Wodeyars of Mysore

From feudatory to kingdom

The Wodeyars began as chiefs under Vijayanagara and became independent after that empire's defeat at Talikota in 1565. Rāja Woḍeyar I took Srirangapatna from the Vijayanagara viceroy in 1610, and under Chikka Devarāja in the late seventeenth century Mysore became a substantial Deccan power with a reorganised revenue system.

The Daśarā festival at Mysore, with its procession and its display of royal authority, was taken over from Vijayanagara practice and has been maintained since.

Eclipse and restoration

In the mid-eighteenth century real power passed to the commander Hyder Ali, and from 1761 he and then his son Tipu Sultan governed Mysore while the Wodeyars remained nominally on the throne. After Tipu's death at Srirangapatna in 1799 the British restored the dynasty under a subsidiary alliance, and administered the state directly from 1831 to 1881 before returning it.

The restored kingdom became the most admired of the princely states. Under Krishnarāja Wodeyar IV and his dewans — M. Visvesvaraya above all — Mysore built the Krishnarajasagara dam and the hydroelectric works at Shivanasamudra, which made Bangalore one of the first cities in Asia with electric street lighting; it founded the Mysore University, the Indian Institute of Science with Tata funding, and the Bank of Mysore, and it established a representative assembly decades before most of British India had one.

Mysore acceded to India in 1947, and the last maharaja served as governor of the successor state until 1964.