Kingdom of Coorg

The Kingdom of Coorg, Kodagu in the hills, was the independent kingdom of India's Western Ghats from the sixteenth century until 1834, ruled from Madikeri by a branch of the Ikkeri Nayakas. Its coffee slopes and pepper vines paid for a soldiery out of all proportion to its acres, and its rajahs built the great palace and stone fort at Madikeri whose walls still frown over the town. and its rajahs raided Mysore, Malabar and Canara by turn while marrying into every court of the coast. Hyder Ali and Tipu Sultan both coveted the passes: Mysore occupied the little kingdom from 1780 to 1788, and the restored rajah put himself under British protection, which proved a slower poison. Dissent, debt and the Company's hunger ended the game in 1834, when the British deposed the last rajah for misrule and folded Coorg into Madras, leaving the Kodava customs, the ancestor houses and the hills themselves as the kingdom's monument.