4 - South India

Summary

The second half of the eighteenth century was punctuated by wars between the French, the British and the various Indian rulers, but by 1800 the political contours of the region were more or less set for the next 150 years. Of the many independent south Indian kingdoms a handful were left: Hyderabad, Mysore, Travancore and Cochin. The French, the Danes and the Portuguese were confined to their coastal settlements. The British had consolidated their direct rule over most of the Madras Presidency. Much contemporary writing suggests that this prolonged warfare devastated the south. In many districts, particularly in the north, English travellers and administrators describe the untilled land, the ruined tanks, and the deserted houses where once an industrious population thrived. Some were careful observers such as Francis Buchanan, who described the deserted villages and towns he saw in Coimbatore, Malabar, south Kanara, and Mysore. But other writers based their accounts on hearsay or exaggerated the effects of war. ‘The prevalent impression is erroneous, although fairly deductible from the records of Madras’, said Wilkes in 1817, ‘that Hyder, on his first descent, perpetrated the wanton and indiscriminate destruction of the whole country’; he devastated an area of 30 to 55 miles around Madras and 15 miles around Vellore, Wilkes argued, but otherwise protected the countryside. The villagers were often left in peace, or they fled to the hills, to return when the shortlived battle was over. Even trade was often uninterrupted by war. Some of the southern districts and parts of Mysore escaped the ravages of war altogether, others recovered from them fairly quickly, while in yet others the destruction of the irrigation works or of trade had more lasting effects of depopulation and impoverishment.