Splendours of Royal Mysore
The Untold Story of the Wodeyars
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EXCERPTS
THE SANDS OF TALAKAD—MYTH VS SCIENCE
The submerged temples of Talakad, the disappearance of Malingi and the strange phenomenon of the Wodeyar lineage raise questions that perplex any reasoning intellect.
To any rational mind, while the last line of the Rani’s curse might seem logical—that of destroying the very family of the Wodeyars for what they had done to her and her family—why the poor towns of Talakad and Malingi had to become scapegoats in this entire drama baffles everyone. Wouldn’t it have been better if she had cursed the capital city of the Wodeyars, Srirangapatna, to death and disaster? In what way did the submergence of Talakad and the whirlpool formations at Malingi affect the Wodeyars? These are questions that do not have a direct answer and remain shrouded in mystery forever.
An unbiased and scientific approach to the story of Alamelamma would naturally bring a question to anyone’s mind--- Was she someone who was spiritually powerful enough to curse an entire lineage and a town to doom? Have there been any evidences or references in the texts to suggest that she was a woman blessed with supernatural powers, bestowed on her after perhaps years of penance or meditation? Sadly none of the sort exists. Someone who is spiritually advanced enough to pronounce such terrible curses on others would generally be believed to have sacrificed all sense of attachments and desires. But here was a woman whose lust for the gold ornaments seemed all encompassing! How often in Hindu traditions do people submit offerings to a deity and take the same back for their personal use? Did the social customs of those times permit widows to deck themselves up with such fanciful jewelry? Raja Wodeyar was supposedly asking these ornaments for the Goddess of the Srirangapatna temple and not for the inmates of his harem. Someone who would rather end her life and throw the jewels in the river, than submit them to the presiding Deity could most certainly not have been a saint capable enough of pronouncing catastrophic curses.
It is noteworthy that historical documentations of the 17th and 18th century make no reference to Rani Alamelamma. In fact even the accounts of British travelers like Francis Buchanan, who has recorded the minutest of details related to the Mysore Kingdom, its people and their traditions, in his account “A Journey from Madras through the countries of Mysore, Canara and Malabar” speaks casually of a legend of the “natives” during his visit to Malingi. He records that they believed that the curious sand formation that had submerged many temples in neighbouring Talakad was the after-effects of the curse of a local woman who was drowned while crossing the river to visit the temple. So enraged was she with the God of the place for having denied her a darshan, that she cursed the temples to be submerged by sand! Nowhere is the reference made to a Queen who lost her life under such tragic circumstances. If this story was true enough, could someone like Buchanan have missed out on something as important as this, even after interviewing scores of locals for his account? Could the locals themselves have missed telling him such an interesting and significant tale? Seems extremely unlikely!
Other contemporary records have similar tales to tell. Lt. Col. Wilks, Political Resident at the Mysore Court, who compiled an exhaustive history of the region, misses out on the Rani too! These documentations were done in the early nineteenth century. If the Rani episode had indeed occurred in 1610, a neat 200 years before, could vernacular and British literature have missed the episode altogether, for so long?
The first time that Rani Alamelamma makes an appearance in the documentation of the history of Mysore is in Rice’s Gazetteer of 1876 and the three-line curse makes it presence felt. The story is further dwelt upon in the Annals with all the dramatization of the events preceding her death. Interestingly the Annals was published by the then Maharaja himself and he took active interest in its contents and publication! If this story was such an embarrassment for the Royal Family, why did the Maharaja not censor it completely? It thus becomes clear that the story of Alamelamma was a fabricated one that took birth in the 19th century—may be towards the 1830’s or 1840’s ---and was most probably at the behest of the Royal family itself. Rationalists argue that the Doctrine of Lapse of Lord Dalhousie that was enforced during that time spurred the royal court to concoct this story. The nobility must have witnessed with alarm, the annexation of numerous Indian princely kingdoms by the British on the pretext of illegitimate succession or the absence of a legal male heir. That the then King of Mysore had no legitimate male heir was reason enough for them to believe that the axe could fall on them next. To avert this, a possible escape route might have been to attribute the childlessness to a curse of yore and try to substantiate it by placing it in a historical and geographical era and circumstance of 1610, Talakad and the Vijayanagara Viceroy’s family. Scientists, geologists and archaeologists dismiss these legends as mere mumbo-jumbo. They attribute more plausible reasons for the occurrence of these phenomena. The course of the Cauvery seems to hold the key, they say, as it takes a sharp meander on its route along the Mudukutore Betta or Hill. High school geography textbooks tell us that when a river meanders and turns back on its course, the outer banks of the river obviously get eroded by the waters of the river, but it also exposes the inner banks, which get deposited with sand and sediments. In the mid-14th century, a minister of the Vijayanagara Empire, Madhava Raya, supposedly built the Madhava Mantri dam. This created lower water stages downstream and exposed the deposits of the river that forced the Cauvery to shift its course. This, coupled with large scale deforestation in the region, created fine sand and silt which got trapped in the topographical area of Talakad bounded closely by the tall temple structures and gradually started accumulating over the entire region. Archaeologists supplement the theory by virtue of their excavations, which reveal that it was no catastrophe that killed people in large numbers or buried their remains in the sands, but a natural and gradual process. The shifting course of the Cauvery in a westward direction exposed the inner banks as stated earlier. But it also eroded the outer banks on which stood Malingi, which was perhaps what was meant by Malingi becoming a terrible whirlpool.
The curse of Rani Alamelamma remains shrouded in mystery. The third part of her curse on the Wodeyar genealogy is also something that doesn’t make rational sense. Especially because the very object of her curse, Raja Wodeyar, begot sons! If the impact of the curse was to get diluted in its very first occurrence, one can comfortably doubt its veracity and its effect on future generations. The Wodeyar lineage (till the last ruler of the Dynasty of 15 kings who succeeded Raja Wodeyar) shows that a possible impact of the Kings dying sonless might have happened only thrice in its family tree. Even in these cases, most often the Kings did not have legitimate sons from the Crown Queen. But the countless concubines or other queens had sons, but they would not have been acceptable as heirs to the Throne. It is but natural for a King with so many wives and concubines to spend the bulk of his time and divert his affection to them rather than the principal queen. Could that and not the curse have then been the reason for the absence of a male heir? Also, during the 18th Century, when the Kingdom was usurped, it was alleged that the young Kings who had been placed as puppets on the Throne were surreptitiously murdered by the usurper by the time they reached their puberty. Obviously such young lads could not have had sons at such an early age, necessitating an adoption from the collateral line.
Thus, while every rational argument goes against the myth of Alamelamma and her existence, she still continues to capture the imagination of people.But the imagery of an innocent woman being wronged by a man intoxicated with power, and the subsequent suicide of the lady in question, is too strong not to affect the psyche of the people. Perhaps for this very reason, despite all the questions being raised about the historical validity and rationale of the Alamelamma legend, it still continues to be narrated as folklore with such conviction as merits a documented fact.
Meanwhile for reasons of geological phenomena or the curse, Talakad stands as a mute spectator to this sudden metamorphosis, wailing amidst a million dunes with the fables of the past swishing with the wind across its arid expanses. The township of Talakad to this day lies submerged in sand dunes, a town on the banks of the river Cauvery that bears the brunt of its hoary past.
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