Swathi Thirunal Rama Varma

Sri Swathi Thirunal Rama Varma III (16 April 1813 – 26 December 1846) was the Maharaja of the Kingdom of Travancore. He was a great musician and composer who has to his credit over 400 classical compositions in both Carnatic and Hindustani style.

A code of laws, courts of justice, introduction of English education, construction of an observatory, installation of the first Government printing press, establishment of the first manuscripts library were amongst the many initiatives taken by Swathi Thirunal, as a King, to modernize Travancore.

Swathi Thirunal was born into the Venad dynasty of the Matrilineal royal family of Travancore, which is now a part of Kerala, on 16 April 1813. He was the second child of Queen Gowri Lakshmi Bayi who ruled Travancore from 1810 to 1815, and Raja Raja Varma Koil Thampuran of Changanasseri Palace, and the elder son. While in the womb itself, he was proclaimed King and thus was referred to as Garbha Sreemaan. He was born in Svati star, and this is the reason why he was named Swathi Thirunal. He reigned under the regency of his mother from 1813 to 1815 and then under the regency of his maternal aunt Gowri Parvati Bayi until 1829. When he was just four months old, his mother invited Colonel John Munro, representative of the East India Company, and his officials and declared in the Durbar that she was entrusting the East India Company with the care of her child and expected the company to co-operate with him in future.He is known as Kalineesam(The demon of Kali Yuga) by Ayyavazhi.

In 1829 Swathi Thirunal reached majority at 16 and assumed full powers of ruler and reigned as the Maharajah of Travancore until his death in 1846. He had an elder sister, Gowri Rukmini Bayi, whose children ascended the Travancore musnud consecutively. Her only daughter was the mother of Moolam Thirunal. He had a younger brother, Uthram Thirunal Marthanda Varma, who succeeded him in 1846 and ruled Travancore until his demise in 1860.

Irayimman Thampi, the famous poet-composer wrote perhaps the most famous Malayalam lullaby Omanathinkal Kidavo (ഓമനത്തിങ്കള്‍ക്കിടാവോ), about Swathi Thirunal when he was born.

Both his aunt/foster mother, who was well-versed in music, and his father, a Sanskrit scholar, took special care about his education. Col. Munro also is said to have taken a keen interest in his education. He started learning Malayalam and Sanskrit at the age of six and English at the age of seven. The young Prince studied several languages, including Malayalam, Kannada, Tamil, Hindustani, Telugu, Marathi, Sanskrit, English and Persian. He impressed all his teachers, and even guests from abroad, with his keen understanding of not only languages but also other subjects like geometry. P. Sankunni Menon (A History of Travancore from the Earliest Times, 1878) records an incident between young Swathi Thirunal and Col. Welsh, a visiting British officer, that the word geometry and words like hexagon, heptagon and so on were derived from Sanskrit. Colonel Welsh summed up the boy King's genius as follows:

Swati Tirunal, now thirteen... took up a book of mathematics and selecting the forty-seventh proposition of Euclid sketched the figure on a country slate but what astonished me most was his telling us in English that Geometry was derived from the Sanskrit, which as Jaw metor (Jyamiti) to measure the earth and that many of our mathematical terms were also derived from the same source such as hexagon, heptagon, octagon... This promising boy is now, I conclude, sovereign of the finest country in India for he was to succeed to the Musnud (throne) the moment he had attained his 16th year.

In 1829, at the age of sixteen, Maharajah Swathi Thirunal married Thiruvattar Ammachi Panapillai Amma Srimathi Ayikutty Narayani Pillai Thankachi, a famed beauty of the Thiruvattar Ammaveedu family, was an expert Carnatic singer and Veena player.