Kadur

Kadur stood on the Karnataka plateau east of the Western Ghats, within a country divided among fortified chiefs after the weakening of Vijayanagara. The surrounding districts linked relatively dry grain-growing lands with the wetter hill country. Local strongholds, temple estates and market settlements gave successive rulers ways to collect revenue and command routes across this varied landscape.

The greater Kadur country eventually came within the orbit of the Keladi rulers at Bednur. Haidar Ali's conquest of their capital in 1763 brought the whole region under Mysore. After Tipu Sultan's defeat in 1799, the restored Wodeyar monarchy inherited a province whose chiefdoms had not ceased to matter. In December 1830 Rangappa Nayaka of the Tarikere family joined a wider rising and seized Kaldurga and Kamandurga. Mysore's troops recovered those forts in early 1831, and the British assumed direct administration of the state later that year. Records of the suppression also mention prisoners held at Kadur fort. The town's place in this history was therefore connected with a wider chain of garrisons and local ruling families, whose accommodation with central government remained fragile into the nineteenth century.