Rani Abbakka of Ullal Refused Portugal's Tribute in 1555 and Faced Its Fleet Again in 1618, and a Five-Ship Coast Guard Class Now Carries Her Name

Rani Abbakka was the queen of Ullal, a port on the Netravati river about 8 km from Mangaluru, and the Portuguese, who controlled much of that coast’s trade, wrote her down as the “Queen of Olala”. Their chronicles, as summarised in F. C. Danvers’s history of the Portuguese in India, record her refusing the tribute they demanded in 1555 and repulsing an attack on her fort in 1618. In December 1623 an Italian nobleman, Pietro della Valle, travelled inland to meet the ruling queen because he had read of her exploits while he was in Persia. The Indian Coast Guard now has five ships in a class named after her.

A port, a dynasty and a tribute demand

According to the Karnataka State Gazetteer for South Kanara, a branch of the Chowta family of Puttige ruled from Ullal, and Somanatha of Ullal was their family deity. One Chowta chief, it adds, visited Vijayanagara and was honoured by Krishnadeva Raya. India’s Department of Posts calls the Chowtas Jains, and the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA) says the same of Abbakka herself.

How a woman came to rule is explained by Pietro della Valle, who asked in 1623. Men usually reigned at Ullal, he was told, but sons did not inherit from their fathers. Sisters’ sons did. When the last king left no nephew or other heir, his wife succeeded him, and after her death her sister took the throne.

The trade of the coast, the same trade that drew Europe to Indian spices, was the larger problem. Vijayanagara’s Aliya Rama Raya signed a treaty with the Portuguese in 1547, the Gazetteer records, that put most of the export and import trade in their hands. Local chiefs disliked the arrangement. Tribute in grain went unpaid, and the Portuguese answered with raids “by fire and sword”, in the Gazetteer’s words. After the defeat of Rama Raya at Talikota in 1565, Ahmednagar, Bijapur and Calicut formed a league against the Portuguese, and several chiefs of Kanara backed it.

1555: twenty-one ships and a treaty

Danvers places the first clash in 1555. Dom Alvaro da Silveira was made admiral of a fleet of 21 sail, and Danvers’s summary of the Portuguese chronicles says the Queen of Olala “had refused to pay her tribute”. Silveira overran the coast, destroyed towns and ships and damaged Mangalore, where a rich temple stood. Then, at the Zamorin of Calicut’s request, a treaty of peace was agreed and the fleet went back to Goa, where Portuguese rule lasted until 1961. Karnataka’s Gazetteer gives the same sequence and the same number of ships.

Indian accounts put the outcome in firmer terms. Per IGNCA she pushed the force back, and at the 2023 stamp release Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said she repulsed it. Danvers’s summary of the Portuguese side records a negotiated peace.

January 1568: a night sally and a fort

The largest Portuguese effort came a dozen years later. Danvers writes that Dom Francisco de Mascarenhas sailed for Olala with 27 ships, with Joao Peixoto sent ahead with eight, “to enforce the payment of tribute”. The Viceroy, Dom Antao de Noronha, followed with about 3,000 fighting men and a plan to build a fort at Mangalore. By the Gazetteer’s account the armada left Goa in September 1567.

Danvers dates the landing to 4 January 1567, and the Gazetteer, citing the Portuguese historian Francisco de Souza, dates the decisive battle to 5 January 1568. The later date fits a September 1567 departure, and The Week, Live History India and the 2023 stamp speech all give 1568.

On the first night, Danvers says, while the Portuguese were at supper, a force of 500 men fell on their camp, followed by 1,500 more. The camp was thrown into disorder for a time, Mascarenhas lost several men at his advance post, and the attackers were driven off only after Dom Luis de Almeida relieved him. Drawing on Souza, the Gazetteer places a night raid just before the Viceroy arrived and says the raiders went back to their lines “with great glory”.

On the eve of Epiphany the Portuguese stormed the city, set it on fire and cut down its palm groves. Danvers counts about 500 dead on the Indian side and about 40 Portuguese. His chronicle says the queen fled to a mountain, and another Portuguese historian says the same, the Gazetteer notes. Their fort of Sao Sebastiao took its name from St Sebastian’s day, when the first stone was laid, and stood finished with a church by the middle of March. They left a garrison of 300 men with ammunition for six months.

What followed is recorded on both sides. During the term of the next Viceroy, Dom Luis de Ataide, the queen asked for peace and bought it with extra tribute and a sum paid at once, according to Danvers. She built, the Gazetteer adds, a fortress at Ullal facing the Portuguese fort at Mangalore before the final treaty.

Indian popular accounts tell the siege differently, and the sources opened for this article do not reconcile them. In IGNCA’s version General Peixoto, sent by the Viceroy, captured Ullal and entered her court. She sheltered in a mosque, came back that night with about 200 soldiers and killed Peixoto and about 70 of his men. Karnataka’s Gazetteer places Peixoto’s death earlier, in a punitive expedition that “ended in disaster” before the Viceroy sailed. Danvers’s passage on the campaign does not mention Peixoto’s death.

Alliances, withheld tribute and a record from 1581

In 1570, IGNCA says, she allied with Bijapur and the Zamorin of Calicut against the Portuguese. The Zamorin’s general Kutty Pokar Markar, it adds, destroyed the Portuguese fort at Mangalore before he was killed on the way back. A wider league of Ahmednagar, Bijapur and Calicut is confirmed by the Gazetteer.

Danvers supplies the next dated entry. After Dom Francisco de Mascarenhas arrived as Viceroy in September 1581, a squadron under Mathias de Albuquerque was sent to the Malabar coast and burned fishing boats and villages. According to Danvers, the loss fell chiefly on the queens of the hills between Calicut and Cannanore and on the Queen of Olala, whose towns and woods were burnt and cut down, and the people then paid “the tribute they had withheld for some years past”. In the expedition of 1598 to 1599, the Portuguese commander Andre Furtado dissuaded the King of Banguel and the Queen of Olala from helping Kunhale Marca, the Malabar naval chief the Portuguese were then fighting.

1618: the ship from Mecca

The chronicle entry for 1617 to 1618 begins with a Portuguese captain, Francisco de Miranda Anriques, capturing “a rich ship from Mecca” that belonged to the Queen of Olala. In revenge she sent men to join the forces besieging the Portuguese-held fort of Banguel, and both sides lost heavily. Anriques then attacked the fort of Olala and “was repulsed and forced to retire.” At the start of the following year, Danvers writes, Venkatappa Nayaka (his “Ventaca Naik”) fell on Luiz de Brito e Mello with 12,000 men as he brought relief to Anriques, and killed both officers along with 180 Portuguese.

The India Post brochure tells the same war from the Indian side. It says the Portuguese looted a merchant ship of hers in 1617, bound for Arabia, that she had help from Venkatappa Nayaka of Keladi, and that two Portuguese commanders, Miranda and “D’Mello”, escaped. Danvers has Anriques and Brito e Mello dying in the following year’s fighting. The brochure states that its text is based on information received from the proponent of the stamp.

One queen or several

The Portuguese record names a Queen of Olala in 1555, 1567 to 1568, 1581, 1598 to 1599 and 1618, a span of 63 years. The queen Pietro della Valle met in 1623 looked to him about forty, although Portuguese informants had described her as much older. A queen who was 20 in 1555 would have been 88 in 1623.

The sources disagree on the count. According to IGNCA, archival records and Portuguese travelogues confirm three Abbakkas, a mother and two daughters, who fought between 1530 and 1599, and folklore merges them into one. India Post counts two: an elder queen (1554 to 1588) and a younger one (1594 to 1640), her daughter. Four queens of that name ruled, reports Live History India, which gives Abbakka II a reign of 1544 to 1582, taken from Ganapathi Rao Aigal’s 1928 history. Della Valle’s informants called the queen of 1623 the sister of her predecessor, which does not match the brochure’s mother and daughter. None of the sources opened for this article settles the question.

December 1623: the Italian’s account

Pietro della Valle reached Mangalore from Ikkeri and wrote his sixth letter there on 9 December 1623. He visited Ullal itself on 2 December and found a pleasant coastal town with a market, a large temple and a palace a mile off that the queen used only now and then. She kept her court at Manel, inland along another river.

He met her on the road there. She was on foot with four to six soldiers carrying swords in front and as many behind, one holding a palm-leaf umbrella over her. She wore plain white cotton and went barefoot. She spoke, he wrote, “like a prudent and judicious Woman”. She asked who he was, which courts he had seen and whether he had fallen ill so far from home, then told him to find a house and said she would talk with him again. He was told afterwards that she went on to see trenches she was having dug to carry water to land she wanted to improve. He gives her name as Abag-devi-Ciautrii, with Ciautrii a title he was told all the kings and queens of Olala bore.

His account of her past matches the tradition on two points. She had been married for many years to the King of Banghel, and when the quarrel came she divorced him and sent back the jewels he had given her. She then made war on him and the Portuguese who supported him, and she called in Venkatappa Nayaka of Ikkeri, who destroyed the fort at Banghel and beat the Portuguese in a battle near Mangalore. He also records the price. Venkatappa, whom he calls rapacious, took the richest city she had and much land, and she governed the rest in peace, respected by her neighbours. Portuguese informants told him she had poisoned her elder son, and he wrote that he did not believe it.

What the songs and the stamp add

Both the brochure and IGNCA set her beside Rani Lakshmibai of Jhansi, saying Abbakka came nearly 300 years earlier and has been largely forgotten by history. Tulu tradition carries the rest. The brochure and IGNCA say her story is kept alive in folk songs, in Yakshagana theatre and in bhuta worship, where a possessed performer narrates her deeds. IGNCA describes her as dark, simply dressed and dispensing justice late into the night, and says folklore makes her the last known user of the agnivana, the fire-arrow. The plainly dressed queen in the Italian’s 1623 account agrees with that picture.

How she died is not settled. In the brochure the elder queen resists the Portuguese until her last breath. In IGNCA’s telling her husband gave the Portuguese her battle plans, she was arrested, and she revolted in prison and died fighting. Live History India says sources give her death between 1580 and 1598, with Aigal’s book giving 1582. No contemporary document opened for this article describes her death.

The ship, the stamp and the class

ICGS Rani Abbakka was commissioned at Visakhapatnam on 20 January 2012 by Dr M. M. Pallam Raju, Minister of State for Defence, according to the Ministry of Defence release reproduced by Indian Defence Review. Hindustan Shipyard Limited designed and built the 50-metre vessel, which the release calls an inshore patrol vessel and the first of five in its series. The release gives a top speed of 31.5 knots and an endurance of 1,500 nautical miles at 14 knots. It was manned by 5 officers and 34 men and based at Chennai under Coast Guard Region (East). The Coast Guard’s own website now lists the Rani Abbakka Class under Fast Patrol Vessels, with five ships: Rani Abbakka, Rani Avantibai, Rani Durgavati, Rani Gaidinliu and Rani Rashmoni.

India Post issued a commemorative stamp of 500 paise (Rs 5) on Rani Abbakka Devi, and Nirmala Sitharaman released it at Excellent College, Moodbidri, on Friday 15 December 2023, according to the Deccan Herald. The portrait follows a painting by Vasudeva Kamath. India Post printed 303,200 of the stamps at the Security Printing Press, Hyderabad.