Tipu Sultan: The Tiger of Mysore's Last Stand

When a British and allied army stormed his island capital in May 1799, they were braced to find that Tipu Sultan had run or surrendered, the way they expected defeated princes to behave. Instead they found his body in a gateway, among his own dead guards, the sword still near his hand. He had been offered, more than once, the deal the British liked to hand out: keep a shrunken throne, take a pension, rule on as their client. He refused it every time. He is remembered for the line that it is better to live two days as a tiger than two hundred years as a sheep, and at Seringapatam he made the words literal.

The ruler the empire wanted gone

Tipu Sultan ruled the south Indian kingdom of Mysore from 1782, succeeding his father Hyder Ali, who had already made Mysore the most dangerous obstacle the East India Company faced in the south. Tipu was a serious and modernising sovereign. He reformed the land revenue and the coinage, pushed state-run trade and industry, planted the beginnings of a navy, and sent embassies to the French and the Ottomans looking for allies who might help him hold off British power. The Company watched all of this and drew a simple conclusion. A strong, independent Muslim state in southern India was not something it meant to tolerate. Mysore was not a threat to British India so much as a threat to British expansion, which is a different and more telling thing.

Rockets, and the technology Britain took

Mysore's most famous innovation was military. Tipu's armies fired iron-cased rockets in massed volleys, weapons that carried further and hit harder than anything the Europeans had, and they broke British formations at battles such as Pollilur, where Hyder Ali had earlier handed the Company one of the worst defeats it ever suffered in India. After Tipu was dead and his capital taken, the British carried captured rockets back to England, studied them at Woolwich, and fed the design straight into the development of the Congreve rocket, which Britain then fired at its other enemies, including American forces in the war of 1812. The empire that called him a savage was content to copy his weapons.

Carving up a kingdom

Mysore fought four wars against the Company across the second half of the eighteenth century. The third ended in 1792 on terms built to humiliate. Tipu was forced to give up roughly half his territory, to be divided between the Company, the Marathas and the Nizam of Hyderabad, and to pay an indemnity of more than three million rupees. As surety for the money he had to surrender two of his young sons as hostages to Lord Cornwallis. The British turned the moment into a celebrated painting, the conqueror receiving the children of the defeated king, the sort of image an empire frames and calls glory.

The storming and the plunder

The fourth war was the end. In 1799 an army of more than fifty thousand, Company troops and the soldiers of their Indian allies, besieged Seringapatam on its island in the Kaveri and took it by storm. Tipu died defending the breach. What followed was a thorough looting of the city, British soldiers carrying off an estimated one and a half million pounds in what they politely called prize money: coins, jewels, worked cloth, furniture, the contents of a royal capital shared out among the victors from general down to private. His possessions were shipped to Britain as trophies, among them the mechanical tiger that shows one of his soldiers being mauled by a European, now a museum piece in London, and his war turban, which passed into the Cornwallis family. A sovereign state was emptied out and turned into a collection.

Two memories of one man

For the British, Tipu became a useful villain, the byword for the dangerous native ruler who would not accept his place, his defeat retold as the triumph of civilisation over a tyrant. For the people of the subcontinent, and for a wider Muslim world watching a confident state dismantled by a trading company with an army, he became something else entirely: one of the first rulers to understand what European power actually was, and to die rather than kneel to it.

The Tipu Sultan print is part of the Riwayah Azadi collection, which records the human cost of empire. You can view the print.

Tipu's stand was one chapter in a much longer resistance. For the wider arc, see what Azadi was.