Career
The 23-year-old Kanthirava Narasaraja I (also known as Ranadhira Kanteerava Narasa Raja Wodeyar), who had earlier been adopted by the widow of Raja I, became, in 1638, the new Wodeyar of Mysore.Before becoming king of mysore,he lived in terakanambi near gundalpet,chamarajanagar district. In the fashion of the two wodeyars before him, he continued to expand the Mysore dominions. This included taking Satyamangalam from the Nayaks of Madurai in the south, unseating the Chingalvas from their base in Piriyapatna in the west, gaining possession of Hosur (near Salem) to the north and delivering a major blow at Yelahanka to the rule of Kempe Gowda of Magadi, from whom a large tribute was exacted.
Kanthirava Narasaraja I was also the first wodeyar of Mysore to create the symbols associated with royalty, such as establishing a mint and issuing coins named Kanthiraya (corrupted to "Canteroy") after him.
These were to remain a part of Mysore"s "current national money" for well over a century. Kanthirava Narasaraja I, who married ten times, died on 31 July 1659, at the age of 44.
Catholic missionaries, who had arrived in the coastal areas of southern India—the Malabar coast, the Kanara coast, and the Coromandel coast—starting early in the sixteenth century, did not begin work in land-locked Mysore until halfway through the seventeenth. Although a few years later Cinnami was expelled from Mysore on account of opposition in Kanthirava"s court, the ruler himself was not seen by the Jesuits as unsympathetic, and towards the end of Kanthirava"s rule, Cinnami returned to establish missions in half a dozen locations.
According to (Subhrahmanyam 1985, p 209), "Of a reported 1700 converts in the Mysore mission in the mid-1660s, a mere quarter were Kannadigas (Kannada language speakers), the rest being Tamil speakers from the western districts of modern-day Tamil Nadu..".
