The Kunjali Marakkars Fought the Portuguese at Sea for the Zamorin of Calicut from 1524 to 1600, and the Indian Navy Named INS Kunjali for Them in 1954

The Kunjali Marakkars commanded the Zamorin of Calicut’s ships against the Portuguese on the Malabar coast, and the first dated record of the family at war with them is the entry for 1524 in the Tuhfat al-Mujahidin, an Arabic history written in Kerala. The Hakluyt Society’s edition of the French traveller Pyrard de Laval gives 16 March 1600 for the capture of the fort of the fourth Kunjali Marakkar. The Indian Navy says there were four successive Kunjali Marakkars between 1500 and 1600, and its Mumbai establishment INS Kunjali, commissioned on 1 July 1954, commemorates them.

Kunjali Marakkar was a title before it was a name. According to the Navy’s page, the Zamorin bestowed the honorific on the commandants of his naval force, and K. M. Panikkar, the historian of the Portuguese in Malabar, writes that even the title Kunjali Marakkar was the Zamorin’s grant.

The entry for 1524

The Tuhfat al-Mujahidin was written by Shaykh Zainuddin, who is said to have lived at Ponnani, and its narrative of the Portuguese in Malabar closes with 1583. S. Muhammad Husayn Nainar translated it into English for the University of Madras in 1942. Its stated purpose is to rouse Muslims to fight the Portuguese, so it is an advocate’s account, but it was written within about sixty years of the events it dates.

Under 1524 it says that Ahmad Marakar, his brother Kunji Ali Marakar, their uncle Muhammad Ali Marakar and other dependents felt the desire to wage war against the Portuguese, and left Cochin for Calicut. Portuguese ships then attacked Ponnani, the Zamorin’s port. He sent his chief minister to fight them, Muslims came from many towns, and the Portuguese garrison at Calicut, short of food, slipped out of a hidden opening in its wall to its ships. Panikkar, who read the Portuguese sources, dates the Marakkars’ move to Calicut to the same year.

Defeats are in the chronicle too. Under 1538 it has Ahmad Marakar, Kunji Ali and Ali Ibrahim Marakar sailing with a fleet of forty-two vessels, which the Portuguese caught at anchor and captured. Ali Ibrahim Marakar died on the way back. A year later, the chronicle says, Ahmad and Kunji Ali sailed again with eleven.

Why Lisbon called them pirates

Vasco da Gama had reached Calicut in 1498, as the article on Europe’s hunt for Indian pepper tells. By Panikkar’s account the Portuguese Crown then claimed the sole right to sail the Indian Ocean, and any vessel without a Portuguese pass, a cartaz, could be treated as a pirate. One case sits under 1537 and 1538 in the Tuhfat: the Portuguese burned the town of Barunur and killed a Marakar, Kutti Ibrahim, because, the chronicler says, its people had sent a ship of pepper and ginger to Jidda without a pass. A century later the Maratha admiral Kanhoji Angre ran a pass system of his own on the Konkan coast.

Panikkar’s judgement is that the label depends on that claim. He writes that the Marakkars were the Zamorin’s admirals, held their land and authority under him, and could not be dismissed in a summary manner as pirates. F. C. Danvers, whose history follows the Portuguese record, says of a Kunjali in the early 1590s that he was acting in concert with the Zamorin, who could control his proceedings. In the treaty of January 1540, according to Panikkar, the Zamorin accepted the pass system for Moorish ships; after 1591 he refused it again.

Fast boats, convoys and the siege of Chaliyam

Panikkar describes the Marakkars’ method as guerrilla war on the sea: attack convoys, harass trade and fight a pitched battle only when forced. He gives their vessels as faster than the Portuguese ships and their guns as lighter but well used. In a battle off Cannanore in 1558 the Kunjali’s flagship was sunk, he writes, but nine of the thirteen Calicut vessels got away unpursued. In 1569, by his account, a Portuguese fleet of eighty-six vessels under Martim Afonso de Miranda could not catch him, then forced a battle from a poor position and lost it; Miranda was wounded and died at Cochin.

The Portuguese fort at Chaliyam stood near Calicut, and the Tuhfat describes its siege in 1571. The Zamorin’s men and the people of Tanur and other towns entered Chaliyam at night, burned the houses outside the fort and the churches, and shut the garrison in the stone fort behind trenches. Two months in, the Zamorin came in person. Out of food, the garrison asked to leave with safe passage and marched out at midnight. The Zamorin kept the cannon, pulled the fort down, and gave some of the stone and timber to rebuild the cathedral mosque that the Portuguese had destroyed when they built it. Panikkar dates the siege from June to September 1571 and notes that the monsoon kept Portuguese ships from bringing help. The Kerala Department of Archaeology credits the third Kunjali Marakkar with the attack on Chaliyam, yet the Tuhfat’s account names the Zamorin, his ministers and the townsmen and does not name a Marakkar.

The fort at Kottakkal

Within two years of Chaliyam, Panikkar writes, the third Kunjali obtained the Zamorin’s leave to build a fort and dockyards at Pudupattanam, and held it with the privileges of a Nair chief. The fort stood at Iringal near Vatakara, in the area now called Kottakkal, according to the Kerala Department of Archaeology.

Pyrard de Laval, who visited the district about 1607, saw what remained and described the fort as he heard it. Gray’s notes say the Portuguese chronicler Diogo do Couto calls both the fort and its lord Cunhale. Pyrard writes of a large fortress at the mouth of a river, with lime and sand walls and fresh water inside, two more forts guarding the river mouth, and a well-built town. In a hall of a great Malabar lord’s house he saw the lord’s victories painted, with the galleys and ships he had taken. Of the Kunjali he says his fame ran from the Cape of Good Hope to China.

The victories that followed, in Panikkar’s list, are a battle won against the Portuguese in 1586, the defeat of a Portuguese squadron in 1589 by the Kunjali’s nephew Khwaja Musa, whose fleet André Furtado then destroyed, and a peace in 1591 made at the urging of a priest. Danvers, describing a settlement of those years, names the priest as Friar Francisco da Costa, who was held at the Zamorin’s court. In 1595, Panikkar says, Kunjali IV took over the fort and the fleet.

The break with the Zamorin and the siege of 1600

Different accounts give different reasons for the break. Panikkar says the new Kunjali grew proud and humiliated a Nair, and cut the tail off one of the Zamorin’s elephants. In Pyrard’s version he refused to hand over vessels belonging to the Zamorin’s subjects and set aside the king’s orders, and adds that the Portuguese were glad of the quarrel and had encouraged it. The Zamorin and the Portuguese signed an agreement in 1597, Panikkar says.

A first joint attack in 1599 failed. Pyrard puts the Portuguese loss at 500 men and has the garrison cutting down a landing party that found its boats had been moved. Panikkar blames poor co-ordination between the army and the navy.

André Furtado de Mendonça then took command. A new agreement of December 1599, Panikkar writes, had the Zamorin supply 5,000 Nairs, 1,000 labourers and fifteen elephants, with the booty split in half. Furtado cleared the river and built batteries. The Kunjali, finding the position untenable, asked for his men’s lives to be spared and then surrendered to the Zamorin, on condition that his own life be spared, according to Panikkar. The Hakluyt chronology to Pyrard dates this to 16 March 1600. In Pyrard’s account the Zamorin took the sword and told the Portuguese commander, “Take Cognialy: he is yours.”

The Kunjali was taken to Goa, the Portuguese capital in India, the city whose churches and convents still stand. Bells were rung and a Te Deum sung, Pyrard says, and the Kunjali was beheaded. He adds that asked to turn Christian, the Kunjali said he would if his life were spared and otherwise would die a Muslim. Panikkar writes that the Portuguese broke their promise to spare him, and the Kerala Department of Archaeology that he was tortured and his body torn apart. The accounts that name a place say Goa, and they differ on the manner. Pyrard adds that the Zamorin regretted giving him up, and that Malabar men killed every Portuguese they could find.

Where the family is remembered

Pyrard saw the fort’s walls after its destruction still standing to about the height of two men. Today the family’s house and a museum stand at Payyoli, and the Navy keeps the name.

The Kunjali Marakkar Smarakam, in Kozhikode district, is a house belonging to the family’s successors, which the Kerala Department of Archaeology declared a protected monument in 1976. According to the department, the Portuguese destroyed the original house in the last years of the sixteenth century. The museum beside it shows stone cannonballs dug up at the fort site on the Kottakkal river bank, swords found on the house premises, and a model of the fort. Kerala Tourism lists the museum as about five kilometres from Payyoli, at Kottakkal. About 500 metres to the north-east stands the Kottakkal Valiya Juma mosque, which the department says holds a Portuguese throne and sword captured by a Kunjali Marakkar.

INS Kunjali, at the southern tip of Mumbai, was commissioned on 1 July 1954 with Captain Michael Benjamin Samuel as its first commanding officer. Its page says the establishment was set up to administer the Regulating School, the School of Music, the Navy’s provost headquarters in Mumbai and the Indian Naval Band, and that its motto, Satyam Vad Dharma Char, means to speak the truth and tread the path of dharma. Its air station at the old Gun Carriage Basin was known as Kunjali II until it became INS Shikra on 22 January 2009.

Where the accounts differ

How many Kunjali Marakkars there were, and which of them did what, is not settled. Both the Navy and the Kerala Department of Archaeology list four. The department dates them 1524 to 1538, 1538 to 1569, 1569 to 1595 and 1595 to 1605, a last date that does not match a death at Goa in 1600. Panikkar names the first commander as Kutti Ali, taken prisoner in 1528, and his son as Kunjali II. Onmanorama says the Kunjali I of its account died in Sri Lanka in 1539 and also that there are no valid historical records of the family’s origin. Gray notes that Kunhali was a family title borne by the fort’s founder and by the corsair of Pyrard’s story, whom Pyrard confuses. For INS Kunjali, the Maritime History Society names Kunjali III, where the Navy’s own page says only that it commemorates the Kunjali Marakkars.