- Lived:
- birth year unknown; crowned queen of Ullal in 1525; died a Portuguese prisoner around 1570 — her whole story unfolds on a few miles of the Tulu coast around the mouth of the Netravati river, in today's coastal Karnataka
- Field:
- queen of the Chowta dynasty of Ullal — Jain rulers of a small Tulu Nadu port — and leader of some four decades of armed resistance to the Portuguese at sea
- The Big Idea:
- A small trading port refused to buy the sea from the empire that claimed to own it. For most of a lifetime, a queen with fishing boats and fire-arrows made the Portuguese — masters of the Indian Ocean — pay for every attempt to collect.
- In their words:
- No sentence of hers survives in her own voice. For the dynasty's manner we have an eyewitness: an Italian traveller in 1623 found a queen of Ullal of the same name and line dressed like her own farmhands, "girded at the waist, with a plain piece of thick white Cotton, and bare-foot," out at daybreak inspecting her works.
- If you remember one thing:
- The earliest sustained Indian resistance to a European power was led from a port smaller than a modern suburb, by a woman, at the head of an alliance of Jains, Hindus and Muslims — and we know her through exactly two kinds of source: her enemy's ledgers and her people's songs.