14. PARAMASATTEE, a wooden idol with iron spoons attached, (see “Missionary Magazine,” October, 1837.)

Caureavilly near Mandycadoo, Kingdom of Travancore, November 1836^⁠1

Around three hundred Christians gathered in the early morning at a temple ‘in a beautiful grove of jack and Palmyra trees, and surrounded by several fine banyans’.^⁠2 At its heart were two reclining figures, six feet long and made from sun baked brick, plastered with chunam (highly polished plaster). 

According to the Rev. Charles Mead, who returned to England soon afterwards, they represented Pattera-Kalee (Bhadrakali) and Veerapathiran (Virabhadra), female and male emanations of the wrath of Shiva, with ‘faces painted to give them a terrific appearance’. Their faces were soon removed with an Indian spade (mamatee). While paid labourers cleared ‘the rubbish’:

We retired to the veranda of the temple, sung a Tamil hymn, read the 10^th chapter of the first Epistle to the Corinthians, addressed the people from the 20^th verse, and concluded with prayer. The people were delighted with the overthrow of the the idols; and subsequently began daily to assemble to hear the Scriptures read, and to join in prayer, where satanic worship was once performed. After the service was over, the image of Paramasattee was brought out of an adjoining room, and we rescued it from the flames with a view of bringing it to England, where it has safely arrived.^⁠3

Returning to his Mission House at Neyoor (Neyyoor) ‘before the sun was very powerful’, Mead found that Martha and Charles Mault, fellow missionaries from Nagercoil just over 8 miles away, had come to see him before he left:

When reviewing what the Gospel had effected for Travancore, since we first entered the field, we could not avoid saying, and our friends in Britain will join in the exclamation, ‘What hath God wrought!’.^⁠4

Mead clearly detected the hand of God in the changes he had seen over two decades in India, regarding his own part in these as contributing to a long-term war against what he called ‘satanic worship’. Indeed, the verse he preached from at the temple comes from a letter that was written by St Paul to the people of Corinth during the first century AD. 

It warns them not to consume sacrifices made at idolatrous altars, since these had been made to demons. Pointing out that consumption of the eucharist underlies the fellowship of Christians, Paul told the Corinthians ‘I would not that ye should have fellowship with demons’.^⁠5

Charles Mead had originally been appointed to succeed William Tobias Ringeltaube, a Prussian minister trained at the University of Halle who established the London Missionary Society’s mission in South India. Born in 1770, Ringeltaube’s missionary ambitions were inspired by John Newton (Chapter 2 & 12), going first to Calcutta in 1796 with the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge.^⁠6 He returned to Europe in 1799, complaining that he had been forced to preach in Portuguese to ‘a mixed congregation of Portuguese, Malays, Jews and Chinese’.^⁠7

Ringeltaube was appointed by the London Missionary Society in 1803, along with four others intended for India and Ceylon (Sri Lanka). They arrived at the Danish colony of Tranquebar (Tharangambadi) in December 1804, where Pietist missionaries had been operating since 1706. Seeking guidance from another German-speaking SPCK missionary, John Caspar Kohlhoff, Ringeltaube began learning Tamil before taking responsibility for Palamcottah (Palayamkottai) in Tinnevelly (Tirunelveli), on behalf of Kohlhoff.^⁠8

Around this time, Kohlhoff seems to have introduced Ringeltaube to Maharasan Vedamanickam, a Christian convert he had baptised some years earlier. Vedaminanickam came from Mylaudy (Mayiladi) in the Kingdom of Travancore (now part of Tamil Nadu’s Kanyakumari district), close to India’s southern tip. Ringeltaube began paying regular visits to Vedamanickam’s village, ultimately assisting him to begin to build a Church in 1809.^⁠9

The Kingdom of Travancore had been in a subsidiary alliance with the British East India Company since 1795, but conflict over a new treaty in 1805 enabled the Company to consolidate its influence. The Company’s resident, Colin Macaulay, was the son of a Church of Scotland minister and brother to Zachary Macaulay, one of the leaders of the evangelical campaign to abolish slavery in London. It was presumably Colin Macaulay who negotiated with the Maharaja of Travancore for the permission for  Vedamanickam’s church.

In 1812, Ringeltaube moved to Mylaudy, but facing health problems, in 1816 he ordained Vedamanickam and sailed to Ceylon. He evidently planned to recover in South Africa, but seems to have died en route.^⁠10 Although Mead never met Ringeltaube, it was into his shoes that he stepped when he arrived in late 1817, his first wife having died on the journey.^⁠11 He found the Church had thrived under Vedamanickam’s care, with seven chapels, five or six schools and around 900 converts and candidates for baptism.^⁠12

Macauley had been replaced as the Company’s local resident in 1810 by another reforming Scot, John Munro, who was appointed Dewan (Prime Minister) of the Kingdom of Travancore between 1811 and 1814. Munro retained considerable influence at the court, and persuaded the young Rani (Queen Regent), Gowri Parvati Bayi, to provide Mead with a bungalow at Nagercoil, four miles from Myladi, as well as 5000 rupees to purchase rice fields to support the seminary he proposed to establish.^⁠13

This patronage formed part of the official embrace of missionary education by the Kingdom of Travancore, in parallel with the 1813 alteration to the East India Company’s charter (Chapter 6), which had introduced an obligation to introduce ‘useful knowledge’ as well as ‘religious and moral improvement’.^⁠14

In 1819, Mead was joined at Nagercoil by Charles and Martha Mault (née Mead, who evidently traced her descent from Britain’s seventeenth century Puritan leader, Oliver Cromwell).^⁠15 Charles Mead and Charles Mault divided responsibility for surrounding villages between them, but it was only after the visit of George Bennet and Daniel Tyerman in 1827 (more below) that Mead moved to Neyoor, in the mission’s Western division.

​An image of ‘Pattera-Kalee and Veerapathiran’ was printed on the cover of the Missionary Magazine and Chronicle in September 1837, under the title ’Demon Worship in South Travancore’.^⁠16 Mead’s account of destruction, quoted above, was printed beneath this image, but its source is unclear since the figures are shown standing, while his description suggests those destroyed were reclining.

The appearance of such images on the title page of the Chronicle was a fairly recent innovation. Although the quarterly Missionary Sketches had featured striking images on its covers since its first issue in April 1818 (Chapter 4), the monthly Evangelical Magazine continued to feature just a single portrait each month, a practice established with the magazine in 1793 (Chapter 2). This had continued even after its title expanded to The Evangelical Magazine and Missionary Chronicle when a distinct Missionary Chronicle section was added at the end of the magazine in June 1813.

In June 1836, however, an editorial addressed ‘To the Members and Friends of the London Missionary Society’ appeared under a banner, The Missionary Magazine and Chronicle (relating chiefly to the Missions of the London Missionary Society). This stated that the Missionary Magazine and Chronicle would now be made available independently, but still continue as the final section in the Evangelical Magazine. Some surviving copies of the Missionary Magazine and Chronicle after this date have different page numbers to those included with the Evangelical Magazine, as well as an issue number and date included as a header (compare the covers for 1836 to those from 1837 shown here), but otherwise appear to be identical.

While Charles Mead remained the sole European male missionary resident at Neyoor, the text explained that he was assisted by an Indian ‘superintendent of schools, fourteen readers, and twenty-six assistant readers’.^⁠23 Mead’s 1832 report referred ‘to the village of Paenguddy, where the inhabitants delivered up the serpent-idol, represented in the first page of this sketch’.^⁠24

Missionary Sketches was quick to remind readers that:

Every instance in which the objects of heathen veneration are either discarded or destroyed, should excite our devout thanksgiving, and impart greater fervency to prayer, while we regard it as an earnest of the arrival of that period, in which, referring to the purposes of the Most High, it is declared “the idols he shall utterly abolish.” These indicate that God is working by the means now employed for effecting this…^⁠25

An excerpt from Mead’s report summarised his efforts to establish a school house at the village of Careavilly (Kariavili) in the grounds of the temple, referred to as ‘the principal devil house in these parts next to Mundacadoo’ (Mandaikadu).^⁠26

Mead explained that some of the owners of the temple had converted to Christianity, and the school house was intended to become a focus for Christian worship during the evenings. He thought that the ‘Pagoda will no longer be used as a place of heathen worship’ but would either be removed or allowed to decay, suggesting that ‘the latter is thought to be the most advisable mode of rooting out idolatry from the place’. Mead explained:

The heathen hold the pagoda in great veneration, and if any thing was done that looked too much like a triumph over them, it might be resented and occasion opposition.^⁠27

A much bolder approach seems to have been adopted at what seems to have been the same temple a mere four years later, according to Mead’s account of destruction from the Missionary Magazine and Chronicle of 1837. The overall strategy of converting the temple into a location for Christian worship, however, seems to have remained the same.

The final paragraph from Missionary Sketches in April 1833 provides an insight into the preoccupations of those responsible for commissioning the multiple serpentine images for LMS publications in subsequent years, suggesting:

The extensive and valuable labours of the native readers, the numbers under Christian instruction… and the attentive behaviour of the native congregations in places of worship, unite to endorse on every disciple of Christ more fervent and persevering prayer, for the influences of the Holy Spirit a savour of life… and thus to accelerate the arrival of the period, when the worship of the serpent, and every other delusive idolatry promoted by the great destroyer of our race, who, under the form of a serpent, introduced sin and all its degradations and penalties to our world, shall be discontinued…^⁠28

For British Christians like Charles Mead, raised on an account of temptation and fall in which a serpent played the leading role, it must have been obvious that the reverence paid to snakes in the form of Naga Swamy at places like Nagercoil was a form of ‘devil worship’, indicating the ongoing influence of Satan, ‘the great destroyer of our race’.

In describing the annual festival at nearby Mandaikadu in 1837, Mead emphasised that it was a ‘place of devil worship’, describing a ‘swinging machine’ which hoisted devotees using a ‘hook inserted in the back’. He described how children who had recovered from illnesses were made to dance with ‘a thin piece of cane inserted in their side’, even hinting that the resident ‘demon’ was said to require a human sacrifice every thousand years.^⁠29

Missionary work, situated in this way, was understood as a contribution to a very long-term cosmic battle, in which conversions and the renunciation of ‘idols’ suggested the scales might be tipping.

The following month, the Missionary Magazine and Chronicle returned to ‘Demon Worship in South Travancore’, continuing Charles Mead’s ‘account of this decaying but abhorrent superstition’.^⁠33 On the cover an apparently accurate image of ‘Paramasattee’ was printed, with which Mead had returned to London, imagined under a Banyan tree at night, small flames rising from the many spoon-shaped attachments attached to her front.

Mead’s account resumes:

The name Paramasattee literally signifies, ‘heavenly virtue, or strength.’ This demon, though frightful in appearance, is accounted no less a personage than the wife of heavenly Seevan [Shiva]. The image, which is formed of wood, was usually concealed from public view, except on great occasions, when it was brought out and worshipped in connection with Pattera-kalee [Bhadrakali]. There is a great assumption of mystery connected with the worship of this evil spirit.^⁠34

Mead seems to have derived much of his understanding of the function of this image from a former priest at the temple, described as ‘a very interesting man, more than seventy years of age’, who was now ‘a converted character’ following baptism as a Christian. He seems to have told the missionary that the many spoon-shaped vessels were used as lamps, holding oil and wicks, lit during temple festivals to create ‘an imposing appearance, when placed in the shade of a banyan tree, on a dark night’:

These lamps are intended to represent the letters of the alphabet, which are repeated when the image is worshipped; and there are several Tamil letters carved on the image itself. Five of the letters are held as sacred and mystic, and the very repetition of them, it is said, ‘consumed the sins’ of a certain Rajah: they form the mysterious word, Na-ma-se-va-ya.^⁠35

According to Mead, when the figures of Pattera-kalee (Bhadrakali) was destroyed, the same former priest told the people:

You used to come to the pagoda with your offerings, and ask me to dance before the idols until the evil spirits came on me; then I would tell you what to do. It was all false and wicked; but we did this until the Missionaries and the native teachers came to enlighten us. Now by the blessing of God our eyes are opened. Some of us have long since abandoned the devil’s service. I am glad I am no longer his slave. Let us be stedfast, and endeavour to show others the true way to salvation.^⁠36

At the end of his speech, Mead provided a slightly different account of the destruction at the temple in Kariavili to that printed the following September:

The people wished me to attend a meeting for the purpose of destroying a large temple, containing two images. On my arrival, I found them all assembled and very much interested. They said, “The evil spirits, which these images represent, have been long troubling the neighbourhood, and several of us have for some time given up our idolatry. Now we wish these relics to be entirely removed, but no one has the courage to do it.”^⁠40

Mead apparently told them that ‘we would have it removed’ only ‘if they could show it was their property’. He was given ‘the signatures of eighteen persons, saying they would freely give up the temple to us, to do what we pleased with it’, ending his speech with a mention of Paramassattee:

The other image was a wooden idol – the people wished to burn it, but, as it was rather portable, I proposed to bring it home, telling them, that when you saw that they were casting away their idols, it would be some proof to you of their desire to become true Christians.^⁠41

It seems that Christianity may have represented a new form of freedom for many converts, liberating them from inherited forms of power, including the powers of what were referred to as ‘evil spirits’. Nearly a quarter of a century later, readers of the Juvenile Missionary Magazine were told of Paramasattee, the ‘tall, curious looking wooden idol’ shown on the left of an image of the case of ‘The Buddhist and Other Idols’ at the Missionary museum, that:

“Ignorant and unwise,” the simple people stare with wonder at this strange sight, and are quite ready to believed that Paramasattee is indeed a great god.^⁠42

The testimony reported by Mead, however, seems clear that temple images were not regarded as gods in their own right, but rather as representations or and vessels for spirits, as in Polynesia (Chapter 13). Nevertheless, there remained an understandable nervousness about being the one to wield a spade against them.

The majority of early converts in Travancore belonged to caste groups that were at the time referred to as Shánar (known since 1921 as Nadar), as well as Pariah (Paraiyar). These had a fairly lowly status within the Kingdom, which was dominated by Nair (or Nayar) and Brahmin caste groups, who had developed a range of ways of asserting their status. These included various forms of compulsory labour, including at temples, but also prohibitions on lower castes wearing clothing above the waist, carrying umbrellas, wearing shoes or golden ornaments.^⁠44

When converted Christian women began wearing clothing on their upper bodies, this was regarded as asserting a privilege properly reserved for the higher castes. Violent confrontations as well as legislative responses followed after 1827, and it was not until 1859 that Nadar women in Travancore gained the legal right to cover their breasts, although not in the same way at Nair women.^⁠45

Concern for the lives of women seems to have become a significant dimension of early missionary work at Nagercoil, driven in no small part by the arrival of Martha Mault. She established a girl’s boarding school in 1819, although female education seems to have been regarded somewhat suspiciously, including by many new Christians converts, at least initially.

In 1821, Martha Mault began to teach lace-making to her female students, after they had learned how to read and write. By 1827, there were forty girls at her school in Nagercoil, twelve learning lace-making.^⁠46 Mault’s efforts have been connected to contemporary British gender ideologies of ‘women’s work’, emphasising ‘separate spheres’ as part of a ‘mission of domesticity’, but they also appear to have been underpinned by a series of fairly practical aims.^⁠47

Firstly, the sale of lace created a source of income that supported the costs of running her school. Secondly, lace-making was seen as a way to enable enslaved girls to build up a financial surplus with which to purchase their liberty. Girls in this position were evidently prioritised when it came to teaching these skills, and by 1830 Martha Mault reported that eight girls had emancipated themselves in this way.^⁠48

Many former students from ‘Mrs Mault’s school’ went on to become the wives of Christian ‘Native teachers’ as well as village school mistresses in their own right.  While many more boys than girls were educated at mission schools in South Travancore, Martha Mault’s educational project, combining literacy with needlework, seems to have struck a chord with women across Evangelical networks all over the world.

Groups of British women came together to fund the education of particular girls – by 1830, 22 girls were supported in this way.^⁠49 Some of these girls were even given names by their supporters, possibly to commemorate deceased female relatives and friends. ‘Ladies’ at St. Neots, the town in Huntingdonshire where Martha Mault grew up, raised £2 and 5 shillings each year ‘for the support of “Sarah Franklin”’.^⁠50

When Charles Mead spoke at Exeter Hall in May 1837, he told the meeting:

I have in my hand the writing of a little girl, named Elizabeth Fletcher, who is supported by the church at Stepney. It is the second Epistle of St. John, and it is written on a palmyra leaf, with an iron pen. It is novel sight in India, to witness females reading and writing, but their parents are now anxious for their instruction.^⁠51

Considerable funds were also raised for Travancore schools beyond Britain. A donation of £12 from Leonora Gaussen on behalf of the ‘Ladies Association for Female Education’ in Geneva was received in November 1837,^⁠52 followed by a further £14-10 in March 1838.^⁠53

Richard Knill, who initially travelled to India with Charles Mead and assisted him establish the mission at Nagercoil, was appointed as a minister at St Petersburg in Russia by the London Missionary Society after his return to London in 1820. His congregation raised funds for the Nagercoil mission,^⁠54 continuing even after Knill returned to London in 1833.

A key supporter of the LMS was Sarah Biller (née Kilham), who formed part of an influential group of evangelical (and Quaker) women in the city.^⁠55 Another St Petersburg Quaker, Daniel Wheeler, appointed to manage Russian imperial farms by Tsar Alexander, felt called to visit missions in the Pacific, setting off with his son in late 1833, only to return in early May 1838.^⁠56

Martha Mault herself returned to Britain in September 1833, ironically perhaps, at least partly to arrange for the education of her own five children.⁵⁷ Nevertheless, she used the opportunity to raise funds and solicit interest in ‘female education’ in India.^⁠58  Following her return to Travancore in October 1835, she arranged for a circular letter to be printed at Nagercoil, to send to her supporters.^⁠59

One of these, dated 7 September 1836, has survived in the archives of the Council for World Mission in London, having been sent to the Foreign Secretary, William Ellis. The first printed line reads ‘My dear Madam’, although the last word has been crossed out and replaced with Sir, suggesting that Ellis was probably the only male recipient of one of these letters.^⁠60

Mault reported that when she returned, there were 62 boarders and 10 day scholars at her school in Nagercoil, but 38 more boarders were soon added. Miss McGregor, who returned with her in 1835 in order to marry the missionary Charles Miller, soon established her own school at Neyoor with a further 35 students. Mault reported that by September 1836, they had between them 145 girls ‘under our immediate inspection’, with a similar number taught at village schools.

The circular acknowledges that ‘most of the higher castes are still averse to having their daughters instructed’ but suggested that ‘as the benefits of education become more apparent by its wider diffusion among the lower ranks, the higher will be compelled to educate their daughters too’.^⁠61 The final paragraphs of the letter explained that each girl was instructed for four years, unless they needed to stay longer, but that ‘the simplicity of their food and dress enables us to keep a girl at the trifling expense of forty five shillings per annum’.

Following their visit to Nagercoil in 1827,  George Bennet and Daniel Tyerman noted:

We are most highly gratified with the state of the general aspect of this Mission… There is nothing, as far as we have seen, equal to it in all India, and we were strongly reminded of what we had so often witnessed in the South Seas.^⁠62

They also noted:

The girls’ school, under the care of Mrs. Mault (of whom we cannot speak too highly), is in an excellent state, and does her exertions much credit. Twelve of these girls learn to make lace, some of which is exceedingly well done…^⁠63

Although Tyerman and Bennet were thwarted when they attempted to acquire an ‘idol’ at the temple in Nagercoil, they do seem to have been presented with a sample of locally made lace by Martha Mault. It survived, pinned to a note written by George Bennet describing its source, at the headquarters of the Council for World Mission in London, where I encountered it in August 2010.^⁠64

As an artefact, this fragment, now at the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich in London (Chapter 32), has the potential to say at least as much about the early Travancore  mission, with its complex and changing dynamics of caste and gender, as the figure of Paramasattee, now kept on the other side of the river Thames, at the British Museum.

It finds a curious echo in a length of lace from the collection of the V&A Museum in South Kensington, where a printed green label states ‘London Missionary Society, Lace Industry, Nagercoil, S. India’ (V&A T.195-1993). Below this, a hand-written price in Rupees suggests that it was purchased in India, perhaps with the intention of using it as a decorative edging. How many other examples of Nagercoil lace survive in museum collections, without such labels, incorporated into other garments?

Annette Weiner, who undertook doctoral fieldwork in the Trobriand Islands, six decades after Bronislaw Malinowski, found he had significantly underestimated the role played by women in the Kula exchange system, described in his famous 1922 book Argonauts of the Western Pacific. While men were concerned with enhancing their status through the exchange of shell valuables, women developed an elaborate technology for ‘making wealth out of dried banana leaves’, which Weiner came to regard as paralleled by female practices of textile production all over the world.^⁠65

Introducting her 1992 theoretical book, Inalienable Possessions, Weiner suggested that:

In many societies throughout the world, however, women are the producers and, in part or wholly, the controllers of highly valued possessions – a currency of sorts made from “cloth”. Intricate symbolic meanings semantically encode sexuality, biological reproduction, and nurturance so that such possessions, as they are exchanged between people, act as the material agents in the reproduction of social relations….
Historically, women’s control over these arenas has accorded them powers associated with magical potency, sacred prerogatives, political legitimacy, and life-giving and life-taking social controls.^⁠66

Lace making in England, like the production of banana leaf fibres in the Trobriands, can be regarded as involving the production of ‘a currency of sorts made from “cloth”’. In the East of England, where Martha Mault came from, lace-making was linked to the history of Protestantism, having arrived with French and Flemish refugees from continental wars of religion during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Lace formed an important and valuable part of middle-class female dress, with inherited items of ‘antique lace’ treasured as family heirlooms, playing a role in key English life-cycle ceremonies – baptisms, weddings and funerals. During the nineteenth century, although lace making was increasingly mechanised, making lace by hand survived ‘as a means of occupying spare time’ among middle class women.^⁠67 Indeed, work produced in this way was increasingly sold to generate funds to support missionary work.^⁠68

Alongside a description of mechanised lace-making in Nottingham, Derby and Leicester, Friedrich Engels observed in 1844 that hand-made lace continued to be commercially produced in Northampton, Oxford and Bedford, where lace ‘schools’, effectively small-scale workshops, exploited the children of the poor. Summarising, he suggested:

This is the price at which society purchases for the fine ladies of the bourgeoisie the pleasure of wearing lace; a reasonable price truly! Only a few thousand blind working men, some consumptive labourers’ daughters, a sickly generation of the vile multitude bequeathing its debility to its equally “vile” children and children’s children.^⁠69

Did the introduction of lace-making in South Travancore simply mark the expansion of similar forms of exploitation to an Indian context? A century later, Mahatma Gandhi deployed the production of Khadi cloth by hand as a symbol of dignity in labour as part of the swadeshi movement. Is it implausible to suggest that lace-making as form of economic self-empowerment within the female-directed educational setting of ‘Mrs Mault’s school’ at Nagercoil, suggests something similar may have been at play in missionary contexts?

In moving from the destruction of temple sculptures to the production of lace, I have attempted to demonstrate some of the ways in which these seemingly distinct practices remained intimately connected. The transformations associated with the widespread adoption of Christianity by marginalised castes in South Travancore pitted the temple, a focus for existing ideas and practices surrounding fertility, where many dedications were evidently made by women, against the school, where at least some women gained new forms of economic power, clothing their bodies in new ways to challenge entrenched forms of hierarchy.

With a focus on the Pacific, Annette Weiner noted ‘many examples of gender complementarity between women and men in terms of hard and soft (cloth) possessions, weaving and warfare’.^⁠71 This interplay is powerfully represented by the ki’iki’i from Rarotonga (Chapter 12), which brings a hard wooden core together with soft barkcloth wrappings, just as the to’o from Tahiti (Chapter 4) combine a wooden core with woven and feather wrappings.

The paired temple figures of Bhadrakali and Virabhadra, their hard bodies clothed by soft woven fabric, suggests that similar notions of gender complementarity formed part of South Indian religious conceptions, although the introduction of education for girls, even in a kingdom dominated by the famously matrilineal Nair caste, marked a new departure in gender relations.

Weiner suggested that to read such examples of complementarity as oppositions between male and female ‘is to miss entirely the commingling of symbols and actions that define the political domain for men and women in terms of reproducing relationships and possessions in the face of loss’. Cloth, she suggested, with its ‘acts of tying and unravelling, sacred threads and dangerous dyes, woven warps and unworked woofs’,  ‘may be the most apt metaphor to visualise… expressions of longed for unity juxtaposed against the realities of death, destruction, and change.’^⁠72

If the early mass conversions at Nagercoil were to be followed by the establishment of a Christian society, able to reproduce itself through subsequent generations, schools seem to have provided the institutional form through which its members could be produced. Martha Mault and Charles Mead arguably represent complementary poles underpinning the establishment of this new dispensation in South Travancore, at least when they represented it to supporters elsewhere in the world.