Madurai Nayak dynasty | |||||||||||||||||||||||
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| 1529–1815 | |||||||||||||||||||||||
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| History | |||||||||||||||||||||||
• Established | 1529 | ||||||||||||||||||||||
• Disestablished | 1815 | ||||||||||||||||||||||
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The Madurai Nayaks were a Telugu dynasty[1] who ruled most of modern-day Tamil Nadu, India, with Madurai as their capital. The Madurai Nayaks had their origins in the Balija warrior clans of present-day Andhra Pradesh.[2] The Nayak reign which lasted for over two centuries from around 1529 to 1736 was noted for its achievements in arts, cultural and administrative reforms, revitalization of temples previously ransacked by the Delhi Sultans, and the inauguration of a unique architectural style.[3]
The dynasty consisted of 13 rulers, of whom nine were kings, two were queens, and two were joint-kings. The most notable among them were king Tirumala Nayaka and queen Rani Mangammal. Foreign trade was conducted mainly with the Dutch and the Portuguese, as the British and the French had not yet made inroads into the region.
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- Howes, Jennifer (1 January 1998). The Courts of Pre-colonial South India: Material Culture and Kingship. Psychology Press. p. 28. ISBN 07-0071-585-1.
- Vink, Markus (14 October 2015). Encounters on the Opposite Coast: The Dutch East India Company and the Nayaka State of Madurai in the Seventeenth Century. Brill. p. 70. ISBN 978-90-04-27262-0.
- Smith, Bardwell L.; Reynolds, Holly Baker (1 January 1987). The City As a Sacred Center: Essays on Six Asian Contexts. Brill. p. 12. ISBN 978-90-04-08471-1.
- Selby, Martha Ann; Peterson, Indira Viswanathan (22 May 2008). Tamil Geographies: Cultural Constructions of Space and Place in South India. SUNY Press. p. 61. ISBN 978-0-7914-7245-3.
- More, J. B. P. (1 November 2020). Pondicherry, Tamil Nadu and South India under French Rule: From François Martin to Dupleix 1674-1754. Routledge. p. 26. ISBN 978-1-000-26356-5.
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- Gita V. Pai, ed. (2023). Architecture of Sovereignty: Stone Bodies, Colonial Gazes, and Living Gods in South India. Cambridge University Press. p. 36, 51. ISBN 9781009150156.
Madurai rulers were of likely Balija heritage, merchant-warriors, who came from the relatively less-stratified arid zones of the Andhra region
- Antje Flüchter, Rouven Wirbser, ed. (2017). Translating Catechisms, Translating Cultures: The Expansion of Catholicism in the Early Modern World. BRILL. p. 229. ISBN 9789004353060.
Madurai was a prosperous city ruled by Nāyaka kings who were Telugu warriors with Balija cultivators and merchant-caste affiliations
- Sheldon Pollock, ed. (2003). Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia. University of California Press. p. 413. ISBN 9780520228214.
.... in the seventeenth century, when warriors/traders from the Balija caste acquired kingship of the southern kingdoms of Madurai and Tanjavur.
- David Dean Shulman, ed. (2020). Classical Telugu Poetry. University of California Press. p. 57. ISBN 9780520344525.
..... in the Tamil country, where Telugu Balija families had established local Nāyaka states (in Senji, Tanjavur, Madurai, and elsewhere) in the course of the sixteenth century.
- Dr. B.Ramachndra Reddy R. Nata Rajan, ed. (2007). "Identity and Crisis of Telugu Migrants of Tamil Region". Itihas. 33. Andhra Pradesh State Archives and Research Institute: 145.
....It is told that the Nayak Kings of Madurai and Tanjore were Balijas , who had marital relations among themselves and with the Vijaya Nagara rulers, and so were appointed as the rulers of these regions.
- G. S. Ghurye, ed. (1969). Caste and Race in India. Popular Prakashan. p. 106. ISBN 9788171542055.
The Nayak kings of Madura and Tanjore were Balijas , traders by caste
- Eugene F. Irschick, ed. (1969). Politics and Social Conflict in South India. University of California Press. p. 8.
The successors of the Vijayanagar empire, the Nayaks of Madura and Tanjore, were Balija Naidus
- Muzaffar Alam, ed. (1998). The Mughal State, 1526-1750. Oxford University Press. p. 35. ISBN 978-0-19-563905-6.
As an arrangement, the Golconda practice in the first half of the seventeenth century was quite similar in crucial respects to what obtained further south, in the territories of the Chandragiri ruler, and the Nayaks of Senji, Tanjavur and Madurai. Here too revenue-farming was common, and the ruling families were closely allied to an important semi-commercial, semi-warrior caste group, the Balija Naidus.
- A. Satyanarayana, Mukkamala Radhakrishna Sarma, ed. (1996). Castes, Communities, and Culture in Andhra Desa, 17th & 18th Centuries, A.D. Osmania University. p. 145.
After the fall of the dynasty several Balija Nayudu chieftains rose into prominence. Tanjore and Madura kingdoms were the most important of such new kingdoms
- Velcheru Narayana Rao, Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ed. (1992). Symbols of Substance Court and State in Nāyaka Period Tamilnadu. Oxford University Press. p. 10. ISBN 978-0-19-563021-3.
Originally part of the great Telugu migrations southward into the Tamil country in the 15th and 16th centuries, the Balija merchant- warriors reveal the rise of hitherto marginal, and only recently politicized.. These mobile, aggressive, land-hungry, Telugu-speaking warriors...helped to build the Nāyaka state-system and to impregnate it with their particular cultural vision; strong surviving traditions; supported by contemporary evidence, assert Balija origins and / or marital connections for the major Nāyaka dynasties in the Tamil country quite apart from the well-known Balija role in restructuring the revenue systems of Nāyaka Tanjavur and Madurai
- Lennart Bes (2022). The Heirs of Vijayanagara: Court Politics in Early Modern South India. Leiden University Press. p. 79.
The dynasty's first ruler was Vishvanatha Nayaka, son of the imperial courtier and military officer Nagama Nayaka. He belonged to one of the Balija castes, which originated in the Telugu region and whose members undertook both military and mercantile activities. Vishvanatha was possibly installed at Madurai around 1530 and reigned until c. 1563
- Noboru Karashima, ed. (1999). Kingship in Indian History. Manohar Publishers & Distributors. p. 192. ISBN 9788173043260.
To understand the historical process of the reducing of the Nayakas as an open status group into a mere shell of what they had formerly been and the growth of respective caste identities, the Telugu Balija caste and its history may give an important clue. Many Nayakas, including the three major Nayakas in the Tamil area and the Nayakas of Cannapattana, Beluru, and Rayadurga in the Kannada area, are said to have been Telugu Balijas.
- Biplab Auddya, ed. (2017). Research in Multidisciplinary Subjects. Vol. 6. The Hill Publication. p. 18. ISBN 9788196477660.
Many later rulers were also of different castes, such as the Madurai Nayaks, Balijas (traders) who ruled from 1559 to 1739
- Francine R. Frankel, M. S. A. Rao, ed. (1989). Dominance and State Power in Modern India: Decline of a Social Order. Oxford University Press. p. 30. ISBN 9780195620986.
The Nayak kings of Madura and Tanjore were balijas ( traders )
- Peter N. Stearns, William Leonard Langer, ed. (2001). The Encyclopedia of World History Ancient, Medieval, and Modern, Chronologically Arranged. Houghton Mifflin. p. 368. ISBN 9780395652374.
The Vijayanagara Empire developed, in its second half, into what is known as the nayaka state-system, in which administrative and political relations differed significantly from what had gone before. While the Vijayanagara rulers continued to hold ultimate power over a broad belt of territory, they shared authority locally with a number of military chiefs, or nayakas. Originally part of the great Telugu migrations southward into the Tamil country in the 15th and 16th centuries, Balija merchant-warriors who claimed these nayaka positions rose to political and cultural power and supported an ethos that emphasized nonascriptive, heroic criteria in legitimizing political power.
- Daniel D'Attilio, ed. (1995). The Last Vijayanagara Kings. University of Wisconsin--Madison. p. 81.
......many of the Telugu migrant groups who settled in Tamil Nadu from the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries were led by Balija warriors . These Balijas and their descendants became local rulers under the auspices of Vijayanagara.
- Markus Vink (2015). Encounters on the Opposite Coast: The Dutch East India Company and the Nayaka State of Madurai in the Seventeenth Century. BRILL. p. 57. ISBN 9789004272620.
- South Asia Politics. Vol. 5. Rashtriya Jagriti Sansthan. 2006. p. 14.
- Gita V. Pai, ed. (2023). Architecture of Sovereignty: Stone Bodies, Colonial Gazes, and Living Gods in South India. Cambridge University Press. p. 36, 51. ISBN 9781009150156.
- ^ The Journal of the Ganganatha Jha Research Institute. Vol. 26. 1970. p. 677.