Bekal Fort: Keladi Sea Fort, Mysore’s Coastal Station, Kerala’s Largest

Bekal Fort is a laterite sea fort on a headland at Pallikkara in Kasaragod district, at the northern tip of Kerala. Shivappa Nayaka of the Keladi (Ikkeri) Nayakas fortified it in the mid-17th century, Hyder Ali of Mysore took it in 1763 and it passed to the East India Company after Tipu Sultan fell in 1799. Spread over about 40 acres, it’s the largest fort in Kerala and a centrally protected monument of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI).

Two things about Bekal usually get told too neatly. The first is the builder: guidebooks give Shivappa Nayaka and a round 1650, but the ASI keeps a second version in which the Kolathiri Rajas already had a fort here, and the old gazetteers can’t agree on his dates. The second is the owner people remember. Many visitors file Bekal as Tipu Sultan’s fort, yet Tipu inherited it from his father, who took it from the Keladi kingdom. The short version is that Keladi built or rebuilt it and Mysore used it before the Company inherited it. The dates for each handover are firmer than the date for the first stone.

Where Bekal Fort is and what kind of fort it is

Bekal is a sea fort in the plain sense. Its walls sit on a laterite headland that runs out into the Arabian Sea, with a bay on its southern side. The ASI places it at 12°23′ N and 75°02′ E, about 16 km south-east of Kasaragod town, on the narrow strip between the Western Ghats and the sea that makes up the Malabar coastal plain. The district tourism council puts the fort about 130 feet above the sea and describes almost three-quarters of its outer face as water-bound. The old Madras gazetteer even derives the name from bi, “burning”, and kallu, “stone”.

Who built Bekal Fort, and when?

The standard answer is Shivappa Nayaka of the Keladi Nayakas, in the middle of the 17th century, and it’s the right one to remember. The Keladi Nayakas are also called the Ikkeri or Bednore Nayakas after their successive capitals in the hills of Karnataka. The 1894 South Canara Manual traces them to a headman of Keladi village who rose in the service of Krishna Raya of Vijayanagara, and whose family, around 1560, was granted the government of Barkur and Mangalore as an underlord. After Vijayanagara’s defeat at Talikota in 1565, the manual’s second volume says, the Bednore Raja seized this stretch of coast.

Shivappa is the name tied to the coast forts. The manual records that the family moved its capital from Ikkeri to Bednore, at the top of the Hosangadi ghat, in 1646, and that Shivappa succeeded in 1649 after running the state as minister since 1625. It credits him with a series of strong forts on the Kasaragod coast, “the most important being Chandragiri and Bekal”. Chandragiri, a large square fort on a hill above the Chandragiri river just south of Kasaragod town, is Bekal’s twin from the same campaign.

Here’s where the tidy date comes apart. The same gazetteer dates the fort-building “between 1650 and 1670” in one place and “between 1625 and 1670” in another, and later histories give Shivappa’s reign different years again. So 1650 is a convenient round figure, not a date read off a gate. None of these sources cites a foundation inscription, which is why “mid-17th century, under Shivappa Nayaka” is the form that holds up.

The Kolathiri version

The ASI’s own account keeps a second story alive. In it, a fort already stood at Bekal under the Kolathiri Rajas, the rulers of north Malabar, and the Ikkeri Nayakas rebuilt it after the Kolathiri and Vijayanagara powers declined. The gazetteer leans the same way. It says Bekal and Chandragiri “are really in the Malayalam country”, that the tract was subject to the Kolathiri or Chirakkal Rajas until Shivappa’s invasion, and of the coast forts generally: “Probably they were in existence long before and were merely improved by the Bednoreans.”

The two versions aren’t really rivals. One is about the stone you see, which is Keladi work, and the other is about the site, which was probably fortified earlier. Writing “built by Shivappa Nayaka” is correct; adding “on an older Kolathiri site, as the ASI records” shows you’ve read past the guidebook.

Bekal’s history in phases: Keladi, Mysore and the Company

Bekal changed hands three times, and none of the sources records a great siege at any of those moments. Each transfer followed a larger war fought elsewhere, so the fort mattered because of who held the coast around it:

• Before the 1650s, Kolathiri country. The land south of the Chandragiri river counted as Malayalam country under the Kolathiri (Chirakkal) Rajas; the river itself, the gazetteer notes, was the old southern boundary of the Tulu kingdom.
• 1650s to 1763, a Keladi fort. Shivappa’s invasion carried Canara south across the river, and Bekal gave its name to a subdivision of the Bednore kingdom. In 1737, under Somasekara Nayaka, Nileshwar was annexed and the fort at Hosdurg was built.
• 1763 to 1799, Mysore. Bekal fell to Hyder Ali in 1763, when he overran the Keladi kingdom. Under Tipu Sultan it served, in the ASI’s words, as “an important military station” for his campaign to hold Malabar.
• 1799 onward, the Company. After the British stormed Seringapatam (Srirangapatna) in May 1799 and Tipu died in the fighting, Bekal was incorporated with the East India Company’s territory. It sat in the South Canara district of the Madras Presidency, and the taluk around it was called Bekal for more than half a century before taking Kasaragod’s name.
• 1956 and 1984, Kerala. The Kasaragod taluk left South Canara and joined the new state of Kerala on 1 November 1956; Kasaragod became a district of its own on 24 May 1984.

Why Bekal stayed Mysorean after 1792

This is the detail that trips almost everyone. The Third Mysore War ended in 1792 with the Treaty of Seringapatam, and Britannica records that Tipu had to cede half his dominions. Malabar went with them: the Kasaragod district’s own history notes that Tipu gave up Malabar under that treaty. Bekal didn’t go, because it lay in Canara, not Malabar. Shivappa’s conquest had made it part of Canara more than a century earlier.

So Bekal stayed with Tipu for seven more years and passed to the Company only in 1799, along with the rest of Canara. The line that mattered in 1792 was the old Canara-Malabar boundary, which ran south of Bekal, not today’s Kerala-Karnataka border to its north. Bekal is in Kerala now only because the 1956 reorganization of states moved the Kasaragod taluk out of South Canara.

What Bekal did in Mysore’s coastal wars

Bekal was a coast-road station for Mysore, not its naval base. Hyder Ali’s interest in the west coast centered on Mangalore, which, the South Canara Manual says, he regarded “as of great importance as a naval station”, and where he set up dockyards and an arsenal. Bekal’s job was to hold the shore south of Mangalore, toward the Malabar chiefs and the English post at Thalassery.

The record of that coast in the Mysore years reads like this:

• 1763: Hyder overruns the Keladi kingdom, and its coastal forts, Bekal among them, pass to Mysore.
• 1768: In the first war with the English, a Bombay expedition takes Mangalore in February; Hyder appears before it in May, and the garrison sails away.
• The second war (1780 to 1784): A British squadron under Sir Edward Hughes destroys Hyder’s young navy at Mangalore, and the war closes with the Treaty of Mangalore in 1784.
• Thalassery: The district’s history records that Hyder conquered the Malabar forts but failed to capture the fort at Thalassery.
• Tipu’s Malabar campaign: Bekal serves as a military station for the push south.

The pattern across the four Anglo-Mysore wars is that Mysore was strong on land and weak at sea. A fort like Bekal could watch ships and cover a landing beach, but it couldn’t stop a fleet that already controlled the water. Once Hughes destroyed the ships at Mangalore, the coastal forts lost the navy that should have worked alongside them.

Excavation has since shown how busy Bekal was in those years. The ASI’s digs inside the fort exposed laterite structures from both the Ikkeri Nayaka and Tipu Sultan periods, and the finds included:

• a building the excavators identified as a mint house (Huzur);
• a palace complex with the remains of a Darbar hall;
• a temple complex;
• coins of the Mysore Sultans and of the Wodeyar kings of Mysore;
• a copper coin mould of Tipu Sultan.

A mould on site suggests coins may have been cast at Bekal. The finds point that way without proving it.

How Bekal Fort’s defenses work: a walk from the land side to the sea

The fort was laid out against two threats, soldiers from inland and ships from the sea. It’s easiest to follow in the order an attacker from inland would have met them.

The ditch and the gate

The approach is from the east. The ASI records a ditch surrounding the fort on the land side and a main gate facing east, protected by bastions. A bastion is a tower pushed out from the wall line; because it projects, defenders on it can fire along the face of the wall at anyone trying to climb it.

Then the way in bends. The district tourism council describes a zigzag entrance, and a bent entry works the same way at every fort that uses one. An attacker can’t charge straight through. A ram loses its run-up, and troops forced to turn show their sides to the wall above.

The walls and the laterite

The walls rise to about 12 meters and are built of local laterite, the iron-rich, reddish material that forms where heavy tropical rain leaches the ground. Laterite cuts easily into blocks when freshly dug and hardens as it dries, which made it the natural building stone of this coast. The ASI adds that the builders used the laterite bedrock of the headland itself to strengthen the fort, and that voids left in the massive walls held the guns.

The manual’s second volume adds a line worth weighing: the fortifications “are said to bear traces of European science”. That’s a report, not a finding. The Portuguese held posts along the Canara coast in the same century, so borrowing is plausible, but no source here names a European engineer at Bekal.

Inside the walls

Once inside, the ASI picks out the features that let a garrison hold out:

• a tank with a flight of steps, the fort’s fresh water;
• a magazine for storing ammunition;
• the opening of a tunnel toward the south, which Kerala Tourism says served as an escape route in sieges;
• a wide ramp leading up to the observation tower, which the ASI calls “a rarity” for the view it gives over the surrounding coast.

The ramp is the detail to notice. Stairs suit people, while a broad ramp suits heavy loads, which fits a fort that had to move guns and powder to its highest point. That’s an inference from the design; the ASI doesn’t say it.

The sea face

The seaward side is where Bekal spent its strength. The ASI notes that the wall and ramparts on the sea side are the strongest, broken by bastions with openings for guns. Kerala Tourism describes the plan as keyhole-shaped, and from the tower the whole bay to the south is in view. A ship coming along the coast would be seen long before it reached gun range, and a landing party in the bay would come ashore under the bastions.

That’s the logic of the whole design. The land side needed a ditch and a bent gate; the sea side needed guns and a long view.

Bekal Fort today: ASI protection, tourism and the UNESCO question

Bekal is a centrally protected monument under the ASI’s Thrissur Circle, and it’s the busiest of the ASI’s ticketed monuments in Kerala. The ASI’s footfall table for 2024-25 counts 375,282 visitors at Bekal, against 265,524 at Palakkad Fort and 243,969 at Fort St. Angelo in Kannur, the other two ticketed ASI sites listed for the state.

What protection means on the ground

Central protection brings the rules of the Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Sites and Remains (AMASR) Act, 1958. An area of 100 meters from a protected monument’s boundary is prohibited for construction, and the 200 meters beyond it are regulated, so new building there needs permission. Since 1 July 2025, the National Monuments Authority has required those applications to be filed online through its NOAPS portal.

At Bekal those rules meet a second rulebook. The fort stands over a beach that has been developed for tourism, and building close to the shore also answers to the coastal regulation zone rules. A project near the fort can fall under both.

The tourism project

Bekal was an early experiment in planned beach tourism. The district tourism council records that the Government of India declared it a special tourism area in 1992. The Bekal Resorts Development Corporation (BRDC) followed in 1995, set up to develop Bekal as a beach destination, with Kerala’s Chief Secretary as its chairman.

The Hindu listed Bekal Fort in 2010 as the location of “Uyire Uyire”, a song from the 1995 film Bombay. Udayavani reported on 19 December 2025 that the Bekal International Beach Festival would open the next day, with the film’s director Mani Ratnam and actor Manisha Koirala among the guests.

The UNESCO question

Bekal isn’t a World Heritage Site, and it isn’t on India’s Tentative List, the list of sites a country says it intends to nominate. In November 2021, Onmanorama reported that the ASI had started moves toward a nomination and had asked Kerala to hand over 3.5 acres of state land inside the fort, including a Government Rest House; the ASI already held 37 acres.

Nothing since shows the bid moving. The Culture Ministry’s Lok Sabha reply of 23 March 2026 put India’s World Heritage count at 44 and listed only two proposals sent to UNESCO, Sarnath and the Jingkieng Jri cultural landscape. Bekal wasn’t among them. The guide to UNESCO World Heritage Sites in India has the full list.

How to study Bekal Fort for exams

Bekal sits where three parts of the syllabus meet. In GS Paper I it belongs to art and culture, as fort architecture, and to modern history, through the Anglo-Mysore wars and the Company’s advance along the west coast. In geography it’s a worked example of a laterite headland on the Malabar coast. For state services it’s a staple of Kerala history, and the Kerala PSC guide explains how that exam handles state history.

The revision facts:

• Location: Pallikkara, Kasaragod district, Kerala, on a laterite headland over the Arabian Sea.
• Builder: Shivappa Nayaka of the Keladi (Ikkeri or Bednore) Nayakas, mid-17th century; the ASI also records an older Kolathiri fort on the site.
• Size: about 40 acres, the largest fort in Kerala, with walls about 12 meters high.
• Transfers: to Hyder Ali in 1763; to the East India Company in 1799, after Tipu’s death at Seringapatam.
• Design: keyhole-shaped plan, zigzag entrance, land-side ditch, tank, magazine, tunnel, ramp and observation tower, gun openings on the sea side.
• Status: centrally protected by the ASI (Thrissur Circle); on neither the World Heritage List nor the Tentative List.
• Tourism: special tourism area from 1992; BRDC from 1995.

The confusions come in pairs, and each has a clean way apart:

• Keladi versus Kolathiri. The Keladi Nayakas fortified the present fort; the Kolathiri Rajas held the site before them.
• 1792 versus 1799. Malabar left Tipu in 1792; Bekal, being in Canara, left him in 1799.
• Two Chandragiris. Chandragiri near Kasaragod is Bekal’s Keladi twin; the “Chandragiri Monument” that the ASI lists under its Amaravati Circle in Andhra Pradesh is a different place.
• Built versus used. Tipu used Bekal; he didn’t build it.

Bekal compares best with its own chain of Keladi forts and with the island forts of the Konkan:

Mains tests this theme from the side of the Anglo-Mysore wars rather than the fort itself. Mains 2022 GS Paper I asked “Why did the armies of the British East India Company – mostly comprising of Indian soldiers – win consistently against the more numerous and better equipped armies of the then Indian rulers? Give reasons.“, and Mysore’s lost navy at Mangalore is one small, concrete piece of that answer. The History optional has gone straight at Mysore: 2019 Paper II set “Tipu Sultan was trying to build in Mysore a strong centralised and militarised state, with ambitious territorial designs.”

In the Prelims question bank, Art and Culture accounts for 94 of the 1,403 questions and History for 184, so a site like Bekal is likelier to turn up in a matching pair or a statement than on its own.

Bekal is a small topic that pays back more than it costs. Hold on to three dates and one twist, Canara rather than Malabar, and you have a ready example of Mysore’s weakness at sea and of how a modern state border can hide an older one.

Frequently Asked Questions

Practice Questions

Prelims

1. Consider the following statements about Bekal Fort: 1. It is a centrally protected monument of the Archaeological Survey of India. 2. It is one of the components of a serial World Heritage property inscribed in 2025. Which of the statements given above is/are correct?

• (a) 1 only
• (b) 2 only
• (c) Both 1 and 2
• (d) Neither 1 nor 2

Answer: (a) Bekal is ASI-protected but not a World Heritage Site; the 2025 serial property is the Maratha Military Landscapes of India.

2. Bekal Fort on the Kasaragod coast was fortified in the mid-17th century by a ruler of which dynasty?

• (a) The Wodeyars of Mysore
• (b) The Keladi (Ikkeri) Nayakas
• (c) The Zamorins of Calicut
• (d) The Nayakas of Madurai

Answer: (b) Shivappa Nayaka of the Keladi Nayakas is credited with Bekal and Chandragiri; Mysore took Bekal only in 1763.

3. Consider the following statements: 1. Bekal Fort passed to Mysore in 1763, when Hyder Ali overran the Keladi kingdom. 2. Bekal Fort passed to the East India Company under the Treaty of Seringapatam of 1792. Which of the statements given above is/are correct?

• (a) 1 only
• (b) 2 only
• (c) Both 1 and 2
• (d) Neither 1 nor 2

Answer: (a) Bekal lay in Canara, which stayed with Tipu after 1792; it passed to the Company only after Seringapatam fell in 1799.

4. Consider the following pairs of fort and district: 1. Bekal Fort : Kasaragod 2. Janjira Fort : Raigad 3. Sindhudurg Fort : Ratnagiri. How many of the pairs given above are correctly matched?

• (a) Only one
• (b) Only two
• (c) All three
• (d) None

Answer: (b) Sindhudurg Fort stands on an islet off Malvan in Sindhudurg district, not in Ratnagiri.

5. Consider the following statements about the Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Sites and Remains (AMASR) Act, 1958: 1. Construction is prohibited within 100 meters of the boundary of a protected monument. 2. The area extending 300 meters beyond the prohibited area is declared a regulated area. Which of the statements given above is/are correct?

• (a) 1 only
• (b) 2 only
• (c) Both 1 and 2
• (d) Neither 1 nor 2

Answer: (a) The regulated area extends 200 meters beyond the prohibited area, not 300.

Mains

1. Safeguarding the Indian art heritage is the need of the moment. Discuss. (10 marks, 150 words) Previous year: Mains 2018, GS Paper I.
2. Bekal Fort changed hands three times between the mid-17th century and 1799 without a recorded siege. What does its history reveal about how power shifted on India’s west coast in the 18th century? (15 marks, 250 words)
3. West-coast sea forts were built to watch ships as much as to stop armies. Examine with reference to Bekal, Janjira and Sindhudurg. (15 marks, 250 words)
4. Why did Mysore under Hyder Ali and Tipu Sultan fail to turn its coastal forts and dockyards into lasting sea power against the East India Company? (10 marks, 150 words)
5. Protecting coastal monuments while promoting tourism around them creates regulatory tensions. Discuss with reference to the AMASR Act, 1958 and Bekal Fort. (15 marks, 250 words)