The Anarchy

by William Dalrymple

  Wellesley was now ready and there would be no time for Tipu to create the alliances he needed to protect himself.35 When he was dying, Tipu’s father, Haidar Ali, had advised his son always to make sure he took on the Company in alliance with other Indian rulers; only that way could he be sure of victory. Ambitious and self-confident, Tipu had ignored that advice. Now, when he most needed that assistance, he would fight alone.

  Tipu must have known how slim the odds now were of success: his dream book records one about the last-minute arrival of a rescue force ‘of 10,000 Franks [Frenchmen]’, while on 20 December the Sultan was awoken by a nightmare of a vast army of regiments of English Christians with the heads of pigs marching on his capital.36 But he had no intention of backing down. As he is alleged to have said when he heard the news that Wellesley’s invasion of his kingdom had begun, ‘I would rather live a day as a lion than a lifetime as a sheep … Better to die like a soldier, than to live a miserable dependant on the infidels, in their list of pensioned rajas and nabobs.’37

  On 3 February 1799, General Harris was ordered to mobilise his troops and ‘with as little delay as possible … enter the territory of Mysore and proceed to the siege of Seringapatam’. The Governor General sent characteristically detailed instructions on how to proceed and ordered that, whatever the circumstances, there were to be no negotiations until the army was standing in front of the walls of Srirangapatnam.38

  On 19 February, the four East India Company battalions in Hyderabad under Colonel James Dalrymple, along with the four further battalions of Hyderabadi sepoys and more than 10,000 Hyderabadi cavalry, joined up with General Harris’s Company army. On 5 March, with some 30,000 sheep, huge stocks of grain and 100,000 carriage bullocks trailing behind them, the two armies crossed the frontier into Mysore.39 There followed at least 100,000 camp followers, who outnumbered the combatants by at least four to one. Wellesley believed his army to be ‘the finest which ever took the field in India’; but it was a huge and unwieldy force, and it trundled towards Srirangapatnam at the agonisingly slow place of five miles a day, stripping the country bare ‘of every article of subsistence the country can afford’ like some vast cloud of locusts.40

  Having surrendered half his kingdom in 1792, Tipu’s resources were much more limited than they had been during Cornwallis’s campaign, and he realised that his best chance of success lay in concentrating all his troops on his island fortress-capital. He made only two brief sorties, one against a small British force from Bombay as it passed through the mountains from Coorg, and another against Harris’s main force near Bangalore, where Tipu personally led a spirited cavalry charge. Then he retired behind the great walls of Srirangapatnam to begin strengthening the defences and preparing for the siege.

  With only 37,000 troops, he was slightly outnumbered by the allies, but remained a formidable opponent. No one forgot that, in the three previous Anglo-Mysore Wars, Tipu’s forces had frequently defeated the Company. Indeed, two of the most prominent Company commanders in the campaign, Sir David Baird and his cousin James Dalrymple, had both been prisoners of Tipu, having been captured and imprisoned for forty-four long months after the disastrous British defeat at Pollilur in 1780, ‘the most grievous disaster which has yet befallen British arms in India’.41

  By 14 March, Harris’s force had passed Bangalore and taken several key forts in the surrounding hills. Three weeks later, on 5 April, the army finally came within sight of Srirangapatnam. On 6 April, Arthur Wellesley led a failed night attack on some of the outer defences; a party of thirteen Company sepoys was captured by Tipu’s forces and then tortured to death. On the 7th, the siege began.42

  With his characteristic ingenuity and tenacity, Tipu showed every sign of resisting. As one British soldier wrote, he ‘gave us gun for gun … [and night-time skirmishes were] made with desperate exertion … Soon the scenes became tremendously grand; shells and rockets of uncommon weight were incessantly poured upon us from the SW side, and fourteen pounders and grape from the North face of the Fort continued their havoc in the trenches; while the blaze of our batteries, which frequently caught fire … was the signal for the Tiger sepoys [Tipu’s elite forces dressed in tiger-striped uniforms] to advance, and pour in galling vollies of musketry.’ In all, around 120 Frenchmen were taken prisoner, including twenty officers.43

  The small French corps, around 450-strong, all wearing Republican cockades and sprigs of laurel, also ‘behaved with great spirit’, sallying out on 22 April to the British positions on the north bank of the island: ‘some of them fell within the entrenchment upon our bayonets, and others were killed close to it.’44

  Tipu put up a brave and skilful defence and for some time it appeared that the Company troops were making little headway: ‘the enemy continued during the night to repair their dismantled parapets,’ wrote one officer, ‘and in the morning surprised us with the production of several guns in a new work, embracing the N.W cavalier … Something akin to despondence was now beginning to steal upon the mind; and unless this aspect of affairs soon changed our calculations went to determine that this truly formidable place, manfully defended as it was, would not change masters without extensive blood-shedding.’45

  But Wellesley’s army was equipped with unprecedented quantities of heavy artillery, and deployed forty 18-pounders for breaching the walls and seven 8-inch and 5.5-inch howitzers for plunging fire inside the fort’s walls. In addition, there were fifty-seven 6-pounders for fire support for the besieging army against Tipu’s infantry.46 By the end of April, most of Tipu’s guns on the northern and western end of the island had been disabled. By 3 May, the artillery of the Hyderabad contingent felt secure enough to move forward to within 350 yards of the weakest corner of the walls, and by evening a substantial breach was made. Harris set the following day for the assault.47

  That morning, after inspecting the breach and bathing, Tipu consulted his Brahmin astrologers. They warned the Sultan of particularly bad omens. Tipu gave them ‘three elephants, two buffaloes, a bullock and a she-goat’, as well as an iron pot full of oil, used for divination, asking them to ‘pray for the prosperity of the Empire’. He now suspected himself doomed.48

  At 1 p.m., in the heat of the day, most of Tipu’s sepoys went off to rest for the afternoon. In the Company trenches, David Baird roused himself and gave his troops ‘a cheering dram and a biscuit, and drew his sword saying, “Men are you ready?” “Yes,” was the reply. “Then forward my lads!”’49 He then jumped out of the trench and led a storming party 4,000-strong into the River Kaveri and across the shallows into the breach. His two columns scrambled over the glacis and into the city, swinging right and left along the ramparts, amid fierce hand-to-hand fighting.

  When he heard the news that the assault had finally been launched, Tipu left his lunch in the palace and rode straight to the breach, accompanied by a bodyguard from his elite Lion of God battalion. But by the time he arrived, the Company troops were already well within the walls. There was nothing for him to do but to climb on the battlements and fight for his life. Outnumbered, bravely taking on the overwhelming incoming rush of Company sepoys, he quickly received two bayonet wounds and a glancing musket shot in the left shoulder. His attendants called on him to surrender, but he replied, ‘Are you mad? Be silent.’

  Here, between the water gate and the inner ramparts of the fort, Tipu stood to make what even his most hostile British opponents acknowledged was ‘his gallant last stand’.50 A party of redcoats had forced their way between the gates, and one grenadier, seeing a gold buckle sparkling on the waist of the wounded man, tried to grab at it, and received a last fatal sword slash from the Sultan in return. Seconds later, one of his companions shot Tipu at point-blank range, through the temple. After four wars against the Company, over a period of thirty-two years, the Tiger of Mysore finally fell, sword in hand, among the heaps of dead and dying men.51

  Within a few hours, the city was in Company hands. That evening, after sunset, Baird was taken to Tipu’s b
ody by one of his courtiers, Raja Khan. ‘The scene was altogether shocking,’ wrote an eyewitness. ‘The numbers of bodies so great, and the place so dark, that it was impossible to distinguish one person from another.’ They had to roll the bodies off the pile, one at a time, checking each face by the flickering light of a lamp. Eventually Baird found Tipu; as chance would have it, his body was only 300 yards from the gate of the prison where Baird had spent his captivity.52

  The Sultan’s body lay at the bottom of a heap of dead and wounded, stripped of its jewels. Tipu’s eyes were open and the body was so warm that for a few moments, in the lamplight, Baird wondered whether the Sultan was still alive; but feeling his pulse, he declared him dead: ‘His countenance was in no ways distorted, but had an expression of stern composure,’ wrote Baird.53 ‘His dress consisted of jackets of fine white linen,’ remembered another eyewitness. Below, he wore ‘loose drawers of flowered silk, with a crimson cloth of silk and cotton round his waist; a handsome pouch with a red and green silk belt hung over his shoulder; his head was uncovered, his turban being lost in the confusion of the fall; he had an amulet on his arm, but no ornament whatsoever.’c The corpse was placed in a palanquin and taken to the palace. There its identity was confirmed by Tipu’s captured family.54

  Already, the Mysore casualties hugely outnumbered those of the allies: some 10,000 of Tipu’s troops were dead as opposed to around 350 of the Company and Hyderabadi sepoys: ‘It would be scarcely possible,’ wrote one British observer, ‘to describe, in adequate terms, the objects of horror, the ghastly spectacle, presented to the senses by the bodies of the slain, in every attitude, and in every direction; lying in the verandas and along the principal street.’55 But the horrors had barely begun.

  That night the city of Srirangapatnam, home to 100,000 people, was given over to an unrestrained orgy of rape, looting and killing. Arthur Wellesley told his mother, ‘Scarcely a house in the town was left unplundered, and I understand that in camp jewels of the greatest value, bars of gold etc etc have been offered for sale in the bazaars of the army by our soldiers, sepoys and followers. I came in to take command of the army of the morning of the 5th and with the greatest exertion, by hanging, flogging etc etc, in the course of that day I restored order …’56

  At 4.30 that afternoon, the Sultan’s funeral procession wound its way slowly and silently through crowds of weeping survivors. People lined the streets, ‘many of whom prostrated themselves before the body, and expressed their grief by loud lamentations’.57 Eventually the cortège reached the white, onion-domed tomb of Haidar Ali in the Lal Bagh garden.

  Here Tipu was laid to rest next to his father, ‘immediately consecrated by his Mahomedan followers as a Shahid, or Martyr of the Faith … with the full military honours due to his exalted rank’.58 The British, all of whom had during the campaign been force-fed on Wellesley’s propaganda that Tipu was a brutal tyrant, were surprised to discover how much his people, both Hindu and Muslim, clearly loved him, just as they had been surprised to see how prosperous his kingdom was – ‘well-cultivated, populous with industrious inhabitants, cities newly founded and commerce extending’ – and how popular he was with his personal staff: ‘numbers of his confidential Hindoo servants who during the war fell into our hands, acknowledged him to be a lenient and indulgent master.’59

  Meanwhile, the Prize Committee, whose job it was to distribute the booty, began to amass what was left of Tipu’s possessions and the contents of his treasury. They were astonished by what they found: ‘The wealth of the palace, which was sufficiently dazzling to the eyes of many who were much more habituated to the sight of hoarded treasure than we were, seemed, at that moment, in specie, and jewels, and bullion, and bales of costly stuff, to surpass all estimate.’60

  In all, around £2 milliond of gold plate, jewellery, palanquins, arms and armour, silks and shawls were accumulated: ‘everything that power could command, or money could purchase.’61 The most magnificent object of all was Tipu’s gold throne, inlaid with precious stones and with bejewelled tiger head finials ‘superbly decorated … [It took the form of a] howdah supported on the back of a Tyger, the solid parts made of black wood, and entirely covered by a sheet of purest gold, about as thick as a guinea, fastened on with silver nails, and wrought in tiger stripes, curiously indented, and most beautifully and highly polished.’62

  Unable to decide who to award it to, the Prize Agents cut it up into small pieces, so destroying one of the great wonders of eighteenth-century India. Arthur Wellesley was the first to lament its loss, writing to the directors that ‘it would have given me pleasure to have been able to send the whole throne entire to England but the indiscreet zeal of the prize agents of the army had broken that proud monument of the Sultan’s arrogance into fragments before I had been appraised even of the existence of such a trophy.’63

  Such was the notoriety of the bloody looting of Srirangapatnam that it later inspired Wilkie Collins’ pioneering detective novel, The Moonstone. This opens at the fall of the city when the narrator’s cousin, John Herncastle, seizes ‘the Yellow Diamond … a famous gem in the native annals of India [once] set in the forehead of the four-handed Indian God who typifies the Moon’. To do this Herncastle, ‘a torch in one hand, and a dagger dripping with blood in the other’, murders the Moonstone’s three guardians, the last of whom tells him as he dies that the diamond’s curse will follow Herncastle to his grave: ‘The Moonstone will have its vengeance yet on you and yours!’ In the course of the novel, the diamond brings death and bad luck to almost everyone who comes into contact with the gem, before being seized back by the stone’s mysterious Hindu guardians – something that has yet to happen with the real loot of Srirangapatnam.64

  For the cream of Tipu’s treasures were later collected by Clive’s daughter-in-law, Henrietta, Countess of Powis, when she made a pleasure trip through southern India the following year. She was bored by the company of her husband, Edward Clive, the dim new Governor of Madras, and she left him to his new job at Governors House while she toured Tipu’s former lands of Mysore. Whenever she came to a Company cantonment, she found herself surrounded by infantrymen longing to swap their share of the jewelled loot of Srirangapatnam for cash. She was happy to oblige. In this way, with very little outlay, she casually accumulated one of Europe’s most impressive collections of Indo-Islamic art. In due course it made its way back to the Clive seat of Powis, where it was put on display beside the loot collected, forty years earlier, from the Murshidabad palace of Siraj ud-Daula. There it remains.

  In the political settlement that followed, Tipu’s sons were despatched to exile in the fort of Vellore and most of the best lands of the state of Mysore were divided between the Company and the Nizam of Hyderabad. The rump was returned to the Hindu Wadyar dynasty whose throne Haidar and Tipu had usurped. A five-year-old child from the dynasty was found living ‘in a state of misery … in kind of stable with sheds attached to it’.65 The boy was informed he was now Raja, and, after a brief ceremony, was given charge of a reduced Mysore state, carefully watched over by a British Resident. The Wadyars in due course moved their capital back to Mysore and Srirangapatnam was left a ruin. It never recovered.

  Today a small village squats beside the foundations of Tipu’s former palace, and goats graze in his once magnificent pleasure grounds. Other than the majestic French-designed fortifications, the best-preserved building in Tipu’s former capital is, ironically, the ancient Hindu Sri Ranganatha temple, after which Tipu’s capital was named, and which was not just protected by Tipu but loaded with the valuable gifts which are still on display today, as are all its beautiful Vijayanagara-era images. Not one of these has suffered from the iconoclast’s chisel, despite standing in the middle of the capital of a ruler denounced by his British enemies as a fanatical ‘intolerant bigot’.

  Today most of Tipu’s capital is grazing land, and very little remains as witness of the former splendour of the kingdom of the Tiger of Mysore, the single Indian ruler who did m
ore than any other to resist the onslaught of the Company.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ said Lord Wellesley, raising a glass, when the news of Tipu’s death was brought to him, ‘I drink to the corpse of India.’66

  In less than two years, Wellesley had managed to disarm the largest French force in India, and to defeat and destroy the second largest. Now only the French-commanded corps of the Marathas stood between him and complete mastery of peninsular India. Further conflict was, sooner or later, inevitable.

  The Marathas still controlled great swathes of western, central and southern India – very much more of the country than was then held by the Company. Had they been able to form a united front they could yet have re-emerged as the pre-eminent power in India; but their forces were now more hopelessly divided than ever, and this was something Wellesley took the greatest pleasure in exploiting.

  The final act of the great Maratha Confederacy opened with the death, on 13 March 1800, of its veteran Prime Minister, the brilliant Nana Phadnavis, who had controlled Maratha diplomacy and administration for a quarter of a century.67 Nana, ‘the Maratha Machiavelli’, had been one of the first to realise the existential threat posed by the Company to all independent Indian rulers and it was he who in the 1780s had stitched together the first Triple Alliance with a view to expelling the Company from India.

  He had worked equally hard to keep the different parts of the Confederacy together. Tragically for the Marathas, he was the last of the talented generation that came to prominence after the catastrophic Maratha defeat at the Battle of Panipat in 1761, and his death came at the end of a five-year period, 1795–1800, which had also seen the loss of the Peshwa and the senior members of the houses of Scindia and Holkar. ‘With the death of the great Minister Nana Phadnavis,’ wrote the British Resident at Pune, General Palmer, ‘all the wisdom and moderation of the Maratha government departed.’68 Wellesley needed to do very little: he could just sit back in Calcutta and watch as the great Confederacy fell apart.