The Master Survivor of Mysore

KRISHNACHARYA PURNAIAH, the fabled Diwan Purnaiah of the Mysore Samasthanam, was older to Maharaja Serfoji II by 31 years.

This is a fragmentary story of a prime minister and a titular king whose respective destinies intersected on the canvas of history in the space of just one year. The cause of this intersection emanated from the same source: the East India Company.

In 1798, the East India Company restored the 21-year-old Serfoji II to the throne of Thanjavur but divested him of his military and administrative powers.

In 1799, in a similar act of restoration, Marquess Wellesley demolished Tipu Sultan—the tyrant of Mysore—and installed the six-year-old boy Krishnaraja Wodeyar III as the ruler under the regency of Diwan Purnaiah. Here too, the military and administration were confiscated by the British.

A British resident was customarily imposed upon both Samasthanams. His job was to enforce obedience on the part of the rulers of these Samasthanams and to collect revenue on behalf of the East India Company. He did both with a cold-bloodedness that had a nonchalant quality to it. When we read the firsthand accounts—correspondences, news reports, anecdotes and descriptions of behaviour inside and outside the durbar—written by and about these residents, we realise that it was actually a miracle how our Samasthanams even managed to survive till the British left India.

In just two years, two large and prosperous South Indian Hindu kingdoms fell like ninepins. It was the beginning of the end of a distinguished legacy that dated back to the Vijayanagara Empire.

Other consequences, too, were similar.

On the positive side, both Serfoji II and Krishnaraja Wodeyar III embarked on an exalted endeavour of long-term cultural rejuvenation within the enfeebling constraints imposed on them. Among other things, these two rulers are the primary reasons for the emergence of the distinctive Thanjavur and Mysore style of paintings. To this day, the culturally rooted citizens of both Samasthanams utter these names with reverence. The private collections of precious artworks and antiques of that era are but fractional testimonies of a profound grandeur that has perhaps been lost forever. The same holds true for the literary eminence attained in that period.

On the negative side, the harvest is abundant. Its most poisonous crop includes an all-encompassing destruction of traditional Hindu institutions by pauperising them. I have already narrated its brief history in my essay on the wholesale, heartless British slaughter of Dharma- Chhatrams in the Thanjavur Samasthanam (‘The Tragedy of Thanjavur’, Open, August 12, 2024).

We notice the same English-inflicted calamity in Mysore as well. The difference lies only in the details.

However, both Thanjavur and Mysore went beyond their means and at great personal cost, strove to sustain these traditional charitable institutions. In Thanjavur, Maharaja Serfoji furrowed money from his own pocket to fund them. In Mysore, Diwan Purnaiah did the same thing in a different fashion.

Diwan Purnaiah was a crafty and tenacious survivor who sprouted from the mud of penury. Nothing else explains how this humble bookkeeper at a trader’s shop rose to become the diwan for three monarchs of Mysore— Hyder Ali, Tipu Sultan and Krishnaraja Wodeyar III. It is a backhanded tribute to his raw survival instinct that he became one of the closest confidants of a bigot like Tipu who had purged Hindu bureaucrats from his administration but retained Purnaiah.

It was Purnaiah who played the most decisive role in ensuring Tipu’s bloodless succession to the throne of Mysore. Tipu was encamped in Malabar when Hyder Ali died in 1782 in faraway Chittoor. Purnaiah kept this news confidential and dispatched a lightning messenger (the equivalent of today’s Speed Post) to convey the news to Tipu, urging him to seize power before other claimants jumped into the fray. Tipu never forgot this favour.

And then, 17 years later, the same Purnaiah was instrumental in getting the throne of Mysore back where it rightfully belonged: the Wodeyar dynasty.

At no point in his highly active career did Purnaiah ever lose his diwanship. A further tribute to his shrewdness is how he became a personal friend of the aforementioned Wellesley—the same man whose army had killed Purnaiah’s former master, Tipu. Mark Wilks, the resident of Mysore in 1803, describes Purnaiah’s acumen in his comprehensive Historical Sketches of Mysore in adulatory terms: “The Raja was installed at the seat of his ancestors, in the presence of an immense multitude of Hindoos, who testified the most unfeigned delight at a spectacle which revived the long extinguished hope of perpetual emancipation from Mohammedan tyranny. The practical efficiency of the Government was secured by the uncommon talents of Poornea [Purnaiah] in the office of minister to the new Raja, and that efficiency was directed to proper objects…” (Emphasis added)

Purnaiah’s chequered career, sprinkled with darker shades of grey, was also marked by his genuine liberality. This singular quality, in a way, redeemed his rank opportunism. Till this day, Purnaiah is eponymous in the Old Mysore region with the Kannada collective noun phrase, Purnayyana Chhatra (Purnaiah’s Charitable Homes). This denotes the profusion of charitable homes and rest houses that he built throughout the dominions of the erstwhile Mysore state encompassing Mysore, Bengaluru, Kolar, Tumkur, Chitradurga, Hassan, Kadur and Shivamogga.

One of the first things Purnaiah did as the diwan of Krishnaraja Wodeyar III was to release generous amounts of funding to mathas, temples and other charitable entities. The East India Company’s documents of that period explicitly mention that even this munificence paled in comparison to the philanthropy that the Wodeyar rulers had performed before Hyder Ali’s usurpation of Mysore.

The Company mentioned this specific point for a reason: by resuming these charities, Purnaiah had directly defied its stricture of 1799 (Article 4 of the Treaty of Srirangapatna), which had ended the timeless tradition of the state funding these charitable institutions. A letter dated September 4, 1799 that Wellesley wrote to Barry Close—the resident of Mysore— reveals the extent to which the British went to destroy Daana in the Mysore Samasthanam: “But though Hindoo princes are… sufficiently frugal in their immediate personal expences… there is one kind of profusion which they are but too apt to practice to an extent that does not unfrequently involve their affairs in general embarrassment, namely the alienation of land in favour of individuals… and pagodas [Hindu temples]… Purniah has already proposed, and obtained the sanction of the late commissioners in Mysore for every considerable endowment of the latter description… these are stated to fall very short of what they amounted to before the usurpation of Hyder Alii Khan, they are at least as liberal as the circumstances of the country will admit of. You must therefore be extremely careful how far you allow any augmentation of these establishments… It will be proper that you should come to a very explicit understanding with Purniah on this head; letting him plainly know that no grants of the nature in question must ever be made without your approbation…” [Emphasis added]

The threat worked. Almost overnight, Purnaiah was forced to reduce the grants to Hindu temples, mathas and other charitable institutions. The reduction is truly mindboggling: from 2,33,954 to 56,993 pagodas—roughly from about nine lakh rupees to two lakh.

Yet, Purnaiah’s magnanimous legacy endured in the long run in the collective memory of the Kannada people.

It was finally, physically and irreversibly, undone after India attained independence. An independence that annihilated all the Samasthanams, including their cultural legacy.

bookkeeperBritish imperialismDiwan PurnaiahIndian modern historyMysore