Person · sultan & military innovator · India
Ṭīpū Sultān
The Mysore ruler who fought the Company in four wars, used iron-cased rockets in massed batteries at Pollilur and Seringapatam, built a navy and a state trading system, sent embassies to Istanbul, Paris and Kabul, and died on the breach at Seringapatam in 1799 rather than negotiate.
- Date
- 1751–1799
- Function
- Authority & administration
- Confidence
- Not assessed
- Location
- 12.420, 76.690
Worth knowing
His rockets were taken to Woolwich and studied; the Congreve rocket that the American national anthem mentions descends from them. He is also among the most contested figures in Indian public memory — a resister of the Company to some, a persecutor of Coorgs, Mangalorean Catholics and Nairs to others, and both records exist.
About the place
Placed at Srirangapatna, the island capital he ruled from and where he was killed on the breach in May 1799. His summer palace and his tomb are both there.
Connections (4)
- Craft tradition ofMysorean rocket artillery
The Mysorean rocket was an iron cylinder rather than the bamboo-and-paper tubes used elsewhere, which let it carry more powder and fly further, and it was used in massed batteries rather than as a novelty — at Pollilur in 1780 a rocket hit an ammunition tumbril and decided the battle. Tipu had a rocket corps of five thousand, a manual, and a factory; the Company had nothing comparable and said so in its own reports.
- CampaignKodagu (Coorg)
Tipu's campaigns in Kodagu in the 1780s, and the deportations and forced conversions of Kodavas and of Mangalorean Catholics that accompanied them, are why he is remembered very differently on the west coast than in Karnataka's textbooks. The Kodava and Catholic accounts of those years are detailed and the Company used them; the resistance to the Company is equally documented. Both things are in the record and the public argument about him tends to require choosing one.
- CampaignVellore Fort
After Srirangapatna fell in 1799 Tipu's family was deported to Vellore fort, where they were held for years — and it was in Vellore that the sepoy mutiny of 1806 broke out, over new uniform regulations about beards, turbans and caste marks, with the mutineers raising Tipu's flag and proclaiming one of his sons. It is the first serious mutiny in the Company's Indian army, fifty-one years before 1857, and it was put down in a morning.
- CampaignPollilur
Tipu commanded the cavalry at Pollilur under his father Haidar Ali and had the engagement painted around a room at the Daria Daulat Bagh, with the Company's officers in confusion and its powder tumbril exploding. He also had his rocket corps expanded after it; the Woolwich arsenal reverse-engineered captured Mysorean rockets twenty years later as the Congreve pattern.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Tipu Sultan”. Mysore and Travancore state records; Kate Brittlebank, Tipu Sultan’s Search for Legitimacy (1997); A. Sreedhara Menon, A Survey of Kerala History.
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