The Queen of Quilon (Coylang / Kollam, Kerala)

1662

Copper engraving on paper

12.5 x 8.25 in (31.6 x 21 cm)

Nieuhof’s Audience with the Queen of Quilon: A Rare Court Scene from Churchill’s Voyages, 1662

Umayamma Rani (r. c. 1677–1684 as regent) was one of the most formidable female rulers in the history of Kerala. A member of the Venad royal house, she exercised effective sovereign authority during a period of intense political instability, marked by internal factionalism and growing European intervention along the Malabar Coast. Contemporary sources describe her as politically astute, militarily decisive, and uncompromising in the defence of royal prerogative. Her reign coincided with sustained diplomatic and commercial contact with European powers, including the Portuguese and the Dutch, whom she engaged selectively while resisting territorial encroachment. In European travel literature, Umayamma Rani came to symbolise an unusual and compelling figure: a female monarch exercising visible authority within a complex courtly and diplomatic culture. Images associated with Coylang (Quilon) thus preserve not merely an abstract “Indian queen”, but the memory of a historically identifiable ruler whose power challenged European assumptions about gender and sovereignty in Asia.

This engraving appears on page 267 of the 1732 edition of Awnsham and John Churchill’s celebrated A Collection of Voyages and Travels, and depicts Johan Nieuhof’s audience with the Queen of Koylang (Quilon, now Kollam). Dated 1662 on the sheet, the scene relates to Nieuhof’s activities as a Dutch ambassador on the Malabar Coast, where Kollam was at the time ruled by a queen and remained a significant entrepôt within the Indian Ocean trading world.

The verso text provides a vivid first-hand account of the encounter. Nieuhof records that “the 2nd of March (1664) with the break of day, the viceroy of the king of Travankoor, the chief commander… called Marta de Pulo (Marthanda Pillai), and myself set out for the court of the Queen of Koulang.” He continues: “We went to Court, where after I had delivered the presents, and laid the money for Pepper, I was introduced to her Majesty’s presence,” noting that “she had a guard of above 700 soldiers about her, all clad after the Malabar fashion,” and that she “took a Golden bracelet from her arms, which she presented to me as a token of her good inclinations to the Company.”

Johan Nieuhof (1618–1672) was a Dutch traveller whose published journeys to Brazil, China, and India made him one of the most influential European writers on Asia in the seventeenth century. The Churchill brothers, among the most innovative early English booksellers, issued their Collection of Voyages and Travels as one of the first exhaustive compendia drawn from original manuscripts and newly translated accounts, offering European readers an unprecedented single repository of global exploration literature.

Today, the print is valued as a rare visual document of early modern cross-cultural diplomacy on the Malabar Coast, preserving a striking European representation of Indian female sovereignty within the ceremonial world of seventeenth-century court encounters.

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