East India Company and the Kingdom of Mysore

The Anglo-Mysore wars of 1767–1799 were among the most important of the British East India Company’s campaigns in India. They pitted the rising British power against the most formidable Indian state of the late eighteenth century, the kingdom of Mysore under Hyder Ali (r. 1761–1782) and his son Tipu Sultan (r. 1782–1799). The wars were long, expensive, and inconclusive for most of their course, but the British victory in 1799 — the death of Tipu Sultan at the siege of Seringapatam and the partition of Mysore — marked a decisive moment in the making of British India. After 1799 there was no Indian state capable of challenging the British on equal terms. As the historian Sanjay Subrahmanyam has argued, the death of Tipu Sultan was the moment when the British became, in effect, the paramount power in South India.

The Rise of Mysore

Mysore was, in the early eighteenth century, a relatively minor state on the edge of the Deccan, overshadowed by the Maratha confederacy, the Mughal Empire, and the Nizam of Hyderabad. The kingdom was transformed by Hyder Ali, a military adventurer of modest origins who rose to become the effective ruler of Mysore in the 1760s. Hyder Ali was one of the most capable Indian generals of the eighteenth century, and he used the disorganisation of the Mughal and Maratha empires to expand Mysore’s territory at the expense of its neighbours. By the time of his death in 1782, Mysore controlled a substantial portion of South India, from the Krishna River to Cape Comorin, and had developed a formidable military machine based on cavalry and rocket-armed infantry.

The British had been drawn into South India by the Carnatic Wars, and by the 1760s they were the principal European power on the coast. The first Anglo-Mysore War (1767–1769) was provoked by Hyder Ali’s expansion into the Carnatic and by the British support of Hyder’s rivals. The war was fought to a stalemate, and the Treaty of Madras of 1769 restored the status quo ante bellum — although it included a mutual defence clause, by which each side agreed to assist the other in case of attack. Hyder regarded the treaty as a temporary expedient, and the British regarded it as a mistake.

The Second and Third Anglo-Mysore Wars

The Second Anglo-Mysore War (1780–1784) was provoked by Hyder Ali’s attack on the Carnatic in 1780, in cooperation with the Marathas and the Nizam, and by the British failure to provide the support promised by the Treaty of Madras. The war was a serious crisis for the British. Hyder’s forces captured Arcot, the principal British base in the Carnatic, and threatened Madras itself. The British response was led by Sir Eyre Coote, who defeated Hyder at the Battle of Porto Novo in November 1781 and the Battle of Pollilur in August 1781 (the latter was a heavy British defeat, in which the British lost more than 3,000 men). The war was brought to an end by the Treaty of Mangalore in March 1784, which restored the status quo ante bellum.

The Third Anglo-Mysore War (1789–1792) was provoked by Tipu Sultan’s attack on Travancore, a British ally on the Malabar coast. The war was fought on three fronts: in the Carnatic, in the Malabar, and in Mysore itself. The British, allied with the Nizam of Hyderabad and the Marathas, invaded Mysore from the south and the east, and the decisive moment was the siege of Seringapatam in 1792. The Treaty of Seringapatam, signed in March 1792, imposed substantial terms on Tipu: he ceded half his territory, paid a large indemnity, and released all his prisoners. The British emerged from the war as the dominant power in South India, and the Nizam of Hyderabad and the Marathas as their principal Indian allies.

Tipu Sultan and the Fourth Anglo-Mysore War

Tipu Sultan (1750–1799) was one of the most remarkable Indian rulers of the eighteenth century. He was a serious military commander, an able administrator, and a passionate opponent of British rule. He was also an early moderniser — he introduced a new revenue system, a new coinage, and a new military organisation, and he sent embassies to France, the Ottoman Empire, and the Afghan kingdom in an attempt to forge a coalition against the British. His famous “rocket men” — infantry armed with rockets that could be fired in volleys — were the most advanced military force in India at the time of his death. The British regarded him with a mixture of fear and admiration, and the British press of the 1790s treated him as a serious military threat to the British position in India.

The Fourth Anglo-Mysore War (1799) was provoked by Tipu’s attempts to forge a coalition against the British with the Nizam of Hyderabad, the Marathas, the Afghans, and the French. The British response was overwhelming. The British, allied with the Nizam, invaded Mysore from the south and the east, and the decisive moment was the siege of Seringapatam in May 1799. The fortress of Seringapatam, which had been the seat of Mysore power for over a century, was stormed by the British on 4 May 1799, and Tipu Sultan was killed in the fighting. The British partitioned Mysore: the Nizam received a portion, the Marathas received a portion, and the remainder was restored to the Wodeyar dynasty, the traditional Hindu ruling family of Mysore, under British protection.

The Consequences

The death of Tipu Sultan and the partition of Mysore in 1799 marked a decisive moment in the making of British India. The British had eliminated the only Indian state that could be considered a serious military rival in South India, and they had established the system of subsidiary alliances — by which Indian princes retained their internal autonomy in exchange for accepting British control of their foreign relations — as the principal instrument of British paramountcy. The system was extended, over the next half-century, to the Maratha confederacy, the Nizam, Awadh, and most of the other major Indian states.

The cultural consequences of the conquest of Mysore were also substantial. Tipu Sultan was a patron of the arts and a serious collector of European scientific instruments, and his court at Seringapatam had been a centre of cultural and intellectual activity. The British annexation of Mysore, and the destruction of the Seringapatam court, was the end of an Indian political tradition. As the historian Kate Brittlebank has argued, the death of Tipu Sultan was, for many Indians, a defining moment of the British conquest.

The Mysore Tradition and British Rule

The British did not so much replace the Mysore system as adapt it. The Wodeyar dynasty, restored to a portion of Mysore, became one of the more successful of the princely states of British India. The Mysore system of administration, including its revenue system and its intelligence networks, was substantially preserved. The British East India Company, and later the British Raj, used the Wodeyar rulers as the principal intermediaries with the Mysorean population, and the system worked reasonably well until Indian independence in 1947. The British relationship with Mysore was, in this respect, one of the more successful examples of indirect rule in British India.

The cultural memory of Tipu Sultan, however, remained powerful. The Mysorean court at Mysore, and the Wodeyar princes, preserved the memory of Tipu and the tradition of Mysorean independence. The Tipu Sultan of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was, in the popular imagination, the principal Indian opponent of British rule, and the “Tiger of Mysore” became a symbol of Indian resistance to British domination. The recent work of Indian historians, including the contributors to Tipu Sultan: Life and Legend (in the volumes edited by Parveen Darr and the work of Kate Brittlebank), has produced a more nuanced picture of Tipu — a man of real military and administrative ability, but also a man of considerable cruelty.

Historiographical Note

The historiography of Mysore has been substantially revised since the 1990s. The older British tradition, of which the work of M. Wilks, the nineteenth-century historian of Mysore, is the most distinguished representative, treated Hyder Ali and Tipu Sultan as formidable but ultimately unsuccessful opponents of the British. The nationalist Indian tradition, of which the work of the Karnataka historians D. R. Bendre and G. S. Sardesai is representative, treated Tipu Sultan as a great Indian hero — the principal Indian opponent of British rule. The more recent work, of which Kate Brittlebank’s Tipu Sultan’s Search for Legitimacy (1997) and the contributions to Tipu Sultan and the Age of Revolution (the volume edited by the late Irfan Habib) are the most distinguished representatives, has produced a more nuanced picture. Tipu was a serious Indian ruler whose defeat by the British was, in the immediate military sense, the result of British alliance with the Nizam and the Marathas. The death of Tipu, on this more recent view, was the end of a serious Indian state, and the beginning of British paramountcy in South India.

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