Person · ruler of Mysore
Hyder Ali
/hɐi̯d̪ɐr ɐliː/
Also known as Haidar ʿAlī, Haidar Ali, Hyder Ali Khan, Hyde Ally Cawn, Fath Hyder Bahadur, Nawab Hyder Ali Khan
A soldier from Budikote in Kolar who rose through the Mysore army to become dalavayi and, by 1761, de facto ruler, holding the Wodeyar king Krishnaraja Wodeyar II a prisoner in his own palace. Illiterate but famed for memory and arithmetic, he hired French advisers, built iron-cased rocket companies and a navy on the Malabar ports, and fought the East India Company in the first two Anglo-Mysore wars. He left an enlarged kingdom to his son Tipu Sultan.
- Date
- 1720–1782
- Function
- Authority & administration
- Patron dynasty
- Sultanate of Mysore
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
Worth knowing
In 1781 the Pennsylvania State Navy commissioned a warship named the Hyder-Ally in his honour, and the poet Philip Freneau wrote verses on it praising the eastern prince who had brought the British to shame.
His birth date is uncertain, with sources ranging from 1717 to 1722, his death is recorded as 6 or 7 December 1782, and his paternal ancestry is given variously as Arab Nawayath or Punjabi.
Connections (7)
- Succession in timeTipu Sultan
Tipu was Hyder Ali's eldest son, by his second wife Fatima. Hyder gave him a careful education with learned tutors, and in 1760, when Hyder was driven out of Seringapatam by Khande Rao's plot, Tipu was among the family left behind under house arrest. When Hyder died in camp in December 1782 his advisers kept the death secret until Tipu could be recalled from the Malabar coast; Tipu put down an uncle's attempt to crown his brother Abdul Karim, and raised the Gumbaz over his father.
- Ruled fromSrirangapatna / Srirangapattana
Hyder came to Srirangapatna through an uncle who served there and introduced him to the dalavayi Devaraja. In 1757 he was called in to settle a mutiny over pay in the army there; in 1760 the queen mother and Khande Rao drove him out, and he returned to surround the town and take near-complete control of Mysore. From 1761 he ruled with the Wodeyar king a prisoner in his own palace, allowed Christians to build a church in the town, and was buried in the Gumbaz that Tipu raised there in 1782 to 1784.
- PatronageMysorean rocket artillery
Hyder's father had commanded fifty men in the Nawab of Carnatic's bamboo rocket artillery, used mainly for signalling. Hyder turned the weapon into artillery: he cased the combustion chamber in high-quality iron, which allowed stronger charges, trained companies to aim by rocket size and range, and mounted rockets on carts for massed fire. His rocket corps reached about 1,200 men, which Tipu raised to 5,000. At Pollilur in 1780 a rocket is thought to have blown up Baillie's ammunition, and Mysore rocket cases later reached William Congreve.
- CampaignKeladi & Ikkeri
Backing a claimant to the throne of Bednore, Hyder took its capital Ikkeri in 1763 with a large treasury, renamed it Haidernagar, began styling himself Hyder Ali Khan Bahadur, struck coins and fixed weights and measures there. He moved most of his family to Ikkeri as a natural fortress, but illness and a widespread conspiracy sent him back to Mysore. The conquest brought him Bednore's Malabar ports, including Mangalore, where he founded a small navy whose first admiral was an Englishman.
- CampaignKozhikode / Calicut
In 1757 the Palakkad Raja called on Hyder against the Zamorin of Calicut, then an ally of the East India Company, and Hyder's campaigns on the Malabar coast earned him the jagir of Bangalore. In 1766 he defeated the Zamorin and absorbed Kozhikode, and the smaller states of northern and central Kerala, among them Kolathunadu, Kottayam, Kadathanadu, Tanur, Valluvanad and Palakkad, were brought into the Kingdom of Mysore. Tipu was campaigning on this same coast when Hyder died in 1782.
- Historical linkBengaluru
Hyder Ali's rise ran through Bangalore. The Mysore minister Devaraja rewarded him with the jagir of Bangalore for his part in the siege of Devanahalli, and in 1758 he forced the Marathas to lift their siege of the town. After the death of Krishnaraja Wodeyar II in 1759 he took control of the Mysore kingdom, and in 1760 he built the Delhi and Mysore gates at the northern and southern ends of the city and commissioned the Lal Bagh garden that his son Tipu Sultan completed.
- FoundedLalbagh Botanical Garden, Bengaluru
Hyder Ali commissioned Lalbagh in 1760 and laid it out on the lines of the Mughal gardens then gaining popularity, taking as his model the Mughal gardens at Sira, 120 kilometres from Bengaluru and then the headquarters of the southernmost Mughal province of the Deccan. The gardens were managed for Hyder and his son by Mohammed Ali and his son Abdul Khader, and Tipu Sultan completed the work, adding to its horticultural wealth with trees and plants imported from several countries.
Sources
Wikipedia, "Hyder Ali". Mohibbul Hasan, History of Tipu Sultan (2005); Francis Robson, The Life of Hyder Ally (1786), as cited there.
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