Tipu Sultan

Tipu Sultan was the ruler of the kingdom of Mysore in southern India from 1782 until he was killed defending his capital, Srirangapatna, against the British in 1799. With his father, Hyder Ali, he made Mysore one of the strongest states in India, and for nearly two decades he was the East India Company's most determined Indian enemy, fighting it with a modernised army, rockets and alliances with France. Known as the Tiger of Mysore, he remains admired as a moderniser and anti-colonial hero by many, and condemned by others for his treatment of some non-Muslim communities.

Tipu was born at Devanahalli, north of Bangalore, on 1 December 1751, according to most accounts, though some give November 1750. His father, Hyder Ali, was a Muslim soldier of modest origins who rose in the army of the Hindu Wodeyar kings of Mysore and by 1761 had made himself the real ruler of the kingdom, leaving the Wodeyars as figureheads. Hyder, who could not read, gave his eldest son a thorough education in Persian, Arabic, Urdu, Kannada and the Quran, as well as in riding and arms, and French officers in Mysore's service taught him military tactics.

From his mid-teens Tipu took part in his father's wars against the Marathas, the Nizam of Hyderabad and the British. In the Second Anglo-Mysore War, which Hyder began in 1780 by invading the Carnatic near Madras, today's Chennai, Tipu won a striking victory at Pollilur in September 1780, destroying a Company force under Colonel William Baillie, one of the worst defeats the British suffered in India. In 1782 he defeated another column near Tanjore. Hyder died of cancer in December 1782, in the middle of the war, and Tipu succeeded him.

Tipu ended the war with the Treaty of Mangalore in 1784, which restored the situation before it began. He then fought the Maratha Empire and the Nizam in 1785–87, a war settled by a compromise that left him paying tribute. He styled himself padshah, or sultan, rather than ruling in the name of the Wodeyars, and sought recognition from the weakened Mughal Empire in Delhi.

He was an energetic and inventive administrator. He introduced a new calendar and new coins with their own names, reorganised the government into departments, and tried to build state trading enterprises and factories. He promoted silk production, which became a lasting industry of the region, encouraged commerce, and laid the foundation stone for a dam on the Kaveri that was built only in the twentieth century. He banned alcohol and certain caste customs. He collected a large library and kept a record of his own dreams, now in the British Library.

Tipu's army was drilled on European lines, with French advisers, regular infantry and artillery, and a cavalry inherited from his father. Its most famous weapon was the rocket. Mysorean rockets, developed under Hyder and expanded under Tipu, used iron casings that allowed greater range and power than anything European armies then had, and were fired in large numbers by specialised units. Captured examples were studied in Britain and influenced William Congreve's rockets, which the British used during the Napoleonic Wars. Tipu also began building a navy and commissioned a military manual, the Fathul Mujahidin.

In December 1789 Tipu attacked Travancore, a kingdom allied to the Company. The governor-general, Lord Cornwallis, formed an alliance with the Marathas and the Nizam, and in the Third Anglo-Mysore War, 1790–92, the allies took Bangalore and besieged Srirangapatna. By the Treaty of Seringapatam in 1792 Tipu had to give up about half his territory, pay a heavy indemnity and hand over two of his young sons as hostages until it was paid.

Tipu looked abroad for help. He sent embassies to the Ottoman sultan in Constantinople, to the Afghan ruler Zaman Shah and to the Kingdom of France, and later to the French Republic. British writers claimed he joined a Jacobin club and called himself "Citizen Tipu"; some historians think the story was exaggerated or invented to justify war. When Napoleon invaded Egypt in 1798, partly in the hope of threatening British India, he wrote to Tipu, though the letter was intercepted. The new governor-general, Richard Wellesley, used the French danger as grounds for a final war.

In 1799 armies from Madras and Bombay, with Hyderabad's troops and Maratha support, invaded Mysore and besieged Srirangapatna. On 4 May the British stormed a breach in the walls. Tipu refused to flee and was killed fighting near one of the gateways; his body was found that evening among the dead. Some of his officials had been in contact with the British, and later writers blamed their treachery for the speed of the collapse. The city was looted, and many of his treasures, including his throne's gold tiger head, his library and Tipu's Tiger, a mechanical organ showing a tiger mauling a European soldier, were taken to Britain; the tiger is now in the Victoria and Albert Museum. The British restored a child of the Wodeyar family as ruler of a reduced Mysore under their protection.

Tipu was a devout Sunni Muslim who saw his struggle partly in religious terms. His record towards non-Muslims is the most disputed part of his history. On one side, he employed Hindus in many senior posts, including his treasurer, Krishna Rao, and his chief revenue minister, Purnaiya, issued grants and gifts to Hindu temples near his capital and elsewhere, and corresponded respectfully with the head of the Sringeri monastery, whose temple had been plundered by Maratha raiders in 1791. On the other, he deported large numbers of Mangalorean Catholics to Srirangapatna in 1784, and campaigns against rebels in Coorg and Malabar involved mass killings, forced conversions and the destruction of temples and churches; some of his own letters boast of converting captives.

Historians differ in how they explain this. Irfan Habib, Mohibbul Hasan and Kate Brittlebank have argued that much of the image of Tipu as a fanatic comes from British officers such as Mark Wilks and William Kirkpatrick, who had fought him and wished to justify his overthrow, and that his harshness fell mainly on communities he considered disloyal. Others, including some Indian historians, argue that the religious element in his persecutions was real and cannot be explained away as politics. Most scholars now see him as a ruler who combined genuine piety with the methods of an eighteenth-century state builder, tolerant towards subjects he trusted and brutal towards those he saw as rebels.

In Britain his death was celebrated, and for a century he appeared in British books and paintings as a cruel tyrant. In India the national movement and later governments treated him as an early fighter against colonial rule, and a picture of him appears in the original illustrated copy of the Indian Constitution. Since 2015 his memory has been a political battleground in Karnataka, where official celebrations of his birthday were introduced by a Congress government and cancelled by a BJP one. In Pakistan he is widely honoured as a Muslim hero, and a naval warship bears his name. Beyond these debates, his reign is remembered for the modernised army, rocket artillery and economic experiments that made Mysore, for a time, the most serious Indian challenge to British power.