The Ramnad War of Succession (1720–1729): How a Throne Dispute Shattered the Marava Kingdom

For nearly four decades, the Marava kingdom of Ramnad stood as one of the most formidable regional powers on the southeastern coast of the Tamil country, controlling the sacred pilgrimage island of Rameswaram, commanding tens of thousands of soldiers, and answering to no overlord. Then, within the space of a single decade, it tore itself apart.

The Ramnad War of Succession, fought between 1720 and 1729, is one of the lesser-known but most consequential succession conflicts in early eighteenth-century South India — a war that began as a family quarrel over a deathbed nomination and ended with a once-sovereign kingdom carved into three diminished fragments by a foreign Maratha army. This is the story of that war, the men who fought it, and the kingdom that never fully recovered.

A Kingdom Built by a Formidable King

To understand why the succession crisis of 1720 proved so destructive, it helps to understand the kingdom Raghunatha Kilavan Sethupathi had built. Kilavan, who ruled Ramnad from roughly 1671 to 1710, was the figure who transformed a feudal chieftainship — originally appointed by the Madurai Nayaks in the early 1600s to police the pilgrim routes to Rameswaram — into a genuinely independent kingdom.

He rescued the Nayak of Madurai from the tyranny of Rustam Khan and also successfully campaigned against the King of Thanjavur, who later ceded territories to him. After defeating the army of the Madurai regent Rani Mangammal, he declared the Marava country independent in 1707.

Kilavan also relocated his capital, changing his seat from Pogalur to Ramnad, close to the east coast, partly at the request of Muslim trading merchants who wanted protection from Portuguese traders, and used funds from those merchants to erect massive fortifications around his new capital. He fortified Ramanathapuram, built irrigation works across the Vaigai river basin, and patronized the great Ramanathaswamy Temple at Rameswaram. By any measure, he left behind a wealthy, militarized, and self-confident state — one capable, according to historical estimates, of mobilizing an army of thirty to forty thousand men at short notice.

But Kilavan also left behind something far more dangerous than an empty treasury: an unresolved question of succession, complicated by an extraordinarily large family. Historical accounts describe him as having dozens of wives, and crucially, his intended heir was not a straightforward matter of eldest-son inheritance.

The Seeds of Crisis: A Disputed Nomination

According to the traditional account preserved in regional histories, Kilavan first nominated his illegitimate son, Bhavani Shankar, as his successor. Due to protests from the people, he later changed course and chose his younger son, Vijayaraghunatha Sethupathi, to succeed him instead. Bhavani Shankar, for the time being, accepted his father’s final decision, but the reversal left a current of resentment running beneath the surface of court politics. An uneasy calm prevailed throughout Ramnad in the years that followed Kilavan’s death in 1710.

Vijayaraghunatha Sethupathi I, who is recorded in some genealogies as an adopted rather than strictly biological son of Kilavan, took the throne and proved himself a capable administrator. He inherited a kingdom on the brink of famine but managed the crisis well, and ruled from his base at the fortress of Aranthangi. With the assistance of French engineers, he even built a fort near the Gundar river at Kamudhi. He was, by most accounts, a devout and energetic ruler — pious toward the Rameswaram temple, generally tolerant of the Christian missionaries operating in his domain in his early years, though his attitude reportedly hardened after a personal dispute involving a free pilgrim ferry service that his own son-in-law had begun charging fares for without his knowledge.

Yet the rivalry with Bhavani Shankar never fully dissolved. It was waiting for an opportunity, and in 1720, that opportunity arrived.

1720: Open Rebellion and the Death of a King

In 1720, Bhavani Shankar broke into open revolt. Securing the military backing of the Thanjavur Maratha king Serfoji I and the Raja of Pudukkottai, he invaded Vijayaraghunatha Sethupathi’s seat at Aranthangi. This was no small alliance — Serfoji I ruled one of the most significant Maratha successor states in the south, the Thanjavur kingdom carved out by Venkoji (Ekoji), the half-brother of Chhatrapati Shivaji, decades earlier. By drawing in Thanjavur’s military weight, Bhavani Shankar transformed a domestic family dispute into a regional war involving three separate political powers: Ramnad, Thanjavur, and Pudukkottai.

The siege of Aranthangi proved catastrophic for the reigning king in a way no one had anticipated. While defending the city, Vijayaraghunatha Sethupathi fell victim to plague and died. It was not a battlefield death, but disease moving through a besieged fortress — a grim reminder of how epidemic illness, as much as steel, shaped the outcomes of early modern South Indian warfare.

Even on his deathbed, the king attempted to safeguard the succession. Just before he died, Vijayaraghunatha Sethupathi nominated Tanda Deva, a great-grandson of Raghunatha Kilavan’s father, to succeed him. But the nomination, made in extremis during an active siege, could not be enforced. Before Tanda Deva could accede to the throne, Bhavani Shankar overthrew him, aided by the influence of one of Kilavan’s former concubines, who evidently still wielded considerable sway within the palace.

Reversal of Fortune: Tanda Deva’s Counter-Alliance

Bhavani Shankar’s first seizure of the throne did not go unchallenged for long. Tanda Deva secured the support of the Madurai Nayak king and the Raja of Pudukkottai, who had switched allegiance, and together they invaded Aranthangi, forcing Bhavani Shankar to flee to Thanjavur.

The shifting allegiance of the Raja of Pudukkottai deserves particular attention, since it illustrates just how fluid the politics of the Marava and Kallar country could be during this period. Pudukkottai’s ruling Thondaiman line had, in fact, been established through Kilavan Sethupathi’s own patronage — Kilavan had appointed his brother-in-law as chief of Pudukottai, christening him Raghunatha Tondaiman, founder of the Thondaiman dynasty that would govern Pudukkottai for generations. That a state founded through Ramnad’s own dynastic generosity would switch sides twice within the same war says much about the opportunism that defined Marava-country politics in this era — alliances were transactional, built on immediate advantage rather than lasting loyalty.

Driven from Aranthangi and his position seemingly lost, Bhavani Shankar turned once more to Thanjavur. This time, he made the Marathas an offer they found difficult to refuse.

Bhavani Shankar’s Second Throne and the Price of Betrayal

Bhavani Shankar won over the Thanjavur Maratha ruler by promising him the territory of Aranthangi in return for support, and with this combined force defeated the allied armies of Ramnad, Madurai, and Pudukkottai within two or three months. Tanda Deva, the king’s chosen heir, was captured and killed — a brutal end that removed the last direct claimant tied to Vijayaraghunatha’s deathbed wishes.

Bhavani Shankar ascended the Ramnad throne for a second time, but his reign proved short-lived and deeply unpopular. Most of his trusted generals deserted him. Having won his crown through Maratha muscle, he now found himself unable, or unwilling, to pay the price he had promised. He had failed to keep his promise of delivering Aranthangi to the Thanjavur Marathas, and this earned him the ire of the Thanjavur ruler Tukkoji — by this point, leadership of the Thanjavur Maratha kingdom had passed from Serfoji I to his successor, Tukkoji.

The combination of a broken promise to a powerful ally and a deeply disaffected nobility at home proved fatal. The discontented elements within the Ramnad kingdom approached Tukkoji directly and sought his help in overthrowing Bhavani Shankar. It was a remarkable inversion: the same Thanjavur Maratha power that had once installed Bhavani Shankar on the throne was now being invited by his own subjects to remove him from it.

1729: The Battle of Uraiyur and the Partition of Ramnad

Tukkoji invaded Ramnad, and Bhavani Shankar was finally defeated in 1729 at the Battle of Uraiyur, after which he was taken prisoner to Thanjavur. Nine years of intermittent war, shifting alliances, betrayal, plague, and political assassination had reached their conclusion — not with the restoration of a legitimate Sethupathi line, but with foreign occupation and dismemberment.

The victorious Thanjavur Maratha forces partitioned the Kingdom of Ramnad into three parts. All territory north of the Pambar River was annexed outright to the Thanjavur Maratha kingdom. This was a severe territorial loss, stripping Ramnad of a significant northern belt that had taken generations of Sethupathi expansion to acquire.

The remainder of the kingdom was divided more or less equally between Kattaya Deva — a nobleman of the Ramnad court and the maternal uncle of the slain Tanda Deva — who ascended the throne as Kumara Muthu Vijayaraghunatha Sethupathi, and one of the Ramnad feudatories, who became the first Raja of the newly created Sivaganga estate. A separate scholarly account corroborates the broader pattern, noting that as a reward for its role in the civil war, the Thanjavur king claimed the northern part of the Ramnad kingdom up to the Pambar river, while a victorious Ramnad vassal also took over the western region of Sivagangai, leaving the Sethupathis with only three-fifths of their former kingdom.

In other words, the war did not simply replace one Sethupathi ruler with another. It permanently fractured the territorial unity of the kingdom, creating the separate Sivaganga estate as an independent political entity for the first time and ceding a substantial northern province to a foreign Maratha dynasty. The Ramnad kingdom lost most of its power and influence as a direct result of this war.

Consequences Beyond the Battlefield

The significance of the Ramnad War of Succession extends well beyond the immediate territorial losses. Several longer-term consequences are worth tracing out.

The birth of Sivaganga as a separate state. Before 1729, the Sivaganga region had existed as a subordinate palayam within the broader Ramnad polity, originally established by Kilavan Sethupathi himself. The post-war partition elevated it into an independent estate with its own ruling line — a political entity that would go on to have its own complicated history, including a famous later war against the British East India Company in the 1770s and 1780s under Veerapandiya Kattabomman’s contemporaries and the legendary queen Velu Nachiyar.

A demonstrated pattern of fragility in poligar successions. Comparative research on succession crises among South Indian “poligar” or palayakkarar kingdoms in this period has noted that Ramnad’s succession troubles were not an isolated incident. Scholarly analysis comparing succession patterns across Ramnad, Thanjavur, and the Ikkeri kingdom found that Ramnad experienced three successions around 1673 and a further three between 1725 and 1729 alone, marking it as an unusually turbulent court even by the standards of an era when contested successions were common across the small kingdoms of southern India.

The expansion of Maratha Thanjavur’s regional influence. The war offered the Thanjavur Marathas — themselves a relatively recent transplant into Tamil politics, having been established by Venkoji only in the 1670s — a direct opportunity to expand their territorial reach southward at Ramnad’s expense, without having to fight a war of pure conquest. By backing rival claimants and ultimately serving as kingmaker, Thanjavur extracted permanent territorial gain at minimal cost, a textbook example of how succession disputes among neighboring states could be exploited by an opportunistic third party.

A weakened Sethupathi line heading into the colonial era. The Ramnad kingdom that emerged from the 1729 partition was smaller, poorer, and less militarily formidable than the kingdom Kilavan had built. This weakened condition would prove significant decades later, when Ramnad became entangled in the Carnatic Wars between Britain and France, and later still when the kingdom was formally reduced to a zamindari estate under the East India Company’s Permanent Settlement after a further heir dispute in the 1790s. The seeds of that long decline into subordinate zamindari status — a status the Ramnad estate held until Indian independence — were arguably sown in the partition of 1729.

Sources and Reliability

It is worth noting, in the interest of historical honesty, that the surviving narrative of this war rests heavily on a small number of secondary sources, most traceable back to early twentieth-century colonial-era historiography, including R. Sathianathaier’s history of the Madurai Nayaks and regional gazetteer traditions compiled by British administrators. Names, dates, and even the precise identity of certain figures — such as whether Vijayaraghunatha Sethupathi I was Kilavan’s biological or adopted son — vary somewhat between sources.

The broad arc of the conflict, however — rival claimant, Maratha intervention, royal death by plague, a betrayed alliance, and final partition at the Battle of Uraiyur in 1729 — is consistently corroborated across multiple independent accounts, lending the overall narrative reasonable historical confidence even where individual details remain contested.

The Ramnad War of Succession was, on its surface, a dynastic quarrel between an illegitimate son and a chosen heir. But its consequences rippled far beyond the personal ambitions of Bhavani Shankar and the ill-fated Vijayaraghunatha Sethupathi I. It demonstrated how quickly a powerful, independent Marava kingdom could be undone by internal division, and how readily neighboring powers like Thanjavur’s Marathas could convert a succession crisis into permanent territorial gain.

By the time the Battle of Uraiyur brought the fighting to its close in 1729, the once-unified Sethupathi kingdom of Ramnad had been split into three, the Sivaganga estate had been born, and a once-formidable warrior kingdom had begun the long, slow decline that would eventually see it reduced to a colonial-era zamindari. Few wars of this scale in the Tamil country have left so lasting a mark on the political map of the region while remaining so little known outside specialist circles.

Bibliography

• Kamal, S. M. History of the Sethupathis. Sharmila Publishers, Ramanathapuram, 2003. (Cited for the chronology of Sethupathi rulers and the Dalavai succession.)
• Natarajan, S. The Setupatis of Ramnad: A Study in Political History. (Cited in Shodhganga for the succession chronology of Kuttan and Dalavai Sethupathi.)
• Nelson, J. H. The Madura Country: A Manual. (Cited for the war’s trigger—Dalavai’s announcement regarding his adopted son.)

Related Posts

• Hidden Story of the Ramnad Succession War of 1637
• The Battle of Vedalai: The 1549 Clash of Empires
• The Iron Giant of Tanjore: Discovering the Rajagopala Beerangi
• Pudukkottai State: The Complete History of Tamil Nadu’s Last Royal Kingdom
• History of the Ramnad Kingdom and Sethupathi Rulers (1590–1949)
• Tanjore Marathas: The Forgotten Delta Dynasty
• The Battle of Paramakudi: First Matchlock War in Tamil Nadu history