01Five years a prisoner
When the second Company force under Colonel Deacon took Kittur in December 1824, Chennamma and her daughters-in-law were sent under guard to the fort at Bailhongal, some 15 km away. She spent her last years there reading and in worship, while Sangolli Rayanna, one of her captains, kept up a guerrilla war in the hills in the name of her adopted son. She died in the fort on 21 February 1829. Rayanna was betrayed and hanged at Nandagad in January 1831.
02The samadhi
Her samadhi, a small stone memorial in the Lingayat manner, was long neglected and has been restored by the Karnataka government, with a garden around it. People of the Kittur country come on her birth and death days, and on 23 October, the day of her victory over Thackeray in 1824, the Kittur Utsava is held at Kittur and remembered here too. Bailhongal is a busy market town of the black-soil plain on the Malaprabha side of Belagavi district.
The life of this place
- December 1824After the fall of Kittur, Rani Chennamma is imprisoned in Bailhongal fort.
- 21 February 1829Rani Chennamma dies a prisoner at Bailhongal.
Bailhongal is about 50 km south-east of Belagavi; Kittur fort and its museum are 15 km away and can be seen the same day.
