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Tag: Chitradurga

Chitradurga British History, 1780s-1880s

Barry Lewis 0 Comments
Chitradurga

Recent conversations and emails with my Chitradurga friends and acquaintances made me realize that little is known locally about the period when British soldiers and civilians lived there, mostly because so many of the relevant historical records are held far away in archives and libraries in New Delhi and the United Kingdom. My object here is to sketch a broad historical outline of the British experience at Chitradurga. I also try to explain why they came, why some of them settled in Chitradurga, and why most were gone by the 1830s.

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British Lives at Chitradurga

Barry Lewis 2 Comments

The Madras Army’s withdrawal in the 1830s effectively ended the British community in Chitradurga. The last British marriages at Chitradurga were held in 1812 and there was about a 50 year gap between babies born in 1820 and the next batch of births in the 1870s. The cemetery continued to receive the occasional new grave into the 1870s, most of which were the remains of local civil administrators (e.g., a jailer and the head clerk of the district offices) and Christian missionaries.

The tables in this section list every British man, woman, and child for which I can find primary documentary evidence. The reader is advised that the people named represent only a small fraction of the British population who lived at various times in Chitradurga between the 1760s and the 1880s. We have the few names that we do because these people married, died, or were born or baptised in Chitradurga, all acts that left footprints in official records. The others, like most people, vanished namelessly into the past.

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