Nayaks of Thanjavur

A Telugu court in Tamil country

The Thanjavur Nayaks, like their counterparts at Madurai and Gingee, were Vijayanagara appointees of Telugu origin who became independent after 1565. Their court language was Telugu, and the migration of Telugu-speaking administrators, poets and musicians into the Tamil delta in this period permanently altered its culture.

Raghunatha Nayak, ruling in the early seventeenth century, was himself a composer and a writer, and his court produced a substantial literature — including works by women poets such as Ramabhadramba and Madhuravani, which is unusual enough to be worth noting.

Music and after

The Nayak and subsequent Maratha courts at Thanjavur made the city the centre of Carnatic music and of Bharatanāṭyam as a codified form. The Sarasvati Mahal library, begun under the Nayaks and enormously expanded by the Maratha rajas, holds tens of thousands of manuscripts and is among the oldest working libraries in Asia.

The dynasty fell in 1673 in a succession war, and Thanjavur passed to a Maratha branch under Venkoji, half-brother of Shivaji, whose descendants ruled until the British annexation in 1855.