Page:The Aristocracy of Southern India.djvu/52

34 The chief town is Bobbili, the residence of the Maharajah. (Lat. 18° 34′ N., long. 18° 25′ E.) It is about 70 miles north-west of Vizagapatam. Sir M. E. Grant Duff, who visited Bobbili in 1883, describes it as "a clean and well-kept town, furnished with all the appliances of Anglo-Indian civilisation—schools, hospitals and what not—all within a walk of the remains of the Old Fort, where 126 years ago was enacted one of the most ghastly stories which even Indian History has to record."

The Bobbili family belongs to the tribe known as Velama Doras, who (according to Orme) "esteem themselves the highest blood of Native Indians next to the Brahmins, equal to the Rajputs, and support this pre-eminence by the haughtiest observances, insomuch that the breath of a different religion, and even of the meaner Indians, requires ablution." The men of this race are, as a rule, well-built and of a warlike disposition.

The founder of the house of Bobbili was the fifteenth in descent from the founder of the house of Venkatagiri, from which eminent family sprang the present ruler of Bobbili. In 1652, Sher Mahomed Khan, the Nawab of Chicacole, on behalf of the Moghul Emperor, marched against Vizagapatam, when the former was accompanied by two chiefs, viz., Nirvana Rayappa, generally known as Pedda Rayadu, the fifteenth Rajah of Venkatagiri, and Madhava Varma, the ancestor of the Vizianagaram family. In recognition of the meritorious services rendered to the Nawab by the former chief, the Moghul Emperor conferred upon him the grant of the Rajam Estate, where the chief built a fort and in token of his gratitude towards the worthy donor named it Bebbooly (the royal tiger), in honor of his