Forgotten Forts of Tamil Nadu: Beyond Vellore and Gingee

When travellers speak of Tamil Nadu’s forts, the names Vellore, Gingee, Dindigul and Tiruchirapalli fill the conversation. These are the forts that survived — the ones that kept their walls, gained their ASI plaques and found their way into guidebooks. But Tamil Nadu’s military landscape was never this neat. Dozens of fortifications guarded river crossings, hill passes, coastal inlets and inland trade routes across the state. Most of them are gone. Some survive as mounds of rubble. A few retain a single wall, a collapsed bastion or a temple that the fort once enclosed.

This article excavates eight of these overlooked or demolished strongholds — chosen because each one carries a distinct history that the standard fort narrative ignores, from the mud ramparts of a forgotten Tondaiman lineage in coastal Pudukkottai to a Vijayanagara chieftain’s twin-peak citadel in the Baramahal hills, from Tipu Sultan’s Nilgiri watch post to the Dutch-engineered garrison on the Kanyakumari shore.

Erode Fort: The Mud Citadel That Dheeran Chinnamalai Attacked on the Kaveri Bank

The city of Erode is today described by its own civic literature as “built around a demolished fort.” That phrase says everything. At the heart of one of Tamil Nadu’s fastest-growing textile cities lies an absence — a negative space where a fortification once stood, erased so completely that most residents cannot say where its walls ran. But that absence has a history worth recovering.

Erode’s fortification history begins in the regional politics of Kongu Nadu, the ancient western Tamil country that the Cheras, Rashtrakutas, Cholas, Vijayanagara emperors and Madurai Nayaks all successively controlled. The Madurai Nayaks ruled Erode from 1559 to 1736, during which time the town developed around its position on the southern bank of the Kaveri. The fort itself is attributed to the early seventeenth century. Historical records indicate it was constructed in the early seventeenth century by a local chieftain named Chandramathi Mudaliar, with renovations undertaken in 1640 under Nayak rule. Like many Kongu Nadu fortifications of its era, it was a mud fort — earthen ramparts faced with lime plaster, reinforced at intervals with bastions — rather than a stone structure.

What made Erode strategically significant was not the fort’s architecture but its geography. The Kaveri at Erode is wide and fordable only at certain points; whoever controlled those crossings controlled movement between the Coimbatore plateau to the west and the Salem-Dharmapuri uplands to the north-east.

The fort sat directly on the river bank, commanding the principal ford. During the time of Hyder Ali, Erode had an estimated population of 1,500 people and 300 houses, with a mud fort that reportedly garrisoned 4,000 soldiers. The fort was surrounded by coconut groves and the Kaveri river. That garrison figure — 4,000 soldiers in a town of 1,500 — reflects Erode’s strategic weight to the Mysore military machine rather than its civilian importance.

“A large mud fort occupied by a battalion of sepoys.”

— Francis Buchanan Hamilton, describing Erode Fort in his survey of 1800, barely a year after Tipu Sultan’s death

Hyder Ali incorporated Erode into his defensive network along the Kaveri after the Madurai Nayaks were finally broken in 1736. During the Anglo-Mysore Wars of 1767–1799, Hyder Ali and Tipu Sultan used Erode as a supply and staging point within the Kongu Nadu regional defence network. The fort changed hands during the First Anglo-Mysore War when British forces briefly captured it in 1768, though Mysore reclaimed it shortly after. British troops first captured Erode during the First Anglo-Mysore War in 1768, though they soon lost control of the city.

The most dramatic chapter in Erode Fort’s history comes not from any Mysore campaign but from the resistance movement that followed Tipu Sultan’s fall. After Tipu was killed at Srirangapatna in 1799 and the Kongu region passed to the East India Company, the Kongu chieftain Dheeran Chinnamalai — who had fought alongside Tipu in the Mysore wars — refused to accept British authority.

In 1801, Chinnamalai, allied with other poligars including the Maruthu brothers, launched an attack on the Erode Fort from the banks of the Kaveri River. The assault caught British troops off guard, resulting in 49 casualties among the Company forces, though Chinnamalai withdrew before fully capturing the site. It was one of the more audacious guerrilla strikes of the Second Polygar War — a predawn river-bank assault that demonstrated how completely the British had underestimated the capacity for organised indigenous resistance after Tipu’s defeat.

The fort’s end came not through battle but through bureaucratic decision-making with an accidental humanitarian footnote. The garrison ultimately withdrew in 1807 and the ruined fort was levelled by the British in 1877, during relief works for the famine of the same year. The rubble from the fort’s demolition was used as fill and hardcore for emergency public works that employed famine-relief labour — a grim irony in which the last material trace of Kongu Nadu’s resistance was pulverised to provide work for the starving. Nothing survives above ground. The Kaveri remains, and the ford it once commanded is now bridged.

Hosur Fort: The Forgotten Baramahal Earthwork Beneath the Gothic Ruins

Most people who search for Hosur Fort find Kenilworth Castle — the Gothic Revival fantasy that a British collector named William Brett built over its ramparts between 1857 and 1861. Brett’s folly (it was nicknamed so even by his own colleagues) has become the story people tell about Hosur’s fortifications. But underneath Brett’s crumbling mock-medieval walls lay an older, more consequential structure: the original Hosur fort, whose ramparts had guarded the southern approach to the Baramahal — the “twelve forts” region — for over two centuries before a British civil servant used its earthworks as a foundation for a homesick architectural fantasy.

Hosur’s strategic value derived from its position. The Krishnagiri region, which included Hosur, served as the gateway of Tamil Nadu and the protective barrier for the southern region against onslaughts from the north. The twelve forts of this region were collectively known as the Baramahal forts, and they bore the brunt of attacks from Mysore and Andhra rulers. Hosur’s fort was one element in this interlocking defensive geography.

During the medieval period, Hosur fell under Chola Empire rule from the 9th to 13th centuries, known then as Murasu Nadu, a designation reflecting its administrative division within the Nigarili Chola Mandalam. It subsequently passed through Vijayanagara and Mysore control before falling to the British.

“Hosur was known as Murasu Nadu during the Chola period in the 13th century. From the 16th century onwards, the town has come to be known by its present name.”

— Wikipedia, Hosur entry; the pre-British fort that stood here pre-dates the town’s current name

From 1790 to 1792, Tipu Sultan lost the Third Anglo-Mysore War to the British. In 1801, a partial settlement transferred the southern part of the Mysore kingdom to the Presidencies and provinces of British India.

The Hosur fort and its district became part of Salem collectorate under British administration. It was at this point that the fort’s history took its most bizarre turn. The collector William Brett, working from plans drawn up in England, ordered the construction of a Gothic Revival residence directly on the fort’s existing ramparts.

New hamlets were developed to house chunam (lime) suppliers, masons and labourers for the project. A tehsildar appointed to supervise the project eventually gave up keeping financial records due to the scale of expenses. The original Hosur earthwork — whatever remained of it by the 1850s — was subsumed into Brett’s construction. When that structure in turn collapsed into rubble across the twentieth century, the last physical trace of the original Baramahal fortification vanished with it.

What the landscape archaeology of this site could tell us about Baramahal-era fortification technique remains unstudied. Archaeological surveys in Krishnagiri district have uncovered Neolithic sites with polished stone tools and rock art across multiple sites in the Hosur taluk, indicating human settlements dating to 2500–1000 BCE. A site that has been continuously significant since prehistory, through the Chola, Vijayanagara and Mysore periods, and was then physically erased by colonial construction and subsequent neglect, deserves more than the footnote it currently receives in regional historiography.

Droog Fort, Coonoor: Tipu Sultan’s Nilgiri Hilltop Watch Post at 6,000 Feet

Bakasura Malai — “the hill of the demon Bakasura” — is the name the Badaga and Toda communities of the Nilgiris gave to the rocky summit above Coonoor where a ruined fort wall still stands. The name carries older, stranger associations than the military history that brought Tipu Sultan’s soldiers here.

Local tradition connects the peak to the Mahabharata figure of Bakasura, the rakshasa whom Bhima slew, and the hill’s peculiar isolation — it rises separately from the main Nilgiri ridgeline — lends itself to the kind of uncanny geography that generates such legends. But the military men who built the fort here cared for none of that. They cared about what you can see from 6,000 feet above the plains.

Droog Fort, also called Bakasura Malai fort, is a historic fort located 15 kilometres from Coonoor in the Nilgiris district of Tamil Nadu. The fort was used as an outpost by Tipu Sultan in the 18th century. Today, the fort is in ruins, with only one wall remaining. The site attracts tourists who reach the fort by hiking through the Nonsuch Tea Estate.

The location explains everything. The Droog summit commands a 360-degree view of extraordinary strategic value. From the viewpoint, you can see Coonoor and the mountains to the west and north, Dolphin’s Nose, Kotagiri, the hairpin bends of the Mettupalayam–Coonoor ghat road, the plains of Odanthurai, Mettupalayam town, the curves of the Bhavani river, and even the Pilloor dam to the south-east.

In the late eighteenth century, before the British opened the ghat road and before Ooty existed as a settlement, this summit overlooked the only practical approach to the Nilgiri plateau from the east — the very route Tipu Sultan was concerned about British forces using. The Droog post was, in essence, an early warning station: soldiers stationed here could see a column moving through the ghat road and send signals to the main Mysore positions below hours before any force arrived.

“The ruins of Droog Fort, about 17 km from Coonoor near Nonsuch Estate, date back to the 18th century when it served as an outpost for Tipu Sultan, offering strategic views of the surrounding landscape.”

What is less commonly noted is the pre-Mysore significance of the Nilgiri plateau to the indigenous communities who lived there. The Nilgiris were home to at least forty mud-forts in the area which had been abandoned by the time the British colonial administration began developing the hills from 1819 onward.

Forty abandoned fortifications across the Nilgiri plateau speaks to a military history of the hills that predates Tipu Sultan by centuries — one involving the Badaga, Toda, Kota and other communities navigating the complex politics of the plains below. The Droog fort is therefore not simply a Tipu Sultan outpost but one of many fortification sites scattered across the Nilgiri massif, most of them mud-walled and now entirely unrecoverable. There are approximately 80 bison in the area around Bakasura Malai today, which roam inside the tea gardens. The Nonsuch Tea Estate, through which trekkers now approach the ruins, was carved out of the same landscape that Tipu Sultan’s scouts once watched for British movement.

In 2023, the Tamil Nadu Tourism Development Corporation announced plans to construct a viewing point, food court and toilets near the ruins. One hopes the conservation approach is more careful than the infrastructure planning — the single surviving wall is all that remains of a watch post that once commanded one of the most strategically important viewsheds in southern India.

Thenkaraikottai Fort, Dharmapuri: Tamil Nadu’s Only Plains Fort With Musical Pillars

Every fort in this list is either a hill fort or a coastal fort. Thenkaraikottai is the exception — and that exception is the most interesting thing about it. Thenkaraikottai is described as the only land fort in Tamil Nadu — a fort built on flat terrain, in the plains of Dharmapuri district, by feudatory chiefs of the Vijayanagara empire. In a state where every other fortification worth naming perches on a hill, a promontory or a coastline, this forty-acre enclosure in the dry interior makes a very different claim on the landscape.

Thenkaraikottai is a ruined castle built by Seelappa Nayakkar and Chennappa Nayakkar of the Vijayanagara dynasty. This castle is the only one built on land rather than on a hill like others, and is situated near Pappireddipatti in Dharmapuri district.

The major attraction of the place is the Sri Kalyana Ramaswamy temple, dedicated to Lord Rama, with beautiful architecture at the centre of the fort. The fort contains ruined historic buildings including granaries, stables for elephants and horses, cannons, and a bathing area for royalty.

The fort’s construction on flat ground was not an architectural accident but a deliberate statement of administrative confidence. The Vijayanagara feudatories who built Thenkaraikottai were not primarily concerned with defence from siege — a plains fort offers no natural advantage against an attacking army with superior numbers. They were building a seat of administration, a centre for tax collection, and a symbolic assertion of sovereign presence in the dry Dharmapuri interior.

The fact that the fort was reportedly damaged during later Muslim incursions — due to the invasion of Muslims, the fort was damaged, though the temple was saved by the request of the then Maniyakar of the temple — suggests it was indeed vulnerable to the kind of direct assault that a hilltop fort would have resisted more easily. But vulnerability was evidently a price the Nayakkar chieftains were willing to pay for the administrative convenience of a flat site.

“This temple has beautiful sculptures and pillars that produce the seven svaras of Indian classical music — a feature found only in some temples like the Vitthal temple in Hampi and the Nellaiappar Temple in Tirunelveli.”

The musical pillars are the feature that most distinguishes this site from any other fort in Tamil Nadu. The Kalyana Ramaswamy temple within the fort complex contains pillars that, when struck, produce the seven notes of the classical music scale — the same phenomenon found in the Vitthal temple at Hampi (the Vijayanagara imperial capital) and the Nellaiappar temple at Tirunelveli. The temple’s moola garbhagriha houses twelve moolavars in the form of Pattabishekam Srikolam. This level of sculptural and acoustic refinement — royal bathing areas, elephant stables, musical pillars — indicates that Thenkaraikottai was not merely a garrison post but a small regional court, a node in the Vijayanagara feudal network where the apparatus of courtly life was reproduced on a reduced scale.

The fort’s current state is one of active neglect compounded by poor visibility: it sits off the main tourist trail between Dharmapuri and Salem, receives no ASI protection comparable to more famous sites, and is known almost exclusively to pilgrims visiting the Ramaswamy temple rather than to historians interested in Vijayanagara frontier architecture. The ruined granaries, stables and administrative structures that survive within the forty-acre enclosure represent one of the most complete intact fort interior landscapes in Tamil Nadu — precisely because the site’s obscurity has protected it from the kind of “development” that has cleared other ruins.

Aranthangi Fort: The Mud Rampart of a Forgotten Tondaiman Lineage on the Vellar Shore

There are two Tondaiman dynasties in the history of Pudukkottai district. One — the Pudukkottai Thondaimans — is well documented, survived until Indian independence in 1948, and left behind a princely state, a museum, an extensive collection of copper plate grants and a reasonable body of historical scholarship. The other Tondaiman lineage — the Aranthangi Tondaimans — is almost entirely forgotten. It is their fort that stands, in magnificent dereliction, in the town of Aranthangi near the coast of the Palk Strait.

The main centre of attraction in Aranthangi is a ruined fort. The walls are not constructed of brick or stone. Large interstices are filled with mud. There are no ruins of palaces or any other striking building inside. A line of Tondaimans who were unconnected with those of Pudukkottai held power here in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and it is believed that they constructed it.

The mud-wall construction is striking in context. Unlike many other forts, Aranthangi Fort’s walls are constructed primarily with mud rather than stone or brick. The Aranthangi Tondaimans ruled Aranthangi from the 15th to the 18th centuries as feudal chiefs under the Vijayanagara and Pandya kingdoms. The choice of mud as a primary building material was not evidence of poverty or lack of ambition — it was the standard construction material for inland Tamil Nadu fortifications across this period, as the Erode Fort example also demonstrates.

Mud ramparts, properly maintained with lime plaster and regular repair, were effective defensive structures. The problem is that unmaintained mud walls dissolve. What survives at Aranthangi today is the core of the rampart — the earth fill — while the exterior plaster and any superstructure have long since eroded.

“About 25 copper plate grants of the Aranthangi Thondaimans have been recorded so far, and 16 of them are in the Thiruvavaduthurai Adheenam.”

— Kallar history source, indicating the documentary record of the Aranthangi Tondaiman dynasty far exceeds what is commonly known

The twenty-five copper plate grants belonging to the Aranthangi Tondaimans — sixteen of which are preserved in the Thiruvavaduthurai Adheenam — are a reminder that this lineage was literate, administratively active and religiously engaged with major Tamil Shaiva institutions. They gifted lands to temples at Tiruvarur, Rameswaram, Kanchipuram and even Benares. The Aranthangi Thondaimans were local chieftains ruling Aranthangi from the 15th to 18th century as feudal chiefs under the Pandyas and Vijayanagara kings. The fort represented the physical seat of this administrative activity — a centre from which the coastal territory was governed, taxes collected and the loyalty of subordinate villages maintained.

The fort’s later history involves the Pudukkottai Thondaimans (the more powerful and historically visible dynasty) absorbing Aranthangi into their sphere. After Hyder Ali’s army tried to enter Pudukkottai, the Thondaiman’s army defeated and drove them away. Thondaiman then captured Kilanilai and Aranthangi and helped the British government against Tipu Sultan. By the time Aranthangi was captured, the Aranthangi Tondaiman lineage as an independent political force had already ended. Their fort remained, passed through various administrative hands, and gradually dissolved into the landscape — leaving a poet’s stanza, sixteen copper plates in a mutt library, and a mud rampart that most people in Aranthangi today walk past without knowing what it was.

Udayagiri Fort, Kanyakumari: The Venad Outpost Where a Defeated Dutch Admiral Built His Masterpiece

Of all the forts in this list, Udayagiri is the one that most deserves to be better known — not because it is spectacular in the conventional sense, but because its history is genuinely improbable. A mud fort built by a Venad king at the turn of the seventeenth century; a decisive naval battle in 1741 that marked the first military defeat of a European power by an Indian kingdom in the subcontinent’s modern era; and a captured Dutch admiral who, rather than being imprisoned or executed, was put to work redesigning the very fortifications that his defeat had exposed as inadequate. The fort that stands in Kanyakumari district today is, in the most literal sense, a monument to a story of reversal.

Udayagiri Fort was originally constructed with mud walls in 1600 CE by Venad king Vira Ravivarma Kulasekhara Perumal and substantially rebuilt in stone between 1741 and 1744 CE by Travancore ruler Anizham Thirunal Marthanda Varma. The reconstruction was overseen by Eustachius Benedictus de Lannoy, a Dutch East India Company officer captured during Marthanda Varma’s victory at the Battle of Colachel in 1741, who subsequently entered Travancore service as commander of the king’s artillery and troops, introducing European military tactics and fortifications.

Spanning about 90 acres including an isolated 260-foot hillock, the fort contains an old foundry which was used for casting guns. That foundry is a detail of enormous significance. An iron foundry was established at the Udayagiri Fort where cannons, mortars and balls were cast, and all the batteries were supplied with the necessary pieces of artillery.

De Lannoy was not merely a fort-builder: he was tasked with establishing a complete indigenous arms manufacturing capability, so that Travancore would no longer be dependent on imported European weapons to defend itself against European attackers. The fort became, in effect, a military-industrial complex in miniature — a garrison, an artillery school, an armoury and a cannon foundry, all within ninety acres of Kanyakumari district.

“The tombs of the Dutch Admiral Eustachius De Lannoy and of his wife and son can still be found inside a partly ruined chapel in the fort. The inscriptions on his stone are both in Tamil and in Latin.”

— Military History Fandom Wiki, Udayagiri Fort entry; De Lannoy died in Travancore service and was buried at the fort he helped build

De Lannoy’s bilingual tombstone — Tamil and Latin — is a uniquely poignant artifact. A Flemish naval commander of the Dutch East India Company, defeated at sea off the Kanyakumari coast, absorbed into the service of an Indian king, and buried in the fort he spent his captive career building: his tomb in the ruined chapel at Udayagiri encapsulates a world of cross-cultural encounter that the standard colonial narrative of this period does not accommodate. He is remembered in Travancore tradition as “Dillanai” — De Lannoy rendered in Malayalam phonology — and the fort was locally called Dillanai Kottai for generations.

Presently, the fort has been turned into a biodiversity park by the Tamil Nadu Forest Department, with sites of historical importance such as De Lannoy’s tomb remaining as protected archaeological sites under the Archaeological Department of India. Recently, officials of the Department of Archaeology found an underground tunnel within the fort. The tunnel discovery — an evacuation route or a secret supply corridor, its purpose not yet fully determined — adds another layer to a site already dense with history. The biodiversity park designation is an unusual solution: it preserves the fort’s landscape while acknowledging that full archaeological restoration of a ninety-acre complex is beyond current state capacity.

Vattakottai Fort, Kanyakumari: The Circular Fort That Isn’t Circular and Its Pandya Mystery

Vattakottai means “circular fort” in Tamil. The Vattakottai Fort is not circular — it is a rectangle. This linguistic disconnect, which every visitor notices, opens a larger question about what the name actually refers to and what the site’s pre-Travancore history might have been. The fort that stands today, seven kilometres north of Kanyakumari town on the Palk Bay shore, is an eighteenth-century Travancore construction. But the name and the fish motifs carved into its granite walls hint at something older.

Vattakottai Fort is a seaside fort near Kanyakumari, Tamil Nadu, at the southern tip of India. It was built in the 18th century as a coastal defence fortification and barracks in the former Travancore kingdom. Later it was modified under the supervision of Captain Eustachius De Lannoy, an ex-Dutch naval officer of the Dutch East India Company, who became commander of the Travancore Army after he earned the trust of the Travancore King Marthanda Varma.

The fish carvings are the mystery. The fish motif was the royal symbol of the Madurai Pandya Kingdom. According to most archaeologists, it is believed that this fort must have been under the Pandya rulers for some time in the medieval period.

The Kanyakumari coast was indeed under Pandya sovereignty during the medieval period — it formed the southernmost extent of Pandya territorial control before the Venad (later Travancore) kingdom asserted independence. If the fish motifs are Pandya-era carvings on an earlier structure, then the “circular fort” name may refer to an older Pandya fortification at this site — possibly circular in plan, as some coastal watch-posts were — that the Travancore builders demolished and replaced with their rectangular granite structure, reusing the carved stones in the new construction. This would make Vattakottai a fort built on top of an earlier fort, with the older fort’s iconography accidentally preserved in the newer structure’s walls.

“There was also a secret path through a tunnel about 4 feet wide connecting Vattakottai Fort to Padmanabhapuram Palace. However, eventually the path was closed.”

The tunnel connecting Vattakottai to Padmanabhapuram Palace — sealed now but apparently real — transforms the fort’s significance. Vattakottai was not simply a coastal watchtower but an extension of the palace itself, connected by a secure underground route. The king could, in theory, move between his administrative capital and his coastal garrison without ever appearing above ground. During the British administration, the fort was left intact in 1809 when British troops demolished other Travancore defences. The decision to preserve Vattakottai while demolishing other Travancore forts — presumably because it held no military value to the British given its small size — is the reason it still stands today.

The fort currently faces challenges from sea erosion exacerbated by climate change, with the Kanyakumari coastal zone identified as vulnerable to shoreline retreat and rising sea levels. Government conservation plans involve monitoring and adaptive measures under the Coastal Regulation Zone guidelines. A part of the fort already extends into the sea — whether this is original design or coastal erosion is debated. Either way, Vattakottai is a fort in active dialogue with the sea that surrounds it, and that dialogue is not going well for the stone.

Jagadevidurgam, Krishnagiri: The Twin-Peak Vijayanagara Citadel That the Inscriptions Reclaimed From Tipu

Of all the Baramahal forts — the twelve fortifications that gave the Krishnagiri-Dharmapuri region its Persian administrative name — Jagadevidurgam is probably the least visited and the most historically significant. It sits on a hill that rises in two peaks above the village of Jagadevi in Bargur taluk, 13 kilometres east of Krishnagiri, and almost no traveller who passes through the mango orchards of Krishnagiri district makes the detour to climb it. Those who do find a ruined fort of considerable scale, two Kannada inscriptions, and a history that stretches from the Vijayanagara feudal system through the Anglo-Mysore wars to a British abandonment that left the walls to the elements and the local quarry owners.

Jagadevidurgam is a fort located on the hill near the village of Jagadevi. It is a twin hill fort. The height of this hill is 2,647 feet. At the summit, there are fort fortifications, various buildings in ruins, granaries and natural springs. This fort played a significant role in the wars between the British and rulers Hyder Ali and Tipu Sultan. It served as the capital of the Jagadevi Rayars. Additionally, it is one of the twelve forts collectively known as the Baramahal.

The founding story of Jagadevidurgam is worth tracing carefully, because it challenges the simplified version that most local tourism literature repeats. Inscriptions engraved in Kannada at the fort give details about King Raja Raja Sri Jagadevaraya and Jagadevu durgam, making it clear that the fort was built much before Tipu Sultan’s reign by King Jagadevaraya. King Jagadevaraya was a feudal king under the patronage of the Vijayanagara king Venkatadri of the Aravidu dynasty. The inscriptions directly contradict the widely repeated claim that Tipu Sultan built the fort — a claim that apparently originated from imprecise local knowledge and was then transmitted uncritically across the internet.

Jagadevaraya-I migrated from Hyderabad to Penukonda. He performed such feats of valour against the army of Bijapur that Ranga Raya-II, the representative of the Vijayanagara dynasty at Chandragiri, granted him the territory now known as the Baramahal. In 1589 CE, his son Jagadeva Raya II defended Penukonda against the Golkonda army and received the jagir of Chennapatnam as his reward. After that he transferred his capital from Jagadevi to Chennapatnam. This transfer of the capital to Chennapatnam (present-day Channapatna in Karnataka) explains why Jagadevidurgam, despite being the family’s founding citadel, was not maintained as a primary residence: the Jagadevi Rayars moved on to a more accessible and commercially important seat as their fortunes improved under Vijayanagara patronage.

“The main fort is perhaps the finest in the Baramahal. Now the fortification walls are highly damaged. The local quarry owners are cutting the rock on the hills.”

— Tamil Nadu Department of Archaeology, site description for Jagadevidurgam

The Tamil Nadu Department of Archaeology’s own description of the site — “perhaps the finest in the Baramahal” — sits alongside the devastating observation that the local quarry owners are cutting rock on the hill. Active quarrying at an archaeological site of this significance would be scandalous if the site were better known. But Jagadevidurgam’s obscurity has protected it from scrutiny as effectively as it has denied it protection. King Jagadevaraya belonged to the Telugu Banajiga sect and even today people belonging to this sect are referred to as Kote Banajigas or Musku Banajigas. The living community memory of this association has not translated into sustained advocacy for the fort’s preservation.

The Baramahal Kingdom was preserved by Kumara Immadin Gadevaraya, the great-grandson of the original founder of the family. After that, the kingdom passed successively to the Mysore Wodeyars, to Hyder Ali, to Tipu Sultan, and finally to the British in 1792 under the Treaty of Srirangapatna. Tipu captured the fort from the Wodeyars, and it was later seized by the British in 1792, who subsequently abandoned it. British abandonment after 1792 meant no further maintenance, no garrison, and no investment in the site’s infrastructure. What the quarry operators are now removing is the physical material of a fort that the British left to dissolve a century and a half before the independent Indian state enacted its first monument protection legislation.

The twin-peak geometry of Jagadevidurgam is its most dramatic physical feature. The hill which dominates the villages rises in two peaks. The western peak is called Devalapadi and the eastern peak Jagadevidurgam. Trekkers who have made the climb report that the fortification walls run across both peaks, connected by a defended saddle — a sophisticated design that creates interlocking fields of fire and makes the fort difficult to attack from any direction.

The natural springs at the summit meant the garrison could sustain a long siege without water shortage. Combined with the 2,647-foot elevation and the defensive geometry of the twin peaks, Jagadevidurgam was in its prime a formidable installation. The Department of Archaeology’s “finest in the Baramahal” assessment is not hyperbole. It is a factual judgement about a fort that deserves to be among the best-known in Tamil Nadu, and instead languishes among the least visited.

The Politics of Forgetting: Why Tamil Nadu’s Lesser Forts Disappeared

Reading these eight stories together, a pattern emerges. The forts that survived are the ones that the British found useful — large enough to garrison, strategically positioned on routes they needed to control, and architecturally robust enough to warrant maintenance investment. Vellore, Gingee, Dindigul: all of these were useful to the colonial military administration, and so they were maintained. The forts that the British found useless — Erode’s mud rampart, demolished in a famine year for its rubble value; Hosur Fort, built over by a romantic collector; Jagadevidurgam, abandoned immediately after the Third Anglo-Mysore War — were left to dissolve.

But the colonial period is only part of the story. The pre-colonial polities that built these forts also contributed to their erasure. The Aranthangi Tondaimans were absorbed by a more powerful branch of their own dynasty, and their fort lost its political reason to exist. The Vijayanagara chieftains who built Thenkaraikottai and Jagadevidurgam were feudatories of a collapsing empire; when the empire fell, the network of administrative loyalty that maintained their forts collapsed with it. Droog Fort’s Tipu Sultan connection made it, after 1799, a site that the British had no reason to maintain and every reason to let decay.

What all eight sites share is the need for more systematic documentation before what remains is lost. Mud walls dissolve in every monsoon. Quarry operations cut through inscriptions. Tea plantations grow over ruins. The single surviving wall at Droog Fort could fall in the next major storm.

The copper plate grants of the Aranthangi Tondaimans — sixteen of them in a Shaiva mutt’s library — have not been fully published or contextualised. The tunnel at Udayagiri has only recently been discovered. Jagadevidurgam’s Kannada inscriptions, which definitively settle the question of who built the fort, were found by trekkers from a heritage exploration group rather than by the state archaeological department.

Tamil Nadu’s monument protection apparatus is stretched thin across a state with one of the densest concentrations of historical sites in the world. Prioritising the famous over the obscure is understandable. But the obscure forts in this list are not minor sites — they are the evidence base for understanding how military, administrative and political power actually functioned across Tamil Nadu’s landscape between the fourteenth and nineteenth centuries. Without them, the history of that landscape has gaps that no amount of archive research can fully fill.

Sources and Further Reading

• Rao, Vittal. Forts in Tamil Nadu. Pustaka Digital Media, 2018. ISBN 978-93-5285-967-2.
• Rajannan, Busnagi. Salem Cyclopedia: A Cultural and Historical Dictionary of Salem District, Tamil Nadu. Institute of Kongu Studies, 1992.
• Tamil Nadu Department of Archaeology, site descriptions: Jagadevi Fort (www.tnarch.gov.in).
• Buchanan Hamilton, Francis. A Journey from Madras through the Countries of Mysore, Canara and Malabar (1807) — primary source for Erode Fort’s 1800 condition.
• Hockings, Paul (ed.). Encyclopaedia of the Nilgiri Hills. Manohar, 2012 — for Droog Fort context and Nilgiri tribal history.

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