Members of the Wadiyar dynasty and the Urs clan have also been royal advisers as dewans to their reigning siblings, cousins, nephews, or distant relatives.

During the late 14th century, the family was originally poleygars (Kannada for garrison) defending the regions in and around Mysore town for the Vijayanagara Empire, their feudal overlords.

[2] Between 1766 and 1799, when Hyder Ali and Tipu dictated the kingdom, the Wadiyar rulers as maharajas were largely nominal without any actual powers.

[8] However, historians like P. V. Nanjaraj Urs, Shyam Prasad, Nobuhiro Ota, David Leeming, and Aya Ikegame instead suggest that the Wadiyars were local feudal lords who purported Puranic ancestry and claimed to be the direct descendants of the Lunar Dynasty.

[9][10][11][12] The Wadiyar dynasty started when Yaduraya, a garrison leader (poleygar), was made the prefect of Mysore and the surrounding regions by his overlord Harihara II of the Vijayanagara Empire in 1399.

In 1610, he moved the capital from Mysore to nearby island town of Srirangapattana on the river Kaveri, which provided strategic protection against military attacks.

Raja Wadiya's cousin and successor down the line Kanthirava Narasaraja I expanded the frontiers of the kingdom to Trichy in present-day Tamil Nadu.

From 1760 to 1799, the rule of the Wadiyar dynasty was essentially nominal, with real power firmly in the hands of the Commander-in-chief and later self-proclaimed sultan, Hyder Ali, and his son and successor Tipu.

The four-year-old infant prince Krishnaraja Wodeyar III, adopted son of the previous ruler Chamaraja Wadiyar IX, was anointed as the Maharaja of Mysore.

The Indian Constitution continued to recognise him as the Maharajah of Mysore until 1971, when titles and privy purses of maharajas were abolished by the Government of India under Indira Gandhi.

One of his wives was Alamelamma, a staunch devotee of Ranganayaki, the consort of Lord Ranganatha, the presiding deity of the famous Adi-Ranga temple in the island fortress of Srirangapatna.

To escape an ill-presumed imminent wrath of the king, she ran over to a cliff overlooking the Kaveri river into the whirlpool and cursed before plunging to her own death, "may Talakadu become a barren expanse of land, Malangi turn into a whirlpool, and may kings of Mysore never beget children to all eternity" (Kannada: ತಲಕಾಡು ಮರಳಾಗಲಿ, ಮಾಲಂಗಿ ಮಡುವಾಗಲಿ, ಮೈಸೂರು ದೊರೆಗಳಿಗೆ ಮಕ್ಕಳಿಲ್ಲದೆ ಹೋಗಲಿ; transliteration: talakāḍu maral̤āgali, mālaṃgi maḍuvāgali, maisūru dŏrĕgal̤igĕ makkal̤illadĕ hogali).

Learning of this accident, the king felt repentant and had an idol of Alamelamma made in gold, installed it in the palace, and worshipped it as a deity.

After him, Maharaja Chamaraja Wodeyar III's second daughter Rajakumari Chikkadevi's family with the Bettada Kote Urs branch takes over the monarchy.