your bridge home
True Valor
Revenue that had always been paid in grain was now demanded in cash, from a hill peasantry that had almost none.
On 5 April 1837, rebels took Mangalore and raised the flag of the Haleri dynasty over Bavutagudda hill. They held the town for about a fortnight.
It was twenty years before 1857, and almost nobody outside coastal Karnataka has heard of it.
The British had annexed Kodagu in 1834. The Coorg War.
It was a short campaign against Raja Chikka Virarajendra, who surrendered on 10 April, and was deposed. The kingdom of the Haleri line, which had held that hill country through the whole Mysore period, ended.
What followed the annexation is what caused the rising, and it was administrative rather than military.
Revenue that had been paid in kind was now demanded in cash.
Which meant a cultivator had to sell his crop, at whatever price the market gave. To pay a tax that had previously come out of the harvest itself. The Company took a monopoly on salt and tobacco, which put a price on two things every household needed and had previously got locally. And the assessment rose.
The rest of this story, read aloud, and a new one every day.