Fall of Nerkattumseval

01The western league

From the 1750s the Nawab of Arcot, backed by Company troops, tried to collect tribute from the palaiyakkarars of the Tirunelveli country. Puli Thevar of Nerkattumseval refused, and joined the chiefs of the western blacklands in a league; an expedition under Colonel Heron and Mahfuz Khan in 1755 failed to bring him to heel. His forts at Nerkattumseval, Vasudevanallur and Panayur, of mud and stone set among palmyra and thorn, became the centre of resistance in the south.

02Yusuf Khan’s guns

Muhammad Yusuf Khan, the Company’s commandant for Madurai and Tirunelveli, brought heavy guns against the forts in the autumn of 1760 and battered them for months. Nerkattumseval and the other forts fell in May 1761. Puli Thevar escaped. He came back to his country when Yusuf Khan himself rebelled against the Nawab and was hanged in 1764, and he held out until 1767, after which he disappears from the record. Tamil tradition and ballads honour him as the first to raise arms against the Company in the south.

Person · fought 1755–1767 CEPuli ThevarChief of Nerkattumseval in the Tirunelveli country, Puli Thevar refused to pay tribute to the Nawab of Arcot and his Company allies from 1755 and fought them for over a decade from his forts. Tamil Nadu remembers him as one of the first in the south to take the field against the Company.Read →