A Jain queen on the Karnataka coast refused to pay tribute. They sent fleets. She sent them back.
Vasco da Gama arrived in Calicut in 1498 with cheap trade goods and a fundamental misunderstanding of the situation. The Portuguese thought they were discovering India. India thought they were another set of traders from across the sea, like the Arabs who'd been coming for centuries. Within a decade, the Portuguese had corrected that impression by seizing Goa, massacring Muslims, and establishing a protection racket along the entire western coast.
Pay us tribute. Let us control your trade. Fly our flag, carry our permits, or watch your ships burn.
By 1525, they'd destroyed the Mangalore port and were eyeing the next prize: Ullal, a prosperous little port town where the spices came down from the Western Ghats to meet the Arabian Sea. Pepper. Cardamom. Rice. The stuff that made men rich and empires expand.
That same year, a Jain princess was crowned queen. She would spend the next forty-five years making sure the Portuguese never got their hands on Ullal. Her name was Abbakka, and she was India's first woman freedom fighter—though she wouldn't have used that term. She was just defending her kingdom, her trade, and her people.
The Portuguese called her the biggest threat they faced on the Malabar coast. They weren't exaggerating.
The Chowta dynasty came from Gujarat originally, Jain merchants and warriors who migrated to Karnataka's Tulu Nadu region around the 12th century. They settled in Ullal, became completely naturalized, adopted the local language and customs, and—crucially—followed the matrilineal inheritance system called Aliyasantana.
Under Aliyasantana, property and power passed from mother to daughter, not father to son. A king's heir was his niece, not his son. When Thirumala Raya III ruled Ullal in the early 16th century and had no nephews, he trained his niece Abbakka in everything a ruler needed to know: sword fighting, archery, cavalry, military strategy, diplomacy, and statecraft.
It was unusual for a woman to rule. It was not unprecedented. What made Abbakka remarkable wasn't that she became queen. It was what she did with it.
Thirumala Raya also arranged a strategic marriage for Abbakka—to Lakshmappa Arasa Bangaraja II, king of the neighboring Mangalore kingdom. The idea was to unite the coastal rulers against the Portuguese threat. The marriage failed. Abbakka returned to Ullal with her three children, and her estranged husband nursed a grudge that would eventually help destroy her.
But that was decades away. In 1525, when Abbakka took the throne, she had a kingdom to defend and a port to run.
Ullal was a prosperous port for a reason. Arab merchants had been trading with the western coast of India since the 7th century—spices going out, horses and luxury goods coming in. The Portuguese wanted to break this relationship, to insert themselves as middlemen and gatekeepers, to impose their cartaz system of trade licenses on ships that had sailed these waters for generations.
They would stop your ship. Demand to see your Portuguese permit. If you didn't have one, they'd seize your cargo, kill your crew, and burn the vessel. If you did have one, they'd charge you for the privilege.
One by one, the smaller rulers along the coast fell in line. They didn't have the ships or the soldiers to resist. They paid the tribute, carried the permits, and watched their profits flow to Goa.
Abbakka refused.
Her ships continued to trade with the Arabs. Her port continued to operate outside Portuguese control. When Portuguese envoys came to demand tribute, she sent them away empty-handed. And when they threatened her, she started building an army.
It was a diverse force. Abbakka was Jain, but her administration included Hindus and Muslims. Her soldiers came from all castes—including the Mogaveera fishermen, whose skill on the water would prove crucial in naval battles. She even appointed Beary men (descendants of Arab traders who'd settled on the coast) as seamen in her navy.
This wasn't unusual tolerance for its time. It was strategic. Abbakka needed every ally she could get.
In 1555, the Portuguese sent Admiral Dom Álvaro da Silveira to teach Abbakka a lesson. She defeated him. The details are sparse—sources disagree on exactly what happened—but the Portuguese retreated.
In 1557, they tried again. Abbakka pushed them back.
In 1558, they attacked with a larger force and managed to ransack Ullal to some extent. But they couldn't hold it. Abbakka's guerrilla tactics and knowledge of local terrain forced them out.
In 1567, more Portuguese attacks. More Portuguese defeats.
In 1568, the Portuguese Viceroy António Noronha sent General João Peixoto with a full fleet of soldiers. This time they captured Ullal. They entered the royal palace. They thought they'd won.
Abbakka escaped. She took refuge in a mosque—a detail that says something about the relationships she'd built across religious lines—and that same night, she gathered two hundred of her most loyal soldiers. They raided the Portuguese encampment in the darkness. General Peixoto was killed. Seventy Portuguese soldiers were taken prisoner. The rest fled to their ships.
According to local legend, Abbakka was the last person in history to use the agnivana—fire arrows—in battle. Whether this is literally true or just a way of saying she was the last of an older kind of warfare, the image captures something about her: flaming arrows arcing through the night over Portuguese ships, setting their sails ablaze.
By 1569, the Portuguese had regrouped. They regained the Mangalore fort and captured Kundapur. Abbakka realized she couldn't fight alone forever.
She forged an alliance with the Zamorin of Calicut—the most powerful resistor to Portuguese expansion on the Malabar coast—and with the Bijapur Sultan of Ahmednagar. Together, they mounted a coordinated campaign.
Kutty Pokar Markar, the Zamorin's general, attacked and destroyed the Portuguese fort at Mangalore. It was a significant victory, one of the few times the Portuguese lost a fortification on the Indian coast. But returning from the battle, Kutty Pokar Markar was killed by the Portuguese. The counterattack was vicious.
And somewhere in this chaos, Abbakka's estranged husband saw his opportunity.
Lakshmappa Bangaraja had never forgiven Abbakka for leaving him. According to legend, they'd quarreled over their daughter's marriage—he wanted a political alliance, she wanted a worthy husband for the girl—and when she'd rescued her daughter from an attempted kidnapping, the breach became permanent.
Now he allied with the Portuguese.
He knew her defenses. He knew her strategies. He knew the terrain, the secret paths, the timing of her patrols. He gave it all away.
Sources differ on exactly when and how Abbakka was finally captured. Some say 1570. Some suggest the conflict continued into the early 1580s. One account describes a pre-dawn assault in 1581, with a massive Portuguese fleet carrying 3,000 soldiers catching her off-guard as she returned from a temple visit. She mounted her horse, led a counterattack, fire arrows lighting up the sky—but it wasn't enough. She was wounded and captured.
But even in prison, Abbakka refused to submit. According to traditional accounts, she died fighting, rebelling against her captors to the end. No comfortable retirement, no negotiated peace. Just resistance until there wasn't anything left.
Ullal is part of greater Mangalore now—a quiet fishing town about 10 km from Mangalore Central railway station. The beach is still there, the Arabian Sea still lapping at the same shores that Portuguese ships once bombarded.
The fort is mostly ruins. You can see remnants of the walls behind the Kote Vishnumurthy temple on Uchila hill, and around the Someshwar shore temple—a unique structure on a rocky outcropping where the waves crash against the base while devotees worship above. Some of the old walls are visible, crumbling now, but you can still imagine looking out across the water, watching for sails.
The crevice isn't there anymore, but the memory is. Prof. Thukaram Poojary built the Tulu Baduku Museum in Bantwal taluk, dedicated to Abbakka's memory. There are bronze statues of her in both Ullal and Bangalore. The Indian Navy named an inshore patrol vessel after her—the INS Abbakka. The Indian postal department issued a stamp in 2003.
Every year, Ullal celebrates the Veera Rani Abbakka Utsava, honoring the queen who made the Portuguese empire's life miserable for four decades. They give out the Veera Rani Abbakka Prashasti—an award for distinguished women.
In Karnataka, Abbakka is remembered alongside the state's other warrior queens: Kittur Chennamma, Keladi Chennamma, Rani Chennabhairadevi, and Onake Obavva. Women who fought when fighting meant something different than it does now—no global media coverage, no support networks, just you and your soldiers and whatever alliances you could build before the next attack came.
The Portuguese would hold Goa until 1961—451 years of continuous presence that ended only when Jawaharlal Nehru sent in the Indian army. They converted populations, destroyed temples, established the Inquisition, and left behind a distinctive Indo-Portuguese culture that still shapes coastal Karnataka and Goa.
But they never fully controlled the coast the way they wanted to. Too many local rulers fought back, too many trade routes remained outside their grasp. Abbakka was one of the first to prove that the Portuguese weren't invincible—that a small kingdom with good defenses, smart alliances, and a willingness to die rather than submit could hold them off for generations.
She wasn't the last. After the Portuguese came the Dutch, then the British, then 200 years of colonial rule that ended only in 1947. But when Indians look back for models of resistance, for evidence that their ancestors didn't simply roll over, Abbakka is one of the names that comes up.
Three hundred years before Rani Lakshmibai charged into British gunfire at Gwalior, Abbakka of Ullal was setting Portuguese ships on fire with flaming arrows and escaping through the night to fight another day.
The better India remembers her, the harder it becomes to pretend that colonialism happened because nobody fought back.
Ullal Beach is 10 km from Mangalore Central Railway Station. The Mangalore International Airport is about 20 km away. Local buses, autos, and taxis run regularly from Mangalore city center.
The fort ruins are scattered—some behind the Kote Vishnumurthy temple at Uchila, some near the Someshwar temple on the shore. The Ullal Dargah (tomb of Syed Mohammed Shareefulla Madani, a Sufi saint who arrived in 1569—during Abbakka's reign) is also worth visiting as an example of the religious coexistence her kingdom represented.
The Tulu Baduku Museum in Bantwal taluk has the most comprehensive collection of material related to Abbakka's life. Contact local tourism offices in Mangalore for current visiting hours.
Best time to visit: October to February, avoiding the monsoon when the Arabian Sea gets serious about reminding everyone who's really in charge of this coastline.
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