Hyder Ali's soldiers found a gap in the walls. The guard's wife found them first.
The crack in the rock is still there. About two hundred kilometers northwest of Bangalore, in a fort that sprawls across seven hills, tourists squeeze through a gap in the stone walls that a man can barely fit through sideways. The locals call it Onake Obavvana Kindi—Obavva's crevice. And they'll tell you that the crack is famous because of a woman, a pestle, and a pile of corpses.
Whether it happened exactly the way they say is another matter. But the story has survived two and a half centuries, which is its own kind of truth.
Chitradurga sits on some of the oldest granite formations in the Indian subcontinent—hills that have been here since before anything we'd recognize as life crawled out of the sea. By the 10th century, someone decided these hills would make a decent fort. By the 18th century, after the Chalukyas and Hoysalas and Nayakas had all taken their turns adding walls and gates and watchtowers, the place had become something extraordinary: seven concentric fortification walls, each with narrow passages and gates, wrapping around the rocky slopes.
The locals call it Yelu Suttina Kote—the fort of seven circumambulations. You could walk the perimeter for eight kilometers and never reach the center without knowing where the doors were. Nineteen gateways, thirty-eight smaller doors, thirty-five secret entrances, and (supposedly) four invisible entrances, which seems like a contradiction in terms but gives you a sense of the paranoia involved.
The Nayakas of Chitradurga turned this geological accident into a dynasty. They were originally Bedar—hunters who knew these hills the way surgeons know a body—and they'd risen from chieftains under the Vijayanagar Empire to semi-independent rulers when that empire collapsed in 1565. For two hundred years they held the fort, sometimes allied with the Mughals, sometimes with the Marathas, sometimes with the emerging power in Mysore. They built eighteen temples inside the walls and ingenious water systems that never ran dry.
The greatest of them was Bharamappa Nayaka, who ruled from 1689 to 1721 and built forts, palaces, tanks, and temples across the region. He fought the Mughals to a standstill. But dynasties don't always produce greatness in every generation, and by the time Madakari Nayaka V took the throne in 1758, the balance of power in South India had shifted decisively.
Hyder Ali, the de facto ruler of Mysore, wanted Chitradurga. And Hyder Ali generally got what he wanted.
Hyder attacked Chitradurga three times. In 1760, Madakari Nayaka bought him off with a tribute of four to six lakh rupees—a fortune, but cheaper than losing the fort. In 1770, the same game. But Madakari kept switching allegiances, siding with the Marathas when it suited him, then trying to make nice with Hyder again. It was a dangerous strategy for a small ruler sandwiched between larger powers.
In 1777, Madakari invited the Marathas and the Nizam to invade Mysore. Hyder found out. This time there would be no tribute.
The siege began in late 1777 and dragged on for months. Hyder's army surrounded the seven walls, cut off supplies, and waited. The defenders made weekly sorties, inflicting casualties, buying time. Madakari Nayaka himself was wounded in one of these raids—a bullet struck him, and another hit his brother Parashuramappa.
Somewhere in this grinding attrition, the legend says, Hyder's soldiers noticed something: a narrow crevice in the rocks, just wide enough for a man to crawl through, used by the garrison's families to fetch water from a pond outside the walls.
The crevice had a guard—Kahale Mudda Hanuma, some sources say, or Kalanayak, depending on who's telling the story. He was a soldier, and one afternoon in 1779, he left his post to eat lunch at home. His wife Obavva went to fetch water.
That's when she saw them. Hyder Ali's soldiers, crawling through the crack one at a time, planning to infiltrate the fort from within.
According to the legend, Obavva did not scream. She did not run. She grabbed an onake—a heavy wooden pestle used for pounding grain—and positioned herself beside the opening. As each soldier emerged from the darkness, she struck him in the head. Hard. Then she dragged the body aside, hiding it so the men behind wouldn't know what awaited them.
How many did she kill? The folklore says dozens. Some tellings claim over a hundred. Modern historians, doing the grim arithmetic of what one person could realistically accomplish before fatigue, mess, or suspicion caught up, suggest ten to twenty would be more plausible for an improvised ambush. The Mysore State Gazetteers record that she dragged the bodies through the hole and pushed them aside—an image that suggests considerable physical strength and extraordinary nerve.
When her husband returned from lunch, he found Obavva standing amid the corpses with a blood-stained pestle. He blew the bugle. Reinforcements arrived. The infiltration was stopped.
And then, depending on which version you hear, Obavva died. Of shock, some say. Killed by an enemy soldier, say others. The details are vague because nobody was taking notes. This was a siege, and she was a guard's wife, and her story only became famous afterward.
Here's what we know for certain: Chitradurga fell to Hyder Ali in March 1779. It fell not because of a crevice or a pestle but because of betrayal. Muslim officers in Madakari Nayaka's own service—possibly alienated, possibly bribed—secretly colluded with Hyder Ali, providing intelligence on weak points and switching allegiance at a critical moment. Some accounts say they used the Muharram festival as cover for their defection.
Madakari Nayaka V was captured and sent to Srirangapatna, the Mysore capital, where he died in prison. His family died there too. Twenty thousand Bedar soldiers were deported and conscripted into Hyder's armies. The dynasty that had held the fort for two centuries ended.
There is no contemporary documentation of Obavva's defense in any records from Hyder Ali's campaigns or the Chitradurga Nayaka archives. The siege is well-documented; the single woman stopping an infiltration with a kitchen implement is not. Mark Wilks, writing in the early 19th century, describes collective resistance by Bedar warriors but doesn't mention any individual feat matching the legend.
This doesn't mean it didn't happen. It means we can't prove it did.
What we can prove is that the story persists. November 11 is celebrated as Onake Obavva Jayanti throughout Karnataka. There's a statue of her—sculpted by Ashok Gudigar—in front of the District Commissioner's office in Chitradurga. There's a sports stadium named after her: Veera Vanithe Onake Obavva Stadium. The crevice in the rocks is marked, signposted, and visited by thousands.
In 2019, director B.A. Purushottam made a Kannada film called Chitradurgada Onake Obavva, with actress Tara in the title role. The production team claimed to use what local tradition identifies as the original pestle, though historians question whether any 250-year-old kitchen tool could survive with reliable provenance.
The Karnataka police have an all-women squad called Obavva Pade—Obavva's Brigade—that does community outreach and self-defense training in schools. The legend has become infrastructure.
Chitradurga Fort remains remarkably intact. The seven concentric walls still stand. You can walk the same paths that Madakari Nayaka's soldiers patrolled. The Hidimbeshwara Temple, one of the oldest structures on the site, houses a stone said to be the tooth of the demon Hidimba, killed by Bhima in the Mahabharata—because the hills were collecting legends long before Obavva.
The fort is spread across 1,500 acres. It has its own microclimate. Rainwater flows through an ingenious system of channels and reservoirs that kept the garrison supplied during sieges. The Tanniru Doni—a small water source near Obavva's crevice—still holds cold water year-round.
After Hyder Ali died in 1782, his son Tipu Sultan controlled the fort until the British killed him at Srirangapatna in 1799. The British garrisoned Chitradurga until 1809, then handed it back to the Mysore government. Now it's a tourist attraction and a monument to whoever built it and whoever died defending it.
The story of Onake Obavva fits into a pattern. South India has its warrior queens—Rani Abbakka of Ullal, who fought the Portuguese for forty years; Kittur Chennamma, who resisted the British; Keladi Chennamma, who sheltered the Maratha prince Rajaram from the Mughals. Karnataka remembers its women who fought.
Whether Obavva killed ten soldiers or a hundred or none—whether the story is history or folklore or something in between—it survived because it said something people needed to hear. A guard's wife with a pestle, holding the gap, doing what had to be done.
The crack in the rocks is still there. You can go see it yourself.
Chitradurga Fort is 200 km northwest of Bangalore. The nearest railway station is Chitradurga, which connects to Bangalore and other major Karnataka cities. Buses run frequently from Bangalore (about 4 hours). The fort is 1 km from the main town.
Entry fee: ₹25 for Indians, ₹300 for foreigners. The fort is open from sunrise to sunset. Bring water—there's a lot of climbing—and sturdy shoes. The Onake Obavvana Kindi is marked and accessible, though you'll want to imagine it in 1779, when crawling through might have been the last thing you ever did.
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