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In the rain-soaked hill country of Karnataka’s Malnad, Keladi Rani Chennammaji faces an imperial demand that would have broken most kingdoms: surrender Rajaram, Chhatrapati Shivaji’s son, to Aurangzeb. She refuses—and then defends that refusal, outmanoeuvring invasion and safeguarding her guest’s passage.
Her reign begins in crisis. The kingdom’s sovereign, Somashekhara Nayaka I—her husband—suffered a tragic decline and was murdered, triggering intrigue and a scramble for legitimacy that she had to quell before she could govern.
Drawing on Gazetteer synthesis, primary chronicles, and community memory, The Balija Queen of Malnad follows Chennammaji beyond the famous asylum episode into the harder labor of rule: restoring order, reorganizing military preparedness, managing the temple and treasury, and holding together a coastal–inland political economy where treaties, monopolies, arrears, and cannon belonged to the same calculus.
K.N. Kumar offers a Balija-centred reading without propaganda—treating identity as capability and asking the sharper question: how did a mid-sized hill kingdom preserve sovereignty, commerce, and continuity when an intrusive empire came calling?
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K. N. Kumar
K.N. Kumar (IAS, 1987 batch; Assam–Meghalaya cadre) is a public administrator and agriculture specialist whose career spans rural development, agriculture and fisheries across both state and central government. He holds an MPA from Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and a Master’s in Agriculture from Andhra Pradesh Agricultural University, Hyderabad.
In Meghalaya, he served as Agricultural Production Commissioner and Additional Chief Secretary, and later chaired the statutory Meghalaya State Farmers’ (Empowerment) Commission (2019–2024). He led commodity missions that strengthened aquaculture, expanded Lakadong turmeric and Shiitake mushroom cultivation, and helped introduce strawberry and buckwheat as high-potential crops.
At the national level, he served as Chief Executive of the National Fisheries Development Board and as Joint Secretary (Agriculture), where he conceptualised and drafted the Rashtriya Krishi Vikas Yojana (RKVY), enabling a ?25,000 crore allocation to states to accelerate growth in the primary sector. He also trained newly recruited civil servants at the Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration, Mussoorie, for nearly four years, worked with NIRD, and received the G-Files Exceptional Contribution Award (2017).
A strong advocate of natural farming, he practises it on a small farm near Hyderabad.
