Tipu Sultan and the Fall of Srirangapatna: The Tiger, the Rockets and the Gateway Full of Dead

Srirangapatna, the evening of 4 May 1799. This island fortress in the Kaveri river is the capital of Mysore. In a single afternoon it has fallen to the East India Company, the British trading company with its own army. Its sultan cannot be found.

Major General David Baird is searching for him by torchlight. Nineteen years ago Baird was a prisoner in this fort, nearly four years of it in irons. Now the fort’s commander, the killedar, leads him to a gateway on the north side. It is choked with dead. In the dark, wrote Baird’s staff officer, Major Alexander Allan, no one could tell one man from another.

Soldiers drag the bodies out one by one. Under a palanquin lies a wounded servant, Raja Khan. He has stayed with his master all day. He points to the spot. The body they pull out has its eyes open. It is so warm that Allan and a young colonel feel for a pulse. The colonel is Arthur Wellesley, the future Duke of Wellington. There is no pulse. A bullet has gone in above the right ear. There are three more wounds in the body. On the right arm is an amulet, a lucky charm, sewn into flowered silk.

This was Tipu Sultan, the Tiger of Mysore. He was 47 or 48. For seventeen years he had been the Company’s most dangerous enemy in India. To many Indians he is a freedom fighter who died sword in hand. Many Kodavas of Coorg, Hindus of Malabar and Catholics of Mangalore remember a man who persecuted their people. This is the story of his family, his wars, the day his capital fell, and why India still argues about him.

Forty-two years earlier the Company had won Bengal at Plassey with the help of a defector. That story is told in <a href="/news/battle-of-plassey-1757-full-story">Plassey 1757: The Mango Grove, the Forged Treaty and the Day a Company Bought Bengal</a>.

Tipu’s father, Haidar Ali, was born around 1720 at Budikote, in today’s Kolar district. Haidar’s father, Fath Muhammad, once commanded 50 rocket men for the Nawab of the Carnatic. Later he served the Hindu Wodeyar kings of Mysore. Where the family came from before that is not settled. One tradition says Arab settlers. Another, recorded by some historians, says the Punjab.

Haidar never learned to read or write. But he had a famous memory, and he was better with figures than his own accountants. He also had a gift for war. At the siege of Devanahalli in 1749 he watched the French general Bussy. He learned what trained, drilled foot soldiers and good guns could do.

The Wodeyar kings sat on the throne, but their ministers ran the state. Haidar made himself someone they could not do without. In 1760 the queen mother and a minister, Khande Rao, drove him out of Srirangapatna. They kept his family, the boy Tipu among them, under house arrest. Then luck came from the far north. On 14 January 1761 the Marathas were crushed at Panipat, as told in our story Panipat 1761. Their armies in the south were pulled away. Haidar came back and beat Khande Rao. By the end of 1761 he was master of Mysore. The Wodeyar raja stayed on as a king in name only.

He grew his state by the sword. In 1763 he took Bednur, with its treasury and its ports, Mangalore among them. He started a navy. In 1766 he invaded Malabar. The Zamorin, the king of Calicut, feared what Haidar would do to him. He set fire to his own palace and died in it. When the Nairs rebelled, Haidar crushed them and sent thousands into exile.

Tipu was born at Devanahalli, about 33 km north of Bangalore. Most modern accounts give the date as 1 December 1751; others say 1750. He was named after a Sufi saint of Arcot, Tipu Mastan Aulia. His father made sure the boy got the schooling he himself had missed. Tipu learned Persian, Arabic, Urdu and Kannada, the Quran and Islamic law. He learned riding, shooting and fencing, and tactics from French officers. He grew up a reader. When his palace fell, the British found a library of about 2,000 books.

He went to war young. In 1767 Mysore invaded the Carnatic, in the First Anglo-Mysore War. Tipu, aged 16, commanded horsemen. Haidar ended that war with a stunt the Company never forgot. With 6,000 horsemen he rode about 210 km in three days, to the gates of Madras. There, on 29 March 1769, the Company signed a treaty.

The treaty promised that each side would help the other. When the Marathas invaded Mysore in 1770, Haidar asked for help. It never came. Father and son decided the Company was the enemy that mattered.

In July 1780 Haidar came down the Eastern Ghats into the Carnatic. His army is estimated at 83,000. Many people in Madras first knew of it when they saw villages burning about 14 km away.

A Company column under Colonel William Baillie was marching to join the main army near Kanchipuram. Haidar sent Tipu, not yet 30, to stop it, with about 10,000 men and 18 guns. On 10 September 1780, at Pollilur, Tipu caught Baillie in the open. The British formed a square on a patch of high ground. Then the rockets came. They were iron tubes packed with powder and tied to long bamboo poles. They skimmed and bounced through the ranks. British accounts say a rocket probably set off Baillie’s ammunition carts. Haidar’s main army closed in.

Baillie’s column was more than 4,000 strong, counting its sepoys, the Indian soldiers in Company pay. It was destroyed. Only about 200 Europeans were taken alive. It was the Company’s worst defeat in India until 1849, when the Sikh army mauled it at Chillianwala. That battle is told in The Fall of the Sikh Empire. The prisoners were marched to Srirangapatna. Among them was a wounded officer of 22, David Baird. He spent 44 months there. He would come back.

Tipu had the victory painted across the western wall of the Daria Daulat Bagh. That was the summer palace he built at Srirangapatna in 1784. The painting is still there.

The rockets were Mysore’s secret weapon. Haidar had about 1,200 rocket men. Tipu built the force up to about 5,000. A rocket with half a kilo of powder could fly almost a kilometre. Europe’s rockets, in paper cases, flew much less far. After 1799 captured Mysore rockets went to Britain. There William Congreve used them to develop the rockets Britain fired in the Napoleonic wars. In July 2018 Karnataka archaeologists found more than 1,000 rusted rockets in an old well. It was at Bidanur fort, near Nagara in Shivamogga district.

Haidar did not live to finish the war. In the first week of December 1782 he died in camp, of a cancerous growth on his back. His officers hid the news until Tipu could ride back from the west coast. Before the month was out Tipu had taken the throne. Soon he took a grander title than his father’s: Padshah, emperor.

In 1783 he trapped a Company army under General Richard Matthews at Bednur. Matthews and other officers later died in a hill-fort prison. British accounts say they were forced to drink poison. Then Britain and France made peace in Europe, and Tipu’s French allies pulled out. On 11 March 1784 the Treaty of Mangalore gave back everything both sides had taken. Historians often call it the last time an Indian ruler dictated terms to the Company. Baird went free.

Weeks before the treaty, Tipu turned on the Catholics of the Kanara coast. He accused them of helping Matthews with guides, spies, rice and money. The community remembers that the arrests began on Ash Wednesday, 24 February 1784. Tens of thousands were marched over the Western Ghats to Srirangapatna. We come back to them in Part 13.

Next Tipu fought the Marathas and the Nizam of Hyderabad, until a peace at Gajendragad in 1787. He crushed revolts in Coorg and Malabar. In 1787 his ambassadors asked the Ottoman sultan in Constantinople for soldiers against the British. The Ottomans were busy with Russia. They sent gifts.

Tipu made the tiger his emblem. His throne stood on a life-size wooden tiger covered in gold. Tiger stripes, called babri, marked his soldiers’ jackets, his swords, guns and coins. Alexander Beatson was a Company officer who served in the final campaign. In 1800 he wrote its first full history. He recorded a saying the Sultan often repeated. He would rather live two days like a tiger than two hundred years like a sheep.

He was restless and curious. He started a new calendar and renamed his coins. A Chinese envoy’s gift caught his eye, so he brought silk to Mysore. He banned alcohol. His minister Mir Sadiq complained about the lost tax money. Tipu replied, Beatson says, that kings should never bend in their orders, and God had forbidden wine. He kept a book of his dreams, the Khwab Nama, and read them as omens.

Around 1795 his craftsmen made a wooden tiger, nearly life-size, mauling a man in European clothes. Turn a handle and the man’s arm flaps and he wails. The tiger grunts. A hidden organ plays.

French gunsmiths, engineers and clockmakers worked for him. British papers later claimed more. French soldiers in his capital, they said, had set up a Jacobin club, a club of revolutionaries, and hailed him as Citizen Tipu. The historian Jean Boutier argues the Company made the story up to justify war. Either way, the British were sure of one thing. Tipu was France’s man in India.

In December 1789 Tipu attacked the Nedumkotta lines, the great wall of Travancore. Travancore was a Company ally. The Governor-General, Lord Cornwallis, took the field himself. Eight years earlier he had surrendered to the Americans at Yorktown. Now he had the Marathas and the Nizam as allies. He stormed Bangalore in March 1791 and reached Srirangapatna in May. Then he ran out of food and retreated. In February 1792 he came back. At night, under a shower of rockets, he broke Tipu’s lines outside the island and pressed up to the walls. Tipu asked for terms.

The terms were brutal. The historian Mohibbul Hasan worked from the Company’s minutes of the talks. They show Tipu’s envoys bargaining hour by hour and losing every point. Tipu gave up half his kingdom. He agreed to pay three crore and thirty lakh rupees. Until the money was paid, he had to hand over two sons as hostages. The chosen boys were Abdul Khaliq, eight, and Muiz-ud-din, five, by Hasan’s reckoning. Cornwallis put them at ten and eight.

On 26 February 1792, about noon, the boys left the fort on elephants. Each sat in a silver howdah, under green banners. Tipu watched from the rampart above the gate. A 21-gun salute greeted them at the British camp. Cornwallis met them at his tent door, hugged them and sat one on either side. Then Tipu’s envoy spoke.

These children were this morning the sons of the Sultan, my master; their situation is now changed and they must now look up to your Lordship as their father.Ghulam Ali Khan, Tipu’s envoy, to Lord Cornwallis on 26 February 1792, as recorded in British accounts and quoted by Mohibbul Hasan

Cornwallis gave each boy a gold watch. In London the scene became a favourite picture of British kindness. Engravings of it were on sale by 1793. Tipu paid, and the boys came home in March 1794. The lost half of his kingdom, most of Malabar among it, never did.

In late 1796 bad weather drove a French privateer captain, François Ripaud, into Mangalore. A privateer was a sea raider with a licence from his government. British accounts say Ripaud spoke of 25,000 to 40,000 French troops waiting on Mauritius. Hasan doubts Tipu believed him. Still, Tipu sent envoys back with him to the island, then called the Isle de France.

Its governor, General Malartic, had no army to spare. So early in 1798 he printed a proclamation instead, a public call for volunteers to fight for Tipu. On 26 April the envoys landed back at Mangalore with about a hundred men, by Beatson’s count.

It was a tiny force and a huge mistake. The proclamation reached Calcutta just as a new Governor-General arrived. He was Richard Wellesley, Lord Mornington, Arthur’s elder brother. He believed Tipu’s power had to be broken. Now he had his proof of a French plot. That summer Bonaparte landed in Egypt. On 1 August Nelson destroyed his fleet at the Nile. Mornington kept preparing for war. He made the Nizam disarm his corps of troops with French officers. He sent Tipu demands he could not accept. And Bonaparte, stranded in Cairo, wrote to Tipu.

You have already been informed of my arrival on the borders of the Red Sea, with an innumerable and invincible army, full of the desire of delivering you from the iron yoke of England.Napoleon Bonaparte to Tipu Sultan, Cairo, 26 January 1799, in the English translation printed by Beatson

The letter never reached him. The British got hold of it at Mocha, in Yemen, and Beatson printed it as evidence. Early in 1799 the Company’s armies marched.

Three armies came. The main one, from Madras, had about 21,000 men under Lieutenant General George Harris. With it marched the Nizam of Hyderabad’s force of foot soldiers and thousands of horsemen, led by Colonel Arthur Wellesley. From the west coast came a smaller Bombay army. Modern estimates put the whole at about 50,000. Tipu had perhaps 30,000. The Marathas mostly stayed out.

Tipu struck first. He hit the Bombay army at Sedaseer on 6 March and Harris at Malavalli on 27 March. Both times he was beaten off. On 5 April Harris camped in front of Srirangapatna. That night Arthur Wellesley led an attack on Sultanpettah, a grove full of rocket men. Under fire, he lost his way in the dark and fell back. Beatson politely wrote that the attack was postponed. Wellesley took the grove next morning.

The British trenches crept towards the walls. On 22 April Tipu’s foot soldiers and French soldiers attacked them behind a storm of rockets. A young officer named Bayly remembered that they were so pestered by the rocket boys there was no moving without danger.

Tipu asked for talks. Harris sent terms written by Mornington. Tipu must give up half of what was left of Mysore and pay two crore rupees. Within 48 hours he must hand over four sons and four generals as hostages. Tipu remembered 1792 and refused. Hasan notes that Mornington had already told Harris something else: Tipu’s power should, if possible, be utterly destroyed.

On 2 May the British guns opened a gap in the old western wall. A shot blew up a store of rockets inside the fort. By 3 May the breach, the hole in the wall, was wide enough. The besiegers were short of food, and the river was at its lowest before the monsoon. Harris would storm the fort the next day.

Saturday 4 May began badly for the Sultan. Mir Husain Ali Khan Kirmani wrote the story of Haidar and Tipu in Persian, after the fall. He says the astrologers warned that the hours around midday were unlucky. Tipu gave alms, gifts to the holy and the poor. To a Brahmin he gave an elephant with a black cloth, with pearls, gold and silver tied in its corners. To the poor he gave money.

The British pieced their account together from his servants. In it, he spent the morning on the north rampart. At noon he sat down to eat under an awning. The British had picked this hour on purpose. It was the heat of the day, when the soldiers in the fort rested. Word came that Sayyid Ghaffar, his loyal commander at the breach, had been killed by a cannon ball. Kirmani says Tipu stopped eating and washed his hands. He said, “We also shall soon depart,” and called for his horse.

At about half past one, by Beatson’s account, Baird climbed out of the trench. He drew his sword and called on his men to follow him. Two columns ran down into the river bed. They went through water four feet deep, under rockets and musket fire. Each was led by a forlorn hope, a sergeant and twelve men who went in first. In six minutes the British colours were on top of the breach.

The attackers split left and right along the ramparts. A servant who survived told the British what happened next. The Sultan met them on the north wall. His attendants loaded guns and handed them to him, and he fired. He fell back from one defence to the next as his men melted away.

Near the gate to the inner fort he got on his horse. In the gateway he was shot in the right side, then again. His horse fell. His men laid him in his palanquin under the arch. A British soldier grabbed at his sword-belt. Tipu slashed at the man’s knee, and the soldier shot him through the head. That is the British version, pieced together from the killedar and Tipu’s servants.

Kirmani tells a story of betrayal. At noon Mir Sadiq, the diwan or chief minister, pulled troops away from the breach. His excuse was that they were to be paid. Men in the fort waved white handkerchiefs to the British. Tipu tried to get back into the inner fort, but the postern, a small side gate, was shut against him. He turned, killed two or three of the enemy and “drank of the cup of Martyrdom”. As for Mir Sadiq, Kirmani says a man cut him down at another gate. The man cursed him for handing a righteous prince to his enemies.

By Arthur Wellesley’s reckoning, the fort fell about two hours after the troops left the trenches. Two of Tipu’s sons surrendered the palace on a promise of safety. About 120 Frenchmen laid down their arms. Then Baird went looking for the Sultan with lights.

What happened next, Kirmani wrote, “had better be left untold”. He meant the killing of Muslims, the theft of their property and the rape of their women. Beatson boasted that very few unarmed people suffered. Arthur Wellesley, in a private letter to his brother, did not pretend.

Nothing therefore can have exceeded what was done on the night of the 4th. Scarcely a house in the town was left unplundered.Colonel Arthur Wellesley to his brother Lord Mornington, Seringapatam, 8 May 1799

Jewels and gold bars, he went on, were being sold in the army’s bazaars. He took command of the town on the 5th. He restored order “by hanging, flogging, &c.” People came home, he wrote, but everyone’s property was gone.

Beatson counted more than 8,000 of Tipu’s soldiers killed in the assault. In the whole siege the Company lost about 1,500 killed, wounded and missing. The treasury held 25,35,804 star pagodas, gold coins, in treasure and jewels. That was a little over £1.1 million, less than the army had hoped. The golden tiger throne was broken up for the prize fund, the loot shared out among the winners. Harris’s share alone was more than £100,000.

Much of the loot is still in Britain. Tipu’s Tiger is in the Victoria and Albert Museum. His last sword and ring are in the British Museum. His library, Kirmani says, was sent to Europe. In 1868 Wilkie Collins opened his novel The Moonstone with a British officer stealing a sacred diamond in the sack of Srirangapatna.

On the afternoon of 5 May Tipu was buried. His son Abdul Khaliq rode behind the bier that carried the body, with British grenadiers in front and behind. Beatson writes that many in the crowded streets threw themselves to the ground before the body and wept aloud. Tipu was laid beside his father in the Gumbaz, the domed tomb he had built in the Lal Bagh garden. That evening a violent storm broke over the island. Lightning killed two officers in the Bombay camp.

The Company did not take Mysore openly. On 30 June 1799 it crowned a five-year-old Wodeyar, Krishnaraja Wodeyar III. Purnaiah, Tipu’s old minister, became his diwan. The kingdom was much smaller now, and bound by a subsidiary alliance. That meant Company troops inside it, and the Company in control of its foreign affairs. The Kanara coast and Coimbatore went to the Company. The Marathas refused their share, because it came with a British resident, an official who would watch over them.

Tipu’s sons and their families were sent to Vellore fort, near Madras, to live on Company pensions. Arthur Wellesley stayed on to command at Srirangapatna. Later he beat the Marathas at Assaye in 1803 and Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815. The medal given for 1799 showed a British lion overpowering a tiger.

Vellore did not stay quiet. New rules there banned religious marks and beards, and the sepoys were angry. On 10 July 1806 they rose. They killed or wounded about 200 British troops and raised the flag of the Mysore sultanate over the fort. Followers of Tipu’s son Fath Haidar joined them, though the princes held back. The rising was crushed within the day. Half a century later the rebels of 1857 would rally to a Mughal emperor in the same way.

Far to the north, in July 1799, an 18-year-old Sikh chief named Ranjit Singh rode into Lahore. With Mysore gone, his Punjab would be the last great Indian kingdom the Company had to face. That story is told in Maharaja Ranjit Singh and the Koh-i-Noor.

Two centuries on, people argue less about how Tipu died than about how he ruled. Both sides have real evidence. Both leave some out.

Start with Coorg. Its people, the Kodavas, rose against Mysore again and again. In 1811 the British officer William Kirkpatrick published letters from Tipu’s captured papers. One letter, said to be Tipu’s, describes how he dealt with them.

We proceeded with the utmost speed, and, at once, made prisoners of 40,000 occasion-seeking and sedition-exciting Kodavas… we raised them to the honour of Islam, and incorporated them into our Ahmedy corps.Tipu Sultan to Runmust Khan, Nawab of Kurnool, in William Kirkpatrick’s translation of his letters (1811)

His court chronicle says 70,000. Mohibbul Hasan wrote History of Tipu Sultan (1951), still the classic defence of Tipu. He calls that number absurd, since all of Coorg hardly had so many people. He doubts that Kirkpatrick’s letters are genuine. He accepts that some Kodavas became Muslim, but says they did so willingly. Their descendants, the Kodava Mappilas, still live in Kodagu.

Now Malabar. William Logan’s Malabar Manual (1887) quotes an earlier British history. It tells how about 2,000 Nairs were besieged at Kuttippuram in 1788. They were forced to convert, circumcised and made to eat beef. Rajas and Nair families fled to Travancore. Hasan answers that the Nairs were punished as rebels, not as Hindus. Tipu also massacred rebel Mappila Muslims, he points out.

For Mangalorean Catholics the captivity is the deepest wound in their history. How many were taken in 1784? A Portuguese viceroy’s letter says about 20,000. James Scurry, a British captive, says 30,000. Thomas Munro, and Tipu’s own chronicle, say 60,000. Francis Buchanan says 80,000. A Mangalorean record, the Barcoor manuscript, and British reports say a third died on the march. Young men were circumcised and forced into the army. Churches were pulled down. Perhaps 15,000 to 20,000 came home as Catholics in 1799. Hasan calls the higher figures exaggerated. The Christians, he says, were punished for treason.

Then there is the other Tipu. In 1791 Maratha raiders sacked the Sringeri math, a great Hindu monastery, and killed Brahmins. Tipu wrote to its head, the Shankaracharya, in anger at the attack. He sent money and supplies, and kept writing for years. About 30 of the Kannada letters were found in 1916. Records show grants to about 156 temples. The Ranganatha temple stood a stone’s throw from his palace. Purnaiah, his most powerful minister, was a Brahmin. In Melkote, though, a tradition holds that Tipu’s men killed hundreds of Iyengar Brahmins. In their memory, the town does not celebrate Deepavali.

Tipu has never been allowed to rest. His picture appears in the original illustrated Constitution of India. In 1943 Subhas Chandra Bose proclaimed the Azad Hind government, and named Haidar and Tipu among India’s warriors. Pakistan named a warship after him. In 2017 President Ram Nath Kovind told Karnataka’s lawmakers that Tipu died a heroic death fighting the British.

In 2015 Siddaramaiah’s Congress government in Karnataka began celebrating Tipu Jayanti, a yearly festival in his honour. On 10 November that year the first celebration set off stone-throwing in Madikeri, in Kodagu. A VHP organiser, Kuttappa, 60, died. Police said he fell while jumping a wall. Two people died that day. In July 2019 B.S. Yediyurappa’s BJP government took office. Within days it scrapped the celebrations, citing a letter from a Kodagu legislator. Siddaramaiah called it a crime.

In 2022 a new story appeared. It said Tipu was killed not by the British but by two Vokkaliga chieftains, Uri Gowda and Nanje Gowda. The story began in a play by Addanda Cariappa. BJP leaders took it up before the 2023 election. Historians told The News Minute the two men appear in no historical text, song or folklore. Only one, N.S. Rangaraju, believed they had served Haidar. In March 2023 the head of the Adichunchanagiri math said there was little evidence they existed. He told the minister Munirathna to drop a film about them. Munirathna did.

In 2004 Vijay Mallya bought one of Tipu’s swords at a London auction and brought it home. Another sold at Sotheby’s in 2013 for £98,500. At Srirangapatna a stone tablet marks where his body was found, near what is now called the Water Gate. And on the palace wall, Pollilur is still being won.

The Kaveri still splits around the old walls. Inside them stand temples, mosques and the ruins of the palace. There too is the gateway where a sultan lay warm among the dead. He did not save India from the British. Nobody in his century did. But he made them fight for the south four times, and he died inside his own walls.