TIPU (1750–1799)

Shorter than his father, darker in the skin and possessing larger eyes, Tipu wore (Wilks informs us) ‘a plain unencumbered attire, which he equally exacted from those around him… He was usually mounted, and attached great importance to horsemanship, in which he was considered to excel… The conveyance in a palankeen he derided’ (761).

The tiger was his icon.

Tipu used to say it was better to live for two days like a tiger than drag out an existence like a sheep for two hundred years… He kept six [tigers] in his fortress-city of Seringapatam, where his throne was shaped and striped like a tiger… [T]he hilt of his sword was in the form of a snarling tiger, and his favourite toy was a mechanical tiger straddling a British officer while the victim squealed in terror.

Among dozens of chiefs in eighteenth-century India, Tipu was the only one to have really scared the British. His fame grew, and Tipu found a seemingly permanent place in the pantheon of India’s historical heroes. Knowledge that he could be bigoted and ruthless did not dent the image. In the last two decades or so, the scene has changed. ‘Tipu was a cruel fanatic’ appears to be the only truth for some.

More useful than picking a ‘hero’ or ‘villain’ label for a past ruler is to know the issues confronting him and his state, the alignment of forces for and against him, the ruler’s responses and initiatives, and the people’s reactions at the time.

There is plenty of material to examine, including biographies by two men in his employ, one in Persian by Mir Hussain Kirmani, the other in Marathi by Ramchandra Rao Punganuri (which appears to be based almost entirely on Kirmani’s book); and accounts by Britons like Wilks who fought against him, besides dozens of later works.

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Although the British briefly took Coimbatore from Tipu, the latter won a bigger prize, the port of Mangaluru, obliging the Company to sign a treaty with him. This March 1784 ‘Treaty of Mangalore’, marking the end of the Second Anglo–Mysore War, restored Coimbatore to Tipu and revived French interest in him.

Blocking the shortest route between Srirangapatna and the Malabar coast, and hosting the spirited Kodava community, the mountains of Coorg were governed by Bidanur-linked rajas until Haidar seized control and imprisoned the ruling family.

Always restive at their subjugation, the proud Kodavas were enraged when, following his victory over the British at Mangaluru, Tipu tightened control over Coorg, strengthened his garrison in its chief fort in Madikeri (Mercara), chastised their chiefs for rising against his late father, and taunted them for their religious beliefs.

The Kodavas again rebelled, and Tipu replied by taking a big army, inclusive of a French battalion, to Coorg. The Kodavas were suppressed, but fury and bigotry joined firmness. A large number of Kodavas were killed or forcibly converted, and many were dragged to Srirangapatna.

When, in a treaty signed in 1783 in Paris, the British recognized American independence, Frenchmen involved with India were emboldened. Bussy wondered whether they could not ‘unite the three Indian powers [Marathas, Hyderabad and Mysore] against the English without compromising ourselves’.

But Indians were not interested in allying with one another. The nizam had in fact influenced the Mughal emperor at this time, the feeble Shah Alam II, against recognizing Tipu as Mysore’s ruler.

As Bussy himself noted, ‘The Marathas and the Nizam have made an alliance to destroy Tipu Sultan. This plan marvellously suits the English.’ Moreover, Viscount de Souillac, Governor General of France’s eastern territories, regarded Tipu as ‘proud, vain, imperious and undependable’. To make Tipu dependent on the French, de Souillac wanted the British to defeat him.

Eventually, however, with Tipu firmly in control in Mysore, and both the Marathas and the nizam reaching an understanding with the English, Governor General de Souillac agreed that Tipu could send an embassy to Louis XVI in Paris. A ship, l’Aurore, was provided for the trip.

On 9 March 1786, four ships including l’Aurore sailed from the Malabar coast carrying three ambassadors, retinues of around 900 persons in all, four elephants (one each for the rulers of Turkey, France and England, the fourth to sell for money), large boxes of personal effects and goods for sale. There was a scramble to get on board, for the intention was to call at Islam’s holy places on the return journey.

The mission proved a disaster. Three of the four vessels were destroyed on the voyage and only a handful returned alive. Shipwrecks, plague and the winter in Constantinople (Istanbul) killed hundreds, including women and children.

Sailing first to Muscat and thence to Basra, the party had journeyed by land from there to Istanbul via Mosul and Diyarbakir, often across dangerous terrain. An Indian merchant in Muscat named Maoji Sheth and his agents in Basra, Sewa and Ram, helped, but dissension among the ambassadors damaged commerce as well as diplomacy.

In November 1787 in Istanbul, the Sultan of Turkey, Abdul Hamid I, received what remained of the mission. Tipu’s throne was indeed recognized, but this was poor consolation. Fighting the Russians at this time, the Turks had no desire to antagonize the English as well by helping Tipu, and French agents in Istanbul told Tipu’s men that the mood in France had changed and they would not be welcome there.

Making an about-turn, the truncated mission left for home, stopping en route at sacred places in Arabia. When the voyage ended on the Malabar coast in December 1789, only a handful were alive to step ashore.

An insistent Tipu had, meanwhile, sent another mission directly to France. This managed to reach Paris and was received in August 1788 by Louis XVI and his queen, Marie Antoinette, in the Salon d’Hercules at the Palace of Versailles.

For a few days the Orientals created a buzz, but the French Revolution was around the corner, even though the king and the queen would not be executed until 1793.

Not recognizing the changes in France, Tipu’s envoys asked for 10,000 French soldiers, for whom (they said) Mysore would pay, and they promised the French vast tracts of land in South India (close to Madras and Pondicherry) and also in Bengal and Bihar. The proposals were not taken seriously. The France of 1788 was in no condition to think of helping Tipu.

There were pettier problems. The Mysoreans complained that the palace housing them was not large enough, while French hosts hinted that gifts brought for their king were not valuable enough. Reluctant, it seems, to leave France, the delegation had to be persuaded to depart.

These westward expeditions ordered by Tipu in the second half of the 1780s were ill-conceived, ill-prepared, ill-timed and expensive.

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When, in December 1789, the residue of the mission to Turkey returned to the southern Malabar coast, Tipu was close by, trying to breach the so-called Travancore Lines, which had been constructed in the 1760s for Raja Rama Varma of Travancore by his Dutch/Belgian commander-in-chief, the ingenious Eustachius de Lannoy.

We saw de Lannoy in the last chapter as the prisoner enlisted for strengthening Travancore’s forces by Rama Varma’s predecessor, Marthanda Varma. While protecting Travancore against ground incursions from the north, the Lines were, in fact, built on the land of Travancore’s neighbour and frequent rival, Cochin (Kochi). For decades a Dutch possession, Cochin had become a Mysore tributary in the 1770s.

Proceeding for four miles or so from the sea to a river named Chinnamangalam, and another 24 or 25 miles from the river to the hills, the Lines consisted, for much of their length, of a trench or ditch 16 feet broad and 20 feet deep. Bamboo hedges and a rampart protected the trench. Nearby, also in Cochin territory, stood the fort of Cranganore (Kodungallur).

Few traces of the Lines remain today, but in December 1789 these comprised the site for Travancore’s successful defence against Tipu’s army. Earlier that year, Rama Varma, whose ultimate goal was the ‘unification of Malabar under one flag’, had bought Cranganore Fort from the Dutch. This transaction between Travancore and the Dutch offended Tipu, who also desired the fort and felt that as Cochin’s suzerain he should have been offered it first.

On 28 December, about 800 of Travancore’s Nairs, aided by a six-pounder gun, not only stopped the reputed Mysorean army from capturing the Lines, they inflicted a great loss on the attackers, who retreated in panic.

Reports later circulated, to which Wilks would give credence, that Tipu was among the invaders, that he was wounded by a musket ball, and that his palanquin and arms were captured by the Nairs. The story was denied. Though in the vicinity, Tipu, it was said, was not at the Lines that day, and it was reiterated that Tipu never used a palanquin.

Yet the Nair victory of 28 December 1789 was a reality which Malayalis have recalled with pride ever since. In April 1790, the Mysoreans again attacked the Lines and captured them, and in May Cranganore Fort, too, was taken, but when news reached Tipu that the English were ready to invade his kingdom, he marched back towards Srirangapatna.

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The British used the Travancore incident to launch an all-out war, known to history as the Third Anglo–Mysore War. Named a British ally in the Treaty of Mangalore, Travancore sought the Company’s aid, thereby giving the opportunity for which Lord Charles Cornwallis was waiting.

After fighting unsuccessfully in the western hemisphere against the Americans, Cornwallis had become Governor General in India in 1786. Nursing complaints against Mysore and tempted by its land and money, the Marathas as well as Hyderabad’s nizam (Mir Nizam Ali) joined the war on the British side.

Not everyone in the Company favoured a war on Mysore. Controlling a larger territory and capable of mobilizing a much bigger army, the Marathas were seen by many as Britain’s primary obstacle in India. However, a twenty-eight-year-old lieutenant called Thomas Munro, posted in Ambur near Vellore to gather intelligence on Tipu’s forces, argued for the opposite viewpoint. In January 1790, he wrote to his father:

It has long been accepted as an axiom…by the directors of our affairs, both at home and in this country, that Tippoo ought to be preserved as a barrier between us and the Mahrattas… [But this] is to support a powerful and ambitious enemy to defend us from a weak one…

[Mysore has] the most simple and despotic monarchy in the world, in which every department, civil and military, possesses the regularity and system [created] by the genius of Hyder…

The other…a confederacy of independent chiefs possessing extensive dominions, now acting in concert, now jealous of each other…and at all times liable to be [swayed] by the most distant prospect of private gain, can never be a dangerous enemy…[And] it maintains no standing army and is impelled by no religious tenets to attempt the extirpation of men of a different belief.

On the other hand, Munro argued, ‘Tippoo supports an army of 110,000 men, follows with great eagerness every principle of European tactics…[a]nd he is, with all of his extraordinary talents, a furious zealot in a faith which,’ claimed Munro, ‘founds eternal happiness on the destruction of other sects.’

The thinking in Munro’s letter prevailed, and Tipu was targeted. The allied forces moved in from several points around his domain. Taking personal command of the British force, the battle-seasoned Cornwallis advanced from Fort St George. Coimbatore, lying due south of the Mysore capital, was quickly taken by another British column.

Two Maratha armies marched down from the kingdom’s northwest, one proceeding south to Dharwad, the other southeast to Kurnool. While the nizam’s army also marched southwards on the Deccan Plateau, British units sailing from Bombay captured Calicut and Cannanore on the Malabar coast and lay poised to tighten, from the southwest, the noose around Srirangapatna, which was an island surrounded and protected by the Kaveri.

Tragically for the people trapped in the war, it was also a time of acute scarcity. Nine years later, Buchanan, the Company’s doctor/scientist/officer, arriving in a place not far from Chikballapur called Bomma Samudram, would write in his diary:

25 July 1800: [The horrors of famine] were never so severely felt here, as during the invasion of Lord Cornwallis, when, the country being attacked on all sides and penetrated in every direction by hostile armies, or by defending ones little less destructive, one half at least of the inhabitants perished of absolute want.

It is a sober truth of history-writing that a phrase like this is located, inserted, italicized—and quietly abandoned.

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Gaining Bangalore in March 1791, Cornwallis made it a base to which he returned more than once while attempting junctions with the advancing Maratha and Hyderabad armies. (Italics added) In March 1791, we may mark, ‘the town of Bangalore…situated north of the fort…was circular in form and about three miles in circumference. Its streets were wide… Few towns in India [had] better houses and richer inhabitants.’

Visiting the city nine years later, here is what Buchanan would say of Cornwallis’s attack on it:

Bangalore, or Bangaluru, [is] a city which was founded by Hyder, and which, during the judicious government of that prince, became a place of importance. Its trade was then great, and its manufactures numerous.

Tippoo began its misfortunes by prohibiting the trade with the dominions of Arcot and Hyderabad… [His measures] had greatly injured the place; but it was still populous, and many individuals were rich, when Lord Cornwallis arrived before it, with his army in great distress from want of provisions.

This reduced [Cornwallis] to the necessity of giving the assault immediately, and the town was of course plundered. The rich inhabitants had previously removed their most valuable effects into the fort; but these too fell a prey to the invaders, when that citadel also was taken by storm (Buchanan, 193).

In a counter-measure, Tipu retook an unguarded Coimbatore. Penetrating between two British forces, he also reached Pondicherry, but found its French in no state to support him. Revolution in their homeland had paralyzed them.

Trying also to negotiate, Tipu sent to the British camp old Apajee Ram, ‘the veteran diplomatist’, as Wilks calls him, who twenty years earlier had talked wittily with the Marathas. Cornwallis rebuffed this initiative of February 1791, as also another feeler from Tipu three months later. The Governor General’s stand would be sharply criticized by James Mill in his 1817 History of British India, for four subsequent decades the standard guide for the Empire’s officers in India (Wilks 4: 491fn).

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Serving as a soldier in Cornwallis’s force, Wilks would later provide eye-witness accounts that reveal the Company’s contempt for Indian allies while also providing vivid pictures. Referring to the nizam’s army, which joined the English near Bangalore in April 1791, Wilks mentions ‘ten thousand men well-mounted on horses in excellent condition’ before adding:

It is probable that no national or private collection of ancient armour in Europe contains any weapon or article of personal equipment not [present] in this motley crowd: the Parthian bow and arrow, the iron club of Scythia, sabres of every age and nation, lances of every strength and description, and matchlocks of every form, metallic helmets of every pattern, a steel bar descending diagonally as a protection to the face…complete coats of mail, and quilted jackets, sabre-proof…

To this grand appearance was joined:

the total absence of every symptom of order, or obedience, or command, excepting groups collected round their respective flags; [with] every individual an independent warrior, self-impelled, affecting to be the champion whose single arm was to achieve victory… (444).

According to Wilks, the British had expected the nizam’s army to watch the terrain and provide resources from ‘the country to be traversed’, but this support was not forthcoming. Worse, the nizam’s men consumed forage and grain from grounds on which the English were encamped and plundered villages friendly to the British (445).

In the 1791 summer, as Cornwallis moved west with his army, his goal was to ford the Kaveri along with the nizam’s army and, he hoped, the Marathas, and attack the capital. To assure victory, a British force launched by sea from Bombay and moving east from Calicut was also to join the assault.

This cherished plan had to be given up because Cornwallis’s army was close to starvation, the Maratha ally seemed nowhere near, and Tipu’s soldiers had put up a strong fight at Arakere, 10 miles east of Srirangapatna, before retreating safely to their capital. A British bid to rupture a dam near Arakere to ease the advance of their heavy train was ‘abandoned’ because of ‘the solidity of the work’ (453).

In the area around Srirangapatna, Tipu prevented, for a crucial week, the coming together of his foes, a feat accomplished through agile agents on the ground who kept Tipu informed of his enemies’ movements while misleading enemy attackers regarding the whereabouts of their allies. Wilks would write:

With whatever care Lord Cornwallis concealed his intentions…they were distinctly known to the Sultaun… Tippoo’s activity against the English army was skillfully displayed in the dissemination of false intelligence (4: 437, 443).

Wilks’s sharply negative view, overall, of Tipu lends interest to his observations on the abilities Tipu and his men showed during the 1791 summer. Of the Arakere battle, he says:

Tippoo Sultaun did not decline the [confrontation], and praise cannot in justice be denied to him…[for] executing his movements with…promptitude and judgment (456).

About the British column advancing from the southwest, which was led by Robert Abercromby, Wilks would write:

The admirable efficiency of the Sultaun’s light troops had prevented all communication of General Abercromby’s situation on which Lord Cornwallis’s determinations would very materially depend (461).

The long trek towards Srirangapatna from Bangalore had been slow and hard for Cornwallis’s British, who faced a great shortage of provisions. Tipu’s irregular cavalry had succeeded in cutting off local supplies, and manual support too was absent, for Mysoreans were unwilling to help.

Many of the heavy guns, as well as the field pieces…and all the battering train and almost every public cart in the army were dragged by the troops (461).

His men exhausted and hungry, and the Marathas conspicuously missing, Cornwallis instructed not only a retreat but also the destruction of his heavy siege equipment. Tipu had won against a Governor General who had graduated from a major war in America.

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Three days after that embarrassing order was implemented, the weary British were surprised to face a new body of horsemen. Luckily for Cornwallis, these belonged not to Tipu but to the Marathas. Wilks recorded that Tipu’s light cavalry had prevented word of their arrival from reaching the British camp until the Marathas were ‘actually in sight’ (465).

From Wilks we obtain more pictures, jaundiced perhaps, yet revealing, of scenes from the 1791 summer.

Having not had a wholesome meal for a fortnight, the hungry British and the equally hungry Indian contingents in the Company’s force looked with eager eyes at the freshly-arrived Maratha army, but as Wilks put it, ‘the inimitable mercantile policy of a Mahratta chief in his own camp was skillfully exhibited in holding up exorbitant prices’ (466). The British found some consolation when they saw the nizam’s troops also suffering from Maratha ‘exactions’.

Wilks contrasted the nizam’s ‘stately’ but lethargic ‘cavaliers’ with ‘the mean aspect and black meagre visage of the common Mahratta horseman’ who however ‘foraged at large and effectually commanded the resources of the country’. In areas vacated by the retreating British, the Marathas apparently plundered everything ‘down to the meanest article of wearing apparel’ (468).

But there were impressive features as well. At a ‘bazar of a Mahratta camp’, its ‘famished visitors’, of whom Wilks was one, saw:

the spoils of the east and the industry of the west: English broad cloth, a Birmingham pen-knife, shawls of Cashmire, diamonds, oxen, sheep and poultry; dried salt fish; and the tables of the money-changers overspread with the coins of every country of the east, evidence of mercantile activity inconceivable in any camp excepting that of systematic plunderers (467).

Also available for purchase by British soldiers were ‘what their own Indian capitals could not then produce, except as European imports—excellent sword belts’ (467).

In the weeks following the retreat, the British noticed quite a few Mysorean accomplishments. Of the Nandidurg Fort, about 31 miles north of Bangalore, Wilks would write:

Every fortified place the English had hitherto seen in Mysoor exhibited evidence of the extraordinary attention paid by Tippoo Sultaun to [its] repair and improvement, but the works of Nundidroog, a granite rock of tremendous height, seemed to have engrossed in a peculiar degree his design of rendering it impregnable (498).

Wilks refers also to the ‘fresh vigour’ and ‘a very respectable degree of skill’ with which Tipu’s commander Qamaruddin fought the British in the Coimbatore–Palghat area in October 1791 (507).

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Some Maratha units plundering in Tipu’s richest province, Bidanur, had meanwhile pillaged the ancient Hindu monastery, possibly founded in the ninth century, at Sringeri, which lay about 75 miles northwest of Srirangapatna. The matha was desecrated, many defenders were killed, and the raiders made off with about sixty lakh rupees in cash or jewels.

The monastery’s head, successor to an unbroken line of Sankaracharyas, appealed for aid to Tipu, whose support the matha had evidently received from 1785.

That appeal, and Tipu’s positive response, form part of a well-preserved 1791 correspondence, conducted not in Persian but in Kannada, which discloses Tipu’s support for the matha, his instruction to the asif or provincial governor of Bidanur to help the Sankaracharya, the latter’s appreciation for aid and security received, and also the Sankaracharya’s blessings for a Tipu striving to defend his territory.

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Alleging that the threat to his capital prompted Tipu to order the execution of twenty English boys who had been detained and trained as ‘singers and dancers’ in the style of ‘Hindoostani dancing girl’ (449), Wilks also relates an account of prominent Brahmins around Tipu who were charged with treason and executed.

An unnamed Indian spy recruited by Cornwallis’s intelligence chief, Captain William Macleod, was caught by Tipu’s men, who found an incriminating letter in Kannada in the spy’s hollow walking stick. ‘A Muslim official who knew Kannada was ordered to examine the letter,’ and the writer was identified and ‘seized, a Brahmin forcibly circumcised and now named Mahommed Abbas’.

The letter implicated ‘Sheshgere Row, brother of the treasurer Kishen Row’—the long-serving Krishna Rao, who had given Purniah an early break. According to Wilks, not only Seshagiri Rao but also Krishna Rao and two other brothers were ‘privately tortured and dispatched’ (450).

Writing his account after Tipu’s fall, Wilks reported that because a Muslim had inspected the damaging letter, many Brahmins ‘continue under the impression’ that the alleged involvement of Krishna Rao and his brothers in ‘any act of treachery’ was a ‘calumny’ invented by ‘Seyed Saheb’, the inspector’s influential brother-in-law, in revenge for cuts that treasurer Krishna Rao had previously imposed on money going to ‘Seyed Saheb’ (450). Adds Wilks:

The Sultaun, in reviewing the measures of his reign, had reasonable cause for distrusting all bramins, and such were all his secretaries for the languages of the south (450).

After Tipu’s fall, Wilks discussed with Dewan Purniah, with whom he worked closely, the treason charge against Krishna Rao. He writes: ‘I could never get Poornea, his colleague, to give an opinion’ (450fn).

According to Wilks, Abbas admitted his guilt before Tipu, by whom he was summoned, but refused to implicate others.

‘And how long,’ said Tippoo, ‘have you been a traitor?’ ‘From the period,’ replied he, ‘that you began to circumcise bramins and destroy their temples.’ He was put to death by being publicly dragged at the foot of an elephant (450).

Whether or not Wilks is telling everything truthfully, his narrative reveals a few things. One, throughout his rule Tipu employed Brahmin officers to control funds. Two, punishment for treachery was ruthless. Three, when, some years after Tipu’s fall, Wilks was writing his account, Brahmins continued to resent the treachery charge: loyalty to Tipu was a value they still cherished. Four, it was in the British interest to stoke fires of enmity between Muslims and Brahmins. Five, intelligence was a key element in South India’s end-eighteenth-century battles. And six, Purniah, working first with one side and then with the other, remained totally discreet with Wilks, a top-level imperial officer.

Travelling across Mysore a few months after Tipu’s death, Francis Buchanan was told (he does not state by whom) that Tipu had once asked Purniah to become a Muslim. Apparently Purniah in response merely said, ‘I am your slave,’ and retired. Thereafter several persons, including Tipu’s mother, ‘a very respectable lady’, told Tipu that he should leave Purniah alone. Pressure on him would ‘throw everything into confusion’. Tipu ‘very properly allowed the matter to rest’ (Buchanan, 61).

From the words quoted it appears likely that Purniah, on whom we know Buchanan had called in Srirangapatna, told the story himself. The ‘very respectable lady’ was someone who had known and understood Purniah for years.

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Eight months after his retreat of May 1791, having secured his supply line for food and forage and strengthened also his network of spies, Cornwallis again attacked Srirangapatna from the east. As before, Abercromby advanced from the southwest. Once more joining the invasion were the Marathas, who had used the interregnum to gain territory in northern Mysore, as also the nizam’s troops.

This time Tipu was unable to prevent a confluence of his numerous foes. Facing a massive army outside Srirangapatna, he responded with an unexpected shower of rockets which at first disconcerted the besieging soldiers, but a tight siege was successfully enforced. To furnish timber for the siege, ‘the extensive and beautiful garden [in Bangalore] of Lalbaugh’, containing every kind of tree, ‘a princely nursery for the produce of Mysore’, had been cut down, Wilks would admit (547).

The ‘rockets were iron tubes a foot long and an inch in diameter filled with gunpowder and attached to [longer] bamboo rods… The tubes were aimed, lit and propelled to distances of up to a thousand yards like fiery arrows. These noisy missiles are said to have skittered and snaked along the ground, some bursting like bombshells, causing panic among the opponents’ cavalry.’

Releasing two of his English prisoners, Tipu sent with them a feeler for peace. The Treaty of Seringapatam that quickly emerged included a medieval element on which the British had insisted. Tipu was not only to give the confederates half his territory plus three crore and thirty lakh rupees as damages, he also had to hand over two of his sons to Cornwallis as hostages, to be returned when the damages were fully paid.

On 23 February 1792, Tipu assembled at his capital’s main mosque all the principal officers of his army and asked for their frank opinions, sealed by an oath on the Quran, on the peace terms demanded by the confederates. Wilks writes that ‘in aftertimes few of the members of that assembly could recite its events without tears’ (552).

After Tipu had obtained assent to the terms, the boys were handed over on 26 February. In a solemn ceremony, the two sides exchanging gun salutes, Lord Cornwallis took possession of the Oriental princes, ten-year-old Abdul Khaliq and eight-year-old Moizuddin.

A Scotsman present, Robert Home, painted the scene for posterity. The boys were taken to the Company’s secure fort in Vellore, with Lieutenant Thomas Munro (the one who had called Tipu Britain’s first enemy in India) commanding the escort, and thence to Fort St George.

While the Marathas and the nizam obtained large tracts from Tipu’s domain, the East India Company absorbed Malabar in the west, Bellary and Anantapur in the north, and Salem and Dindigul in the south, attaching these rich districts to its Madras presidency. Tipu also lost Coorg, which became a Company dependency.

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Joseph Michaud, a Frenchman familiar with Srirangapatna both before and after Tipu’s fall, would write:

The city of Seringapatam had become one of the most important in Hindustan. The island on which it is situated is three miles and a half long and about a mile and a half broad. It rises to a great height in the middle of the river Cauvery and slopes rapidly to the bank. The fortress occupies a space of a thousand fathoms from the western extremity of the island. The river envelopes it on the north and on the west.

After the 1792 defeat, the capital was strengthened with ramparts, moats and entrenchments, Frenchmen assisting in the work. According to Michaud:

In times of peace the city was very flourishing. Tippoo Sultan [kept] at his court the sons of the poligars as a pledge of their loyalty [the medieval element again]. This made [it] the residence of the most distinguished and the most wealthy families of Mysore and Canara… Gold-work, jewellery and watch-making made remarkable progress in the city…

The population increased considerably under Hyder Ali and Tippoo Saheb. A large number of Frenchmen had settled down in the capital, the majority of whom remained there after its conquest by the English…engaged in mechanical trades such as watch-making and gold-work. The trade of a gun-smith was the most favoured of all by Tippoo Saheb.

But only the Mussulman religion obtained great prominence and favour.

From notes compiled in the year 1800 by Francis Buchanan, the doctor-traveller, we receive additional pictures of Tipu’s administration:

The people universally accuse Tippoo of bigotry and vain glory; but they attribute most of their misery to the influence of his minister, Meer Saduc, a monster of avarice and cruelty. The Brahmans, who managed the whole of the revenue department, were so avaricious, so corrupt, and had shown such ingratitude to Hyder, that Tippoo would have entirely displaced them, if he could have done without their services; but that was impossible, for no other persons in the country had any knowledge of [the revenue] business (71).

Mysoreans told Buchanan that instead of inspecting his Brahmin bureaucrats, or giving them attractive salaries, Tipu had ‘appointed Muslim Asophs [asifs], Lord Lieutenants, to superintend large divisions of the country; and this greatly increased the evil’. These nobles took bribes from Brahmin bureaucrats, who in consequence demanded double the usual bribe from the people (71).

Of Srirangapatna, Buchanan would write:

The palace at the Laul Baug possesses a considerable degree of elegance and is the handsomest native building that I have ever seen (73).

On the walls of another palace in the capital, Buchanan saw paintings requisitioned by Tipu, including one showing Haidar and Tipu in procession and another capturing the 1782 defeat of Colonel Baillie. Panels portrayed some of Mysore’s ethnicities. An intriguing painting taken from one of these panels and published in Buchanan’s book is of an unnamed Brahmin with his wife and son. The artist is not named either (74).

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A visit to Srirangapatna in January 2017 showed that the Lal Mahal palace admired by Buchanan had long gone, its damaged walls apparently demolished by the British in 1807. The ancient temple of Sri Ranganathaswami, evidently protected by Tipu, was newly painted and thick with devotees, while two similarly ancient temples stood right next to the site of Tipu’s residence, one named after Siva in his form as Lord of the Ganga and the other after Narasimha, the half-man-half-lion incarnation of Vishnu.

In the palace with panels that Buchanan had visited (the ‘Summer Palace’ as it’s now called) hang intact wall-portraits including those of Krishnaraja Wadiyar II, Mysore’s titular ruler from 1734 to 1766, the period’s Hindu rajas of Coorg, Chitradurga and Banaras, the Maratha Peshwa Balaji Baji Rao II, the Muslim Nawab of Arcot, and Kempe Gowda I, the Vijayanagara feudatory who had founded Bangalore in the sixteenth century.

A street now called Purniah (or Purnaiah) Street contained houses where, it seems, only Brahmins reside. Evidently during Tipu’s time, too, only Brahmins lived on this street. If, as seems possible, Purniah, too, resided there, it would have been a short carriage ride for him between home and Tipu’s palace.

*

In the six years of peace that followed his treaty with Cornwallis, Tipu fortified his capital, remounted his cavalry, enlarged and disciplined his infantry, suppressed refractory poligars, and encouraged cultivation. The heavy fine to the Company was paid and he recovered his sons. But the 1792 humiliation remained unavenged.

The Marathas, whose rise the British feared, were moving towards disintegration, even though one of their chieftains, Daulat Rao Sindhia, seemed to control Shah Alam II, the Mughal throne’s feeble occupant. In Hyderabad, which also seemed disorganized, a group of Frenchmen used the peace to gain influence. Only Mysore looked efficient, even though it had lost half its territory and much of its treasure.

Worried by Mysore’s energy, London clamoured in 1797 for a more expansionist India policy, and Richard Wellesley, the Earl of Mornington, an ‘imperialist to the core’ who disliked France and its radical Jacobins, was named Governor General.

Early that year, the port of Mangaluru, which had remained with Tipu, witnessed the landing of a small ship commanded by a Frenchman, François Ripaud. Calling himself a Jacobin and an officer in the French navy, Ripaud proceeded to Srirangapatna, where he told Tipu that 10,000 Frenchmen, led by an admiral and a general, had arrived on the Indian Ocean islands of Mauritius (then ‘Isle of France’) and Reunion (then ‘Bourbon’); the French, added Ripaud, wanted Tipu to use this force and overthrow the British.

Perhaps because he was impatient for revenge, and perhaps also because, as Wilks would contend, he was a poor judge of people, Tipu bought the tale. In May 1797, Ripaud and his Jacobin comrades were publicly welcomed, in Tipu’s presence, at a Srirangapatna event, where opposition was announced to all kings except Tipu, who was hailed as a ‘citizen prince’.

Two officials were asked by Tipu to accompany Ripaud to Mauritius. Arriving in Port Louis on 19 January 1798, they were indeed welcomed by General Malartic, France’s Governor General for the two isles, but there was no sign of the 10,000 French fighters.

Unfazed, Tipu’s men proposed in Port Louis a treaty with France whereby the French would provide to Tipu thousands of troops whose expenses he would bear, and, secondly, once all English troops were eliminated, territories in India would be equally divided between Tipu and the French.

On 30 January 1798, Malartic issued a proclamation saying that Tipu desired a treaty for expelling the British from India, and that Mysore would look after French fighting men (without, however, serving them wine). Enlisting in Tipu’s service, several dozen Frenchmen accompanied Ripaud and the two Mysoreans onto a French frigate, La Preneuse, which brought the party back to the Malabar coast by end-April.

Tipu seemed to think that the British would not come to know of these public acts. But the Company’s agents had not gone to sleep, and their freshly-named chief in India was eager to act.

On the very day when the French frigate landed in Mangaluru, Mornington, sailing from England, touched Madras. Arriving some days later in Calcutta, he received a report of the Port Louis proclamation, which was followed first by word from the British governor of the Cape of Good Hope that the report was authentic, and next by a ship captain’s testimony before the Governor General that he was on shore at Port Louis when the proclamation was made.

Sharpening an unending Anglo–French rivalry, the year 1798 also saw the eastwards advance of Napoleon. In May, Napoleon was in Egypt. In July, he captured Cairo. But in August, the English navy defeated him in the Battle of the Nile.

*

Reaching India, word of that last result injected confidence in the breasts of the new Governor General in Calcutta and his thirty-year-old younger brother, Colonel Arthur Wellesley, the future victor, in Waterloo, over Napoleon, who had arrived in India a year before his older brother.

The confidence was sorely needed. For through their spies the British had learnt that Napoleon had assured the radicals still in control in Paris that ‘as soon as he had conquered Egypt, he will establish relations with the Indian princes and, together with them, attack the English in their [Indian] possessions’.

To a friend, Rear Admiral Charles Magon, Napoleon had evidently exclaimed, ‘That’s it! It’s in India that we must attack English power.’

And Charles Talleyrand, the French foreign minister, had claimed on 13 February 1798: ‘Having occupied and fortified Egypt, we shall send a force of 15,000 men from Suez to India, to join the forces of Tipu-Sahib and drive away the English.’

Mornington quickly took military, diplomatic and political steps. Asking Madras and Bombay to quietly assemble forces on both coasts, he also sent Tipu long, stalling letters which betrayed no hint that he was aware of Tipu’s Mauritius proclamation or of Napoleon’s hopes.

The Governor General also turned his attention to Hyderabad, where, led by a Michel Raymond, 124 French officers, including radical Jacobins, exercised sway over the nizam’s 14,000 soldiers. From Madras a force led by a Colonel Roberts was ‘secretly but expeditiously dispatched to Hyderabad’.

Arriving there on 10 October, Roberts and his men obtained the surrender, twelve days later, of all the Frenchmen without firing a shot. Fortunately for the British, Raymond had suddenly died that year, before the surrender.

Not only did the nizam consent to this surrender; he agreed by treaty to keep in Hyderabad, at his expense, 6,000 artillery-backed English sepoys and in addition, pay the English an annual subsidy of over 14 lakhs! Why would the nizam not pay for protection from future foes and for the removal of Jacobin influence?

To seal the alliance, Mornington offered to protect the nizam from any new attack by the Marathas, at whose hands Hyderabad had suffered a large defeat in 1795, provided the French-trained army was disbanded.

Accepting the terms, the nizam became possibly the first ‘major Indian power’ that had ‘definitely decided to trust to the British alliance and had for good or evil resolved to throw in his lot with theirs… and to heed their advice’.

While the 124 Frenchmen were sent to Europe as prisoners of war, the Governor General’s brother, Arthur, was moved to Hyderabad to head British soldiers poised there for orders to march into Mysore.

To the west, in Poona, ‘a treaty was also formed with the Peshwah, the nominal head of the Marhatta empire, which secured the neutrality of that chief’. The peshwa’s rival, Daulat Rao Sindhia, who briefly thought of backing Tipu, was threatened that the British would finish him first. Mornington also neutralized the Danish settlement of Tranquebar, where Tipu had found French allies.

On 25 December 1798, Tipu’s response to two letters sent by Mornington in November reached Fort St George. Claiming that Mornington’s word of Napoleon’s defeat in the Nile battle had given him ‘more pleasure than can possibly be conveyed by writing’, Tipu went on to express his wish that ‘the French, who are of a crooked disposition, faithless, and the enemies of mankind, may be ever depressed and ruined’.

Knowing what he knew, these sentences from Tipu could not have impressed Mornington.

TIPU FALLS

The Fall of Seringapatam on 4 May 1799 was a huge imperial event, which even Napoleon’s later defeat in 1815 would not greatly eclipse. For years afterwards, British novelists (Walter Scott among them) and artists would pair the Corsican and the Mysorean. The siege preceding the fall, a participant, Alexander Beatson, would write, ‘has never been surpassed in splendor by any event recorded in the history of the military transactions of the British nation in India’.

By February, when Mornington ordered the attack, about 50,000 soldiers had been assembled to carry it out, mostly at Fort St George (about 350 miles from Srirangapatna) or near Mysore’s southern borders (about 130 miles from Tipu’s capital).

Headed by General George Harris, this army comprised the Company’s units from Madras, Bengal and Bombay, a column from Hyderabad led by Arthur Wellesley, and another contingent sent by the nizam. About 4,000 of this force were white, all of them, apart from a few dozen Swiss mercenaries, British. The rest, a great majority, were native sepoys.

Accompanied by numerous elephants and camels and a vast army of bullocks, the soldiers trekked with big and small guns, batteries for breaching walls, and ladders for scaling them. The starvation that eight summers earlier had forced Cornwallis’s retreat was not allowed to recur. Men and animals were fed throughout the long journey, and sustenance left over for enforcing the siege.

The marching mass included ‘flocks of sheep and goats to provide meat for the officers, as well as hordes of camp followers and a travelling market selling food and drink for the soldiery’. Adds historian Richard Cavendish:

Officers took along cooks, grooms, laundrymen and cleaning wallahs, and senior officers like Wellesley, who brought his silver-plated tableware with him, had thirty or more servants in their train. Moving ponderously in the burning heat, the army covered an area of eighteen square miles and on a good day managed to advance ten miles.

A colonial classic, the expedition reached Srirangapatna in the first week of April and placed the city under siege. Though inside the fortress Tipu had around 30,000 soldiers, the British had already won half the battle.

Worse for Tipu, the Kaveri that protected Srirangapatna was almost completely dry: men could walk or even run across it. To delay an attack in hopes of rain, Tipu sent messages to British commanders proposing talks, but the ruse was transparent and the offer spurned.

The spirit inside Tipu’s capital was not great. Many residents saw Mir Sadiq, Tipu’s chief dewan, as venal and extorting, some as a traitor. Purniah commanded a sizable unit (of over 4,000 men), as did Tipu’s son Fateh Haidar and the officer called Qamaruddin Khan, but apart from waiting for an attack all they could do was to randomly fire cannons at a distant enemy.

On 5 April, the defenders succeeded in repelling a night assault, led by Arthur Wellesley, on a village called Sultanpettah. There were twenty-five British casualties; Wellesley himself was injured in the knee and almost captured. The next day, however, the village was easily taken by the British.

Reporting that ‘the thunder of the artillery, English and Mysorean, was kept on in the quietness of the night from bank to bank with terrific noise; and the explosion of the mines spread a frightful light over the horizon’, Michaud, the Frenchman, would refer to ‘the sublime horror of this nightly spectacle’. In his view, ‘Tippoo Saheb showed during the siege valour and bravery without parallel’ (141).

If Harris waited much longer, his army’s stores of food would deplete dangerously, but he wanted a reasonable opening in the fortress’s walls before ordering his men to strike. On 28 April and again on 2 May, the attackers’ batteries caused breaches in the fortress’s walls. The second opening, which the nizam’s soldiers had produced, was widened by fresh fire, and on the night of 3 May, Harris decided on storming through it the following day—‘in the middle of the day, when the sun was high, and Tipu and his army were taking refreshment’.

David Baird, once a prisoner of Tipu (after the latter’s 1782 win over Braithwaite) and now a major general, was asked by Harris to lead the assault. At 1 p.m. on the 4th, ‘a dram of whisky and a biscuit were then issued to the European troops [Indians in the army were not entitled to this favour], before Baird drew his sword to signal the attack’.

Evidently ‘cheers resounded along the trenches as the storming party dashed across the River Cauvery. Within 16 minutes, they had crossed the river…and…scaled the ramparts…under heavy fire from Tipu’s batteries.’

A year later, in April 1800, an enormous canvas, 21 feet high and 120 feet long, portraying ‘The Storming of Seringapatam’ would open in London, done by a young artist called Robert Ker Porter, which Londoners would flock to see over the following nine months.

Many were killed in Srirangapatna that day, hundreds on the British side and thousands on Tipu’s, for defence was defiant and brave, and attackers, too, were daring. Rioting by the victorious side took a fresh toll in the forty-eight hours that followed, while some men of Srirangapatna angrily killed Mir Sadiq. After the fall, in apparent confirmation of treachery, his estate received land in Hyderabad from the nizam.

Earlier that morning, when every portent seemed dark, Tipu had given gifts to Brahmin priests of his city’s Vishnu temple and asked them to pray for him. In the afternoon, he frontally faced the rush of attackers and kept shooting from his horse. When he was hit himself, aides put him on a palanquin and tried to remove him, but an unidentified British soldier killed Tipu, more, perhaps, for his jewelled sword than in knowledge of who he was.

Tipu’s body fell into a pile of other bodies. How it was identified was described in an ‘Extract of a Letter from Camp at Seringapatam’ in the Bombay Courier of 24 August 1799:

About dusk, General Baird, in consequence of information he had received at the Palace, came with lights to the gate, accompanied by the…Killadar of the fort and others, to search for the body of the Sultaun, and after much labour it was found and brought from under a heap of the slain to the inside of the gate.

The countenance was no ways distorted, but had an expression of stern composure; his turban, jacket and sword-belt were gone, but the body was recognised by some of his people, who were there, to be Padshaw.

An officer who was present, with leave of General Baird, took from his right arm the Talisman, which contained, sewed up in pieces of fine flowered silk, an amulet of a brittle metallic substance of the colour of silver, and some manuscripts in…Arabic and Persian characters [confirming]…the identity of the Sultaun’s body.

[The body] was placed on his own palanquin, and by General Baird’s orders conveyed to the court of the Palace, where it remained during the night.

A Major Allan who also confronted Tipu’s body on the evening of the 4th would write:

When Tippoo was bought from under the gateway his eyes were open and the body was so warm, that for a few moments Col. Wellesley and myself were doubtful whether he was not alive; on feeling his pulse and heart all doubt was removed… His head was uncovered, his turban being lost in the confusion of his fall…

He had an appearance of dignity or perhaps of sternness in his countenance, which denoted him above the common order of people.

Also near the scene was Alexander Beatson, whose accounts of Tipu’s fall were among the earliest to circulate. According to him, ‘The Sultaun had been shot, a little above the right ear, by a musquet ball, which lodged near the mouth, in his left cheek: he had also received three wounds, apparently with the bayonet, in his right side.’

*

Tipu had sent emissaries to France, Turkey and Persia for help. With British ships and spies manning Indian waters, these men were forced to take roundabout routes. Tipu was dead before they returned.

A Tranquebar Frenchman named Dubuc managed to reach France after Tipu’s death and told Napoleon that ‘it was the knowledge on the part of the English that Napoleon had written to Tipu from Egypt about his plans for the invasion of India that led to Tipu’s overthrow’.

Tipu had also tried to persuade the Marathas to mediate between the English and him, sending vakils with money to Poona. When under Company pressure the peshwa ordered them to leave his capital, they did so very slowly, hoping till the last to be recalled for a deal. By the time they reached the Mysore frontier, Srirangapatna had fallen.

*

Tipu and his father had climbed out of a basket of Indian chiefs to join a global league of famous rulers. In Mysore, their rule gave stability to peasants and merchants for thirty-eight years. Except for months of famine or war, trade and the economy grew, and ports and roads improved. The administration was efficiently organized, with the territory divided into provinces, talukas, groups of villages, and a village. Though justice was severely enforced, magistrates existed, as also rules for customs duties and land revenue. In Thomas Munro’s previously quoted words, Mysore had acquired ‘a vigour hitherto unexampled in India’.

Tipu innovated widely, not merely in rocketry, guns and coinage, where he acquired fame. Wilks’s survey showed, for example, that ‘the Sultaun had set his mind on the manufacture of silk’, as evidenced by ‘the extraordinary attention with which plants of mulberry had been treated’ (547fn); and Tipu tried to improve Mysore’s sugarcane too.

Also mentioned by Wilks was Tipu’s success in ‘suppressing drunkenness’ and destroying ‘the white poppy and the hemp plant even in private gardens’ (766, 573).

But he won no Indian allies for his greater goal. Containing an increasingly assertive Company while simultaneously fighting the Marathas and the nizam was an unrealistic plan, as was Tipu’s expectation that, forgetting her internal convulsions, France would somehow preserve his kingdom.

Fluent in Hindustani, Kannada and Persian and possessing a scholarly side, Tipu liked books, took a refined interest in their binding, and built a large library, yet Wilks’s appraisal that he ‘neglected the practical study of mankind’ was not wrong (762). Tipu failed to read either the wider geopolitical scene or the minds of his own officers. Mir Sadiq was not his only untrustworthy officer. Making money unlawfully had become the norm in Tipu’s Mysore.

Stating that Tipu’s ‘application’ was ‘intense and incessant’ and that he preferred ‘to write with his own hand the [rough] draft of almost every dispatch,’ Wilks tells a story he may have heard from Purniah.

A secret emissary sent to Poona had evidently informed Tipu in report after report that his cash was expended. After several months of inaction, Tipu finally gave a draft to a secretary, saying, ‘Let this be dispatched to [the man] in Poona.’ ‘Here I am,’ said the secretary, who in fact was the former emissary. Having ‘returned for some weeks from mere necessity’, he had shown up daily at the durbar, but Tipu had not noticed. ‘The Sultaun for once hung down his head’ (764).

Wilks was not alone in accusing Tipu of ‘a dark and intolerant bigotry’ (766). We have seen that Munro called Tipu a ‘zealot’. That Muslims received preferential treatment in Tipu’s ‘Khudadad’ or ‘God-given’ government is undeniable.

In Coorg, Mangaluru and the Malayalam country, many Hindus and Christians were forcibly converted after they had fought or rebelled against Tipu. Yet Islam was not thrust on loyal subjects. The cordiality and durability of his relations with the Sringeri Sankaracharya, his respect until the end for the Sri Ranganathaswami temple in Srirangapatna, and gifts from his government to these Hindu shrines are also undeniable facts.

We may note, too, the nineteenth-century observation of H. K. Beauchamp, Abbé Dubois’s editor and translator, that ‘not a single priest’ of the Catholic mission on whose behalf Dubois had come to South India ‘was persecuted by Tippu’.

Certainly Islam was Tipu’s preference as also at times his punishment for those offending him, but it was not mandatory under his rule. For some jobs in his government, being a Brahmin may have been more of an asset than being a Muslim. Tipu’s large revenue department was staffed wholly by Brahmins, who were employed in other departments as well.

At this chapter’s start we recalled the conclusion of Abbé Dubois, whose three decades in the Kannada and Tamil tracts overlapped with Tipu’s rule and death, that the people ‘cherished and respected’ the Indian princes holding sway over them, while hating the native ‘administration’, and that they ‘hated and despised’ the British rulers that followed.

Although he did not name him, Tipu was the Indian prince of whom Dubois the eyewitness spoke, one not only respected but cherished by his people, non-Muslims included, despite his brutal harshness towards rebels.

Wilks would call Tipu a defiant soldier unable ‘to grasp the plan of a campaign, or the conduct of a war’. Conceding that Tipu ‘gave some examples of skill in marshalling a battle’ and was courageous at the end, Wilks would add, ‘He fell in the defence of his capital; but he fell, performing the duties of a common soldier, not of a general’ (764–65).

Yet from the annals of eighteenth-century South India not many persons are better remembered than Haidar (1721–82) and Tipu (1750– 99), for father and son had taken resistance to the British to a new level.

There were moments during their rule when Britain’s India enterprise seemed shaky indeed. When, in 1799, it was Tipu who expired, London exploded in celebration. Paintings, exhibitions and novels turned the ‘Fall of Seringapatam’ into a scene of triumph that would abide in English memory.

Rivalry with England had given birth to intermittent French support for Haidar and Tipu, but France’s hands were tied first by the 1763 Treaty of Paris, which terminated a seven-year war in Europe with England, and then, in the 1780s and 1790s, by the French Revolution’s convulsions. It was essentially on their own that Haidar and Tipu had waged their contests with the British.

*

For forty-eight hours, Generals Harris and Baird were unable to prevent looting and killing by their triumphant soldiers, but an effort was made to protect Tipu’s family. Sons Abdul Khaliq and Moizuddin were recognized and treated courteously by a few Britons, and Purniah boldly suggested that twenty-seven-year-old Fateh Haidar, Tipu’s eldest son, should fill Mysore’s emptied throne.

A biography of Purniah written by a Kannada historian and published in 1979 by a descendant of the dewan claims that ‘during his last battle in 1799, Tipu had entrusted his eldest son and heir apparent Fateh Hyder, who was about 27 years old, to the care and guidance of Purniah’.

According to this biography, the dewan was ‘summoned by the English to surrender and assured that he had no cause to be alarmed’. An unnamed ‘Maharashtrian envoy’ of the British urged Purniah ‘to give up his old prejudices and loyalties’. After ‘a thorough heart-searching, Purniah decided to surrender himself and to accept the new dispensation’. Since his family were in British custody, the surrender was fully expected (73–78).

‘On the 11th May [seven days after Tipu’s death], Purniah sent a message to General Harris that he wished to pay his respects’. Called by the general on the 12th, Purniah tried to argue that his surrender had been ‘delayed by the Kaveri’s rising waters’. Remarking that Muslim rule had become the norm in Mysore, he requested that Fateh Haidar be placed on the throne or given a principality. Otherwise ‘it might be difficult to maintain peace’ (82).

However, seeing that ‘the really powerful Muslim chiefs’, including the hated Mir Sadiq, were all dead, Harris, Arthur Wellesley (who would become Mysore’s military governor) and Colonel Barry Close (appointed as the Company’s first resident in Srirangapatna) concluded that a Muslim rebellion in Mysore was not on the cards. At Fort St George, from where he had overseen the assault on Tipu, Mornington agreed with them.

Reckoning also that a descendant of Haidar and Tipu might one day revolt against the British, whereas Mysore’s Hindus would welcome the restoration of the Wadiyars, the Company opted to enthrone Krishnaraja, a five-year-old scion of the displaced dynasty, who was living incognito with a relative (76–82).

Frank discussion inside the Company’s governing circles thus produced some astute decisions.

Raja Chamaraja Wadiyar, the boy’s father, had expired in 1796. Of that dynasty, the most influential person still alive was Rani Lakshammanni, the old widow of an earlier Krishnaraja Wadiyar, who had died in 1766. To her house went a delegation of the Company’s officers, taking Purniah with them. The boy was brought there, and the venerable rani assented to the Company’s choice.

PURNIAH

Lakshammanni had, for some time, been in secret contact with Fort St George through an agent called Thirumala Rao, who expected to become the dewan in the new dispensation, but the British not only made Purniah the dewan, they also made him regent during the boy prince’s minority.

As for Fateh Haidar, on 18 June he and other descendants and family members were sent out of Mysore, with assurance of pensions, to Vellore in the Madras Presidency, where they were kept under surveillance. Fort St George was given authority over Mysore. Before long, Wilks would write:

The practical efficiency of the government was secured by the uncommon talents of Purniah…and that efficiency was directed to proper objects by the control reserved to the English government.

For the judicious British, continuity came through Purniah, control through Arthur Wellesley and Barry Close, and popularity through Krishnaraja Wadiyar. An impression in Mysore that ‘Hindu Raj’ had finally replaced Muslim rule suited the Company.

As dewan, the short, plump and light-skinned Purniah would save money, build roads and dams, and win the Company’s praise. Visiting Srirangapatna in 1800, Francis Buchanan would find that ‘by the inhabitants he is called by the same title as is given to the Peshwa in Poonah’—Srimantha. Added Buchanan: ‘Next to Meer Saduc, [Purniah] seems to have [had] a greater power under the late Sultan than any other person; but his authority was greatly inferior [to that of Mir Sadiq]’ (Buchanan, 60).

Well-versed in Kannada and Sanskrit, knowing Persian as well as any Muslim noble of the Mysore of Haidar and Tipu, Purniah understood English too but did not speak it (Murthy, 153). Under Haidar and Tipu, his official correspondence was conducted in Persian. Apart from his expertise with money and numbers, he had ‘managed the commissariat and raised troops’ and also commanded a section of them (153–54).

A story ‘current among the people’ but lacking a source was that when asked once by Tipu to undertake a tricky diplomatic mission, Purniah told him: ‘Neither of us is fit for diplomacy. I will never tell a lie, and you will never tell the truth.’ When Tipu’s mother heard the reply, she went, it was said, into a fit of laughter (156).

If this story suggests that Purniah enjoyed the privilege of one-on-one conversations with Tipu, as he had earlier with Haidar, it also confirms what was glimpsed earlier, a relationship of understanding between Tipu’s mother and this South Indian Brahmin.

Ambitious and bold but prudent as well, aware of political winds, trusted for his integrity and rewarded for his competence, Purniah however was ‘ignorant of European politics’, Arthur Wellesley would say (154). No wonder he presented no realistic advice when Tipu sent his futile missions overseas. Wellesley also thought that Purniah should have kept better touch with Fort St George and built links to ‘the Madras Dubashis, who know everything’ (154).

Purniah did not obtain real authority after Tipu’s fall. Frequently overruling him, the British also denied Purniah’s request, inspired by Poona’s hereditary peshwas, for a continuing dewanship in the family.

He was instead given a jagir rich in timber, plants and water in Yelandur, not very far from the Coimbatore district from where, in his boyhood, he had moved to Srirangapatna. Given in 1807, the lands would stay with the family until the 1970s.

Krishnacharya Purniah died on 27 March 1812 in Srirangapatna, not many months after young Krishnaraja attained maturity and the dewan’s regency ended.

*

A few others who had served Tipu were also given positions in the Company’s Mysore, including a man named Khan Jehan Khan. Calling Jehan Khan ‘a brave, able and interesting officer under Tippoo’ (590), Wilks, who acted as resident after Close and got to know Khan well, tells us that this officer was born a bramin and [was] at the age of seventeen a writer in the service of Sheikh Ayaz at Bednore, when it was surrendered to General Matthews. On the recapture of that place by Tippoo, this youth was forcibly converted to Islam and highly instructed in its doctrines. He was soon distinguished as a soldier and invested with high command.

In 1799 he fell, desperately wounded, in attempting to…repel the assault at Seringapatam. He recovered and was appointed to the command of the raja’s infantry.

After the restoration of the Wadiyars, Jehan Khan ‘made advances through [Purniah] to be readmitted to his rank and caste as a bramin. ‘A select conclave’ of Brahmin priests held that Jehan Khan could be readmitted but ‘with certain reservations to mark a distinction between him and those who had incurred no lapse from their original purity.’ Continues Wilks:

[B]ut the khan would have all or none. ‘I prefer,’ said he (in conversing with me on the subject), ‘the faith of my ancestors, but the fellows wanted to shut up my present road to a better world, and would not fairly open the other… I feel myself more respectable with the full privileges of a Mussulman than I should as a half-outcaste bramin (590–91fn).

Gathered by Wilks, an earlier story about Jehan Khan throws additional light on his character and his life’s complexity. It also brings Khan’s unnamed first wife to life.

Before his forcible conversion, [Jehan Khan] was betrothed or married in the usual form, and the lady, on arriving at the proper age, sent a message intimating that notwithstanding his change of religion and marriage with a Mahommedan lady, although she could not be a bramin wife, she could not be the wife of another, and deemed herself bound to regulate her future life according to his commands.

After some further messages, she [entered into] his protection; a separate quarter of the house was allotted for her exclusive use; when he visited her, it was in the braminical costume; and he presented himself to his Mahomedan wife as a true Mussulman.

Another remark by Wilks hints at the emergence of a new community, of unknown size, of the compulsorily converted.

Before I knew [Jehan Khan], he had married [his] Mahommedan daughter to a Mussulman forcibly converted like himself (591fn).

To complete our picture of Tipu and his times, let us take in another story provided by Wilks, this one about one of Tipu’s preferred officers, Kadir Khan Keshgee, and a former prince of Coorg named Vira Rajendra.

In the mid-1780s, when young Rajendra and his family were confined by Tipu in Periapatnam Fort on the edges of Coorg, Keshgee, commanding the fort, had quietly allowed Rajendra to hunt in the woods near Periapatnam. In 1788, helped by Kodavas, Rajendra escaped. Tipu’s response was to move the rest of the family to Srirangapatna, where two females were ‘received into the royal harem’. The third was sent to Keshgee, who, writes Wilks, had the lady attended by a person of her own caste. [Keshgee] not only never approached her; he sent her secretly to her brother. Later, in Feb–March 1791, when Kadir Khan, leading a body of Mysorean troops, was trapped in Coorg by the raja’s forces, who were being supported by a British force sent from Bombay, the raja not only spared Keshgee’s life, he gave him his liberty (Wilks, 477–81).

*

We may conclude this chapter by remembering that if, to Tipu’s discredit, he had made the treacherous Mir Sadiq his chief officer, he had also given positions of influence to men like Purniah and Kadir Khan Keshgee.