in open battle in the eighteenth century, and it effectively ended Dutch ambitions on the Malabar coast.
In 1750 Marthanda Varma performed the Trippadidanam, dedicating the kingdom to the deity Padmanābha at Thiruvananthapuram and thereafter ruling as the god's servant. It was a device of some subtlety: it placed the state's property beyond the reach of rival claimants and bound the dynasty's legitimacy to the temple.
Reform and after
Travancore under British paramountcy from 1805 became known for administrative reform and, by the late nineteenth century, for the highest literacy rate in India. It was also a state in which caste disabilities were enforced with unusual rigour — including rules of distance pollution — and the reform movements that arose against them, under Ayyankali, Narayana Guru and the Vaikom satyagraha of 1924–25, are central to modern Kerala's history.
The Temple Entry Proclamation of 1936, opening state temples to all Hindus regardless of caste, was among the first such measures in India and was described by Gandhi as a modern miracle.
The state's dewan attempted to declare independence in 1947; the plan collapsed and Travancore acceded to India, merging with Cochin in 1949 and into Kerala in 1956. The treasure vaults of the Padmanābhaswāmy temple, opened under court supervision in 2011, were found to contain one of the largest accumulations of gold and jewels ever recorded in a single place.
Further reading
- Keay, John. India: A History. HarperCollins, 2000
- Wolpert, Stanley. A New History of India. Oxford University Press, 2009
- Bayly, Susan. Caste, Society and Politics in India. Cambridge University Press, 1999
- Brown, Judith M. Modern India: The Origins of an Asian Democracy. Oxford University Press, 1994
- Chandra, Bipan. India's Struggle for Independence. Penguin, 1989
See also
This entry was last revised on 1 August 2026.