Chikka Devaraja
Chikka Devaraja was the Wodeyar who turned Mysore into a revenue state, the ruler who in thirty-one years doubled the kingdom's territory by buying Bangalore from the Marathas and taking the Salem and Baramahal country from the Nayaks, who put down a rising of the peasants against his taxes by inviting their leaders to a feast and killing them, and who sent an embassy to Aurangzeb and got back a signet ring, an ivory throne and the right to the title of raja, which his descendants used until 1950. He came to the throne in 1673 after his uncle Dodda Devaraja and had spent his youth as a prisoner of that uncle in a hill fort, where a Jain teacher educated him. He built the treasury first. The eighteen departments of the athara kacheri, the survey and assessment of the land, the tax on every craft and the salt monopoly were his. The Jangama priests who led the peasants of the Lingayat villages against the new taxes in 1687 were the men killed at the feast at Nanjangud. The Marathas under Shivaji's half-brother Ekoji held Bangalore and sold it to him in 1687 for three lakhs of rupees as the Mughal army came south, and he then made himself useful to the Mughals against the Marathas, which is how the embassy to Aurangzeb came about in 1699 and how he got Salem. He took Hosur, Dharmapuri and the country to the Palar, pushed into the Coimbatore plain, and had a standing army paid from the treasury rather than from land grants, which the Marathas did not. He was a poet in Kannada and a Vaishnava, and the Chikkadevaraya Binnapam, a set of petitions to Vishnu, is his. The court literature of Mysore in Kannada begins with him and his minister Tirumalarya. He rebuilt the fort at Srirangapatna and lived there. He died in 1704 and was succeeded by a deaf and dumb son, and the ministers who ran the state for that son were the beginning of the dalavayi rule that ended in Haidar Ali.
- Lived: 1645 CE – 1704 CE
- Nationality: Indian
- Roles: king, monarch
