your bridge home
True Valor
The harvest has failed, and the Company's collector does not consider that a reason to reduce the bill.
The rains had failed, and the Company wanted its money anyway.
That is the whole of the quarrel, stripped of everything that has been added since. A local ruler in the far south of the Tamil country said he could not pay tribute in a drought year. The East India Company said the tribute was not conditional on the harvest.
Everything else followed from that.
Veerapandiya Kattabomman was born in 1760 at Panchalankurichi, in what is now Thoothukudi district.
He became polygar there at thirty. The forty-seventh of his line.
The palayakkarar or polygar system needs explaining, because the entire conflict turns on it. A polygar held a territory under a larger sovereign.
And within it he had two rights that mattered. He collected the taxes. And he raised the soldiers. He was not a landlord and not a mere official. He was a small hereditary ruler with an army.
The rest of this story, read aloud, and a new one every day.