Tradition · military technology tradition
Mysorean rocket artillery
Iron-cased rockets fired from massed batteries and from wheeled launchers, developed under Haidar Ali and Tipu at Srirangapatna — the first metal-cylinder rocket artillery used in war anywhere, with a range of about two kilometres and a factory and a corps of some five thousand men to serve them.
- Function
- Military & resistance
- Confidence
- Not assessed
- Location
- 12.418, 76.695
Worth knowing
Some seven hundred were captured at Srirangapatna in 1799 and taken to the Royal Arsenal at Woolwich, where William Congreve reverse-engineered them; the rockets' red glare in the American anthem is descended from Mysore. A cache of several hundred was found in a well at Nagara in Shivamogga district in 2018.
Connections (4)
- Craft tradition ofṬīpū Sultān
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.
- PatronageMysore Palace
Mysore Palace and the rocket corps belong to the same state a generation apart: the Wadiyars held the throne, Haidar Ali and Tipu Sultan held the power and built the arsenal, and the Wadiyars were restored to the palace by the Company in 1799 after Tipu was killed. The palace standing now is a 1912 rebuilding by Henry Irwin after the older wooden one burned.
- AnalogueDarra Ādam Khel
Two traditions of making weapons outside the industrial system that was supposed to have a monopoly on them. Mysore's rocket artillery was state-run research — iron-cased rockets fired in volleys against the Company's lines at Pollilur and Srirangapatna, good enough that examples were shipped to Woolwich and copied there. Darra Ādam Khel is the opposite arrangement and the same impulse: Afridi smiths in a bazaar copying any firearm brought to them by hand and by eye, for a century and a half, with no drawings and no factory.
- Site withinMysuru
Mysorean rocket artillery 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. Mysorean rocket artillery 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
Sources
Wikipedia, “Mysorean rockets”. 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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