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Vellore Fort

Vellore Fort is a moated granite fortress in northern Tamil Nadu, built in the sixteenth century by chiefs serving Vijayanagara, which became a seat of the last Aravidu emperors and later passed through Bijapuri, Maratha, Mughal, Carnatic and British hands.

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The fort

Vellore stands on the Palar river, on the main route between the Tamil plain and the Deccan plateau. The fort was built in the sixteenth century by Nayaka chiefs who held the region for the Vijayanagara emperors; the name of Chinna Bommi Nayaka is attached to it in local tradition. It is a large rectangle of dressed granite, with an outer and an inner wall, round bastions and a wide moat that is still filled with water. Inside are the Jalakanteshvara temple, dedicated to Shiva, whose entrance hall carries some of the finest late Vijayanagara carving, as well as a later mosque and a church.

Seat of the Aravidus

After the defeat of 1565 the Vijayanagara court moved south, first to Penukonda and then to Chandragiri. In the early seventeenth century the Aravidu emperor Venkata II made Vellore one of his main residences, and his successors held it as their last strong place. It was from this court that Venkata's successors dealt with the Dutch and the English, who were then setting up trading posts on the Coromandel coast; the English grant of land at Madraspatnam in 1639 came from Vijayanagara's local governors in the region. The emperors' authority was by then weak, and the succession disputes after Venkata's death in 1614 opened the way to invasion.

Changing hands

Forces of the Bijapur sultanate took Vellore in the 1640s, during their conquest of the southern plain. In 1678, during Shivaji's campaign in the south, the Marathas took it after a siege of more than a year. The Mughals captured it at the beginning of the eighteenth century, and it came under the Nawabs of the Carnatic at Arcot, whose wars with rivals backed by the French and the English made the region a battleground in the 1740s and 1750s. The English East India Company garrisoned the fort from the later eighteenth century.

1806 and after

After the fall of Srirangapatna in 1799, the Company lodged the family of Tipu Sultan at Vellore. In July 1806 sepoys of the garrison rose against new dress regulations that forbade caste marks and earrings and prescribed a new turban. They killed more than a hundred British soldiers and officers before troops from Arcot retook the fort, and the reprisals were severe. Tipu's sons were suspected of encouraging the rising and were moved to Calcutta. The episode is treated by some historians as a forerunner of 1857.

The fort was later used as a place of confinement for other deposed rulers. The last king of Kandy, Sri Vikrama Rajasinha, deposed by the British in 1815, was held at Vellore and died there in 1832. Today the fort houses government offices and a museum, and the temple is again in worship after a long period of disuse.

Further reading

  • Stein, Burton. Vijayanagara. Cambridge University Press, 1989
  • Sastri, K. A. Nilakanta. A History of South India. Oxford University Press, 1955
  • Talbot, Cynthia. Precolonial India in Practice. Oxford University Press, 2001

See also

  • Vijayanagara Empire — Vijayanagara was the last great empire of southern India, founded on the Tungabhadra in 1336, ruling most of the peninsula for two centuries until its defeat at Talikota in 1565, and leaving the ruined city at Hampi.
  • Vellore Mutiny — The Vellore Mutiny of 1806 was an uprising by Indian sepoys of the Madras Army against the British East India Company garrison at Vellore Fort, triggered chiefly by new uniform regulations perceived as an attack on religious custom, and is regarded by historians as an early precursor to the far larger revolt of 1857.
  • Nawabs of the Carnatic — The Nawabs of the Carnatic ruled the Tamil country from Arcot, and the contest over their succession became the war through which Britain displaced France in India.
  • Carnatic Wars — A series of three conflicts fought between 1746 and 1763 in which the British and French East India Companies, each backing rival claimants to local thrones, competed for control of southeastern India.
  • Tipu Sultan — Tipu Sultan was the ruler of the Kingdom of Mysore from 1782 to 1799, known both for his prolonged military resistance to British expansion in southern India and, in a historically contested record, for episodes of forced conversion and temple destruction in frontier regions of his kingdom.
  • Shivaji — Shivaji Bhonsle (1630–1680) was the founder of the Maratha Empire, crowned Chhatrapati in 1674 after building an independent state in the Deccan through decades of warfare against the Bijapur Sultanate and the Mughal Empire.

This entry was last revised on 12 November 2026.