Place · river-island fort & capital · India

Srirangapatna / Srirangapattana

Also known as Shrīrangapattanam, Srirangapatnam, Seringapatam

Periods

Regional Flourishing, Islamic Age and Bhakti Traditions

Function

Military & resistance

Tradition

Shrivaishnava/local temple tradition

Confidence

Established / referenced

Location

12.418, 76.695

Worth knowing

A Jacobin club met in the town in 1797 and planted a liberty tree, addressing Tipu as Citizen Tipu, and his embassies to Paris went out through Pondicherry. The Daria Daulat Bagh outside the walls carries a mural of his victory over the Company at Pollilur painted around a whole room. The fort was dismantled after 1799; the temple is still functioning.

Connections (12)

• River flowTalakāverī

  From the tank at Talakaveri in the Kodagu hills the river runs down onto the Mysore plateau and reaches its first island shrine at Srirangapatna, where Ranganatha reclines on Shesha. The Kaveri's sanctity is serial rather than concentrated: Srirangapatna, then Shivanasamudra, then Srirangam far downstream, each an island in the river, so the whole course reads as a single temple laid out lengthwise.

• River flowShivasamudram / Madhyarangam

  From Srirangapatna the Kaveri runs on to the next island shrine of Ranganatha at Shivanasamudra, the Madhyaranga or middle Ranga of the sequence, where the river also falls in two great cataracts. India's first hydroelectric station was built at those falls in 1902 to power the Kolar gold mines — so one of the three Ranga islands is also the site at which electrical power generation in Asia began.

• In the same set asShrīrangam

  Srirangapatna in Karnataka and Srirangam in Tamil Nadu are two of the three Kaveri islands where Ranganatha reclines, with Shivanasamudra between them — Adi, Madhya and Antya Ranga, first, middle and last. The sequence makes the river itself the organising principle of a pilgrimage running four hundred kilometres across two linguistic regions, and pilgrims doing all three are crossing what is now a hard state border over water rights.

• Site adjacencyMysore Palace

  Srirangapatna and Mysore are closely connected through the Kaveri River landscape of Karnataka. Srirangapatna lies on an island in the Kaveri just northeast of Mysore and historically served as a major regional centre before Mysore became dominant. Today, the two form an important cultural and historical corridor within southern Karnataka.

• CampaignMahé

  Mahé was Haidar Ali's arms port, and he had guaranteed its safety. The British capture of the enclave in 1779 was the specific act he cited in declaring war, opening the Second Anglo-Mysore War. A three-square-mile French loge on the Malabar coast is therefore the trigger for the longest and most expensive of the Company's wars in the south.

• Patronage networkPuducherry (Pondicherry)

  Pondicherry was the source of the French officers who drilled Mysore's infantry and cast its guns, and Tipu Sultan's embassies to Paris and to the Isle de France went out through it. A Jacobin club met at Srirangapatna in 1797 and addressed him as Citizen Tipu. After 1799 France had no Indian ally left, and its enclaves survived only because Britain saw no reason to take them.

• Succession in timeAssaye

  Mysore fell in 1799 and the Maratha confederacy four years later, and the two wars were fought by the same commander with the same instrument: subsidiary treaties that left Indian rulers their thrones, their titles and a Company garrison they paid for. Between them the Company acquired the Deccan and the peninsula, and after 1803 no Indian power could face it in the field.

• Succession in timePollilur

  Nineteen years separate Mysore's greatest victory over the Company from its extinction. Pollilur in 1780 was won by mobility, rockets and the destruction of an isolated column; Srirangapatna in 1799 was lost to a siege train, a coalition with Hyderabad and the Marathas, and a treasury already drained by three wars. The Company could absorb one Pollilur; Mysore could not absorb one siege.

• Contemporary capital withShaniwarwada, Pune

  Pune and Srirangapatna were the two Indian capitals that mattered most to the Company in the 1790s, one the seat of the Maratha confederacy and the other of Mysore, and both were reduced within twenty years. Each had European-drilled troops and European officers; neither survived as a capital. Pune became a cantonment and Srirangapatna a ruin beside a working temple.

• AnalogueTalakadu

  Talakadu and Srirangapatna are forty kilometres apart on the same river and both are attached to the same Wodeyar curse story, said to have been pronounced by Alamelamma after the Wodeyars took Srirangapatna in 1610. One is buried under sand the Kaveri laid over it and the other was reduced by an assault in 1799; the legend is the region's own way of narrating both.

• Craft tradition ofManjarabad Star Fort, Sakleshpur

  Manjarabad's eight-pointed star and Srirangapatna's re-bastioned river walls were both laid out by French engineers in Mysore's service, and they are the clearest Indian adoption of the European bastioned trace. Tipu paid for the expertise and used it for his own purposes; the 1799 assault then proved that a European plan without a European siege train behind it was not enough.

• Site withinMysuru

  Srirangapatna / Srirangapattana lies within Mysuru — the two sites sit about 15 km apart, well inside the city's historical boundary and part of the same urban or peri-urban landscape. Srirangapatna / Srirangapattana is one of the specific sites that give Mysuru its layered character, and reads differently when seen as a stop within the larger city rather than as an isolated monument on an open map. The surrounding neighbourhoods, roads and other heritage ensembles belong to the same single urban fabric.

On these journeys

• Pancharanga Kshetrams
• How the Company took India
• UNESCO Tentative List
• Mysore & Travancore
• Cities through time — many civilisations, one place
• British India — 1600 to 1947
• French India — 1664 to 1962
• Forts of the south & Deccan

Sources

Wikipedia, “Srirangapatna”. Mysore Gazetteer, ed. C. Hayavadana Rao (1927); the Daria Daulat Bagh murals; Wellesley's despatches on the 1799 siege.

• Wikipedia — Srirangapatna