Kanthirava Narasaraja I
Kanthirava Narasaraja I was the Wodeyar who turned Mysore from a tributary of the dying Vijayanagara empire into a kingdom of its own, beating off the Bijapur sultanate's army at Srirangapatna in the first year of his reign, taking the southern Karnataka country as far as the Kaveri gorges and the Nilgiri foothills. He struck the first coin the state issued, the kanthiraya fanam that circulated for two centuries, and leaving his successors a treasury, a fort and a title. He was also, the court poets say, a wrestler who killed a champion from the north with his hands, and the name Ranadhira, brave in battle, was given him in that story. He was a nephew of the raja Chamaraja and was chosen in 1638 by the minister who ran the state after a dozen years of weak kings, and within months the Bijapur general Ranadulla Khan, with the young Shahji Bhonsle in his army, came down from the north. He besieged the island capital of Srirangapatna. The siege failed, the raja's cavalry cut up the retreat. Bijapur turned its attention to the Bangalore country instead, leaving Mysore to expand south and west. He took Satyamangalam and the passes of the Bhavani, pushed into the Coimbatore plain against the Nayaks of Madurai, and took the country of the Changalvas around Piriyapatna, so that Mysore's frontier ran from the Western Ghats to the Kaveri falls. The revenue was reorganised under the dalavayi, the commander-minister whose office would one day swallow the kings. He built the Narasimha temple at Srirangapatna, gave the ranks of the court their Kannada titles, and was the patron of the poet Govinda Vaidya, whose Kanthirava Narasaraja Vijaya is the kingdom's first chronicle and the source of the wrestling story. He died in 1659 without a son and the throne went to a cousin, Dodda Devaraja, and then to Chikka Devaraja, who made the state the centralised revenue machine that Haidar Ali would seize a century later. The fanam bearing his name outlasted every ruler between.
- Lived: 1615 CE – 1659 CE
- Nationality: Indian
- Roles: king, monarch
