India
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In 1785 an embassy had left Mysore for Constantinople. It was to alert the Islamic world to British designs on India’s Muslim powers, to effect a political and commercial alliance, and to elicit from the Ottoman sultan, as the successor of the caliphs, recognition of Tipu’s status as a legitimate Islamic sovereign, or padshah. This same mission was now ordered to proceed on to Paris. But, delayed in Iraq, it was superseded by a separate embassy sent direct to France in 1787.
All expenses were now to be paid by the French, who also provided a ship. Flying the flag of Mysore, this vessel eventually docked at Toulon in June 1788. Thence, after fireworks, receptions and visits to the theatre, Tipu’s forty-five-man mission proceeded to Paris overland. The metropole turned out to greet its visitors in style, and the ambassadors were deluged with carriages, apartments and suitable clothes.
On the 10th of August, Louis XVI received the envoys with great pomp. The principal apartments of the Versailles palace were filled with spectators, and the salon d’Hercules, where the audience was to take place, was occupied by persons of rank of both sexes. The Dauphin, being unwell, could not come. But the Queen, Marie Antoinette, was seated in a private box at the side of the throne, the envoys being required neither to look at her nor salute her.15
Whether Tipu’s emissaries had any inkling that all was not well with the Bourbons is unrecorded. But with the storming of the Bastille only a year away and with London watching his every move, Louis XVI was in no position to gratify his visitors with political and military support. In fact France’s domestic crisis meant that her ambitions in India were about to be abandoned and all troops withdrawn. However, Tipu’s less contentious request for ‘seeds of flowers and plants of various kinds, and for technicians, workers and doctors’ was entertained. When the mission left for home at the end of the year it was accompanied by a veritable atelier of munitions experts, gunsmiths, porcelain-workers, glass-makers, watchmakers, tapestry-makers and linen-weavers, plus ‘two printers of oriental languages, one physician, one surgeon, two engineers and two gardeners’.
Haidar Ali had turned Mysore’s forces into a professional army, trained, equipped and paid along European lines. Tipu was determined similarly to modernise his state’s economy. Where Haidar had been illiterate, Tipu benefited from a good education and an extremely inquisitive mind. Alone amongst his reigning contemporaries, he identified something of the dynamic which lay behind the uniformed efficiency of the European regimes and set about duplicating it. Trade was obviously important. To this end he established a state trading company, encouraged investors to buy shares in it, and organised a network of overseas ‘factories’ located around the Arabian Sea and in the Persian Gulf. Modelled on those of the European trading companies, they included both a commercial staff and a military establishment. There is no mention of Louis XVI being petitioned for a ‘factory’ in France, but Tipu certainly urged the idea on the Ottoman emperor and also approached the ruler of Pegu in Burma.
Command of the Malabar ports gave Mysore a ready outlet to the sea plus control of their outward trade in pepper and timbers and of their inward trade in mainly horses from the Gulf states; it was no coincidence that the most effective cavalry in India belonged to the Marathas and to Mysore, both of whom had ready access to the west coast ports. To increase the variety of Mysore’s exports Tipu sought new crops by experimenting with seeds and plants from all over Asia as well as from France. Around his summer palace at Srirangapatnam the ground was laid out in parterres for botanical acclimatisation and propagation. The eighteenth century being the age of ‘improvement’, he took as close an interest in these schemes as any European ‘improver’, and was personally responsible for introducing sericulture into Mysore. The silkworms were obtained from Persia, mulberry-planting received official encouragement, and a factory for silk-processing and -weaving was set up. Other factories turned out sugar, paper, gunpowder, knives and scissors. ‘The ammunition factories at Bednur produced twenty thousand muskets and guns every year.’16 As Tipu boasted to a French correspondent, Mysore was self-sufficient in arms.
Testimony to the prosperity of his country and to the comparative leniency of his revenue demands comes mainly from the wide-eyed British officials and surveyors who would soon be swarming across Mysore to conduct its post-mortem; in victory the British prided themselves on magnanimity. But from the infrequency of protest and the failure of intrigues during his lifetime it would seem that Tipu’s rule was indeed acceptable to most of his subjects, both Muslim and Hindu. ‘Citoyen Tipu’, as his revolutionary French contacts would soon call him, was no man of the people. A vindictive and sometimes cruel autocrat, he readily antagonised his enemies, both Indian and British, and was easily demonised by them. Yet, in his passion for reform and modernity some have seen parallels with the radicalism of the Paris revolutionaries. Thomas Munro, perhaps the most respected of all the British officials who later served in Mysore and a genuine admirer of Tipu’s achievements, noted mainly his ‘restless spirit and a wish to have everything originate from himself’.17 The highly personalised nature of his rule was both its strength and its weakness. So long as he lived, there was little chance of the British reaching an accommodation with Mysore along the lines of those with Hyderabad or Awadh. Taming Tipu, ‘the tiger of Mysore’, meant destroying his entire habitat.
It was not a pretty story. If the conquest of Bengal had been partly dictated by a lust for personal gain, that of Mysore would owe much to a lust for personal glory. The Third Mysore War (1790–2) was declared and largely conducted by Lord Cornwallis, the general who had surrendered to George Washington at Yorktown during the American War of Independence. Upright and avowedly pacific, Cornwallis would wait three years before tackling Tipu. Once committed, however, he would pursue his quarry with a regard for his own dented military reputation that made anything less than Tipu’s abject surrender unthinkable. By way of contrast Richard Wellesley, Earl of Mornington, the governor-general responsible for the Fourth Mysore War (1799), had barely touched Indian soil before he was preparing for battle. An uncompromising empire-builder whose annexations were anything but fortuitous, Wellesley immediately embarked on a veritable digvijaya in which a debilitated Mysore would offer easy pickings for a host of ardent officers including his brother Arthur, the future Duke of Wellington.
Tipu himself was no innocent. Far from avoiding contentious policies liable to unite and provoke his neighbours, he defiantly espoused them. The Third War was provoked by what Cornwallis regarded as an ‘attack’ on Travancore, the southernmost of the Malabar principalities. Tipu disclaimed responsibility but, instead of backing off, maintained his doubtful interests in the area and duly fuelled British paranoia with a full-scale invasion of Travancore. A tripartite alliance forged by Cornwallis with the Marathas and the Nizam of Hyderabad, which should have deterred him, merely antagonised him. The British then laboriously mobilised a force of twenty thousand for an invasion of Mysore. Initially they were outmanoeuvred by Tipu, who brought the war to the Carnatic. But Cornwallis eventually gained the Deccan, stormed Bangalore and advanced on Srirangapatnam. Meanwhile another British army had swept up from the Malabar coast, and Cornwallis had been joined by his Maratha and Hyderabad allies. Tipu, heavily outnumbered and outgunned, yet held out for the best part of a year before accepting terms which could hardly have been more humiliating. They included an eight-figure indemnity, the surrender of half his territories, and British custody of his two sons, one aged eight, the other ten, as surety.
Unexpectedly the indemnity was paid, the sons were reunited with their doting father, and Tipu’s truncated kingdom was restored to an enviable prosperity. In that the Fourth War was so soon in progress, Cornwallis’s boast of having ‘deprived him [Tipu] of the power, and perhaps the inclination, to distract us for many years to come’ would attract ridicule. In fact it was an understatement. Cornwallis’s victory ‘paved the way for British supremacy throughout India’.18 Moreover it did indeed deprive Tipu of
the power to challenge the British; the decision to reopen hostilities for a fourth and last time came entirely from Governor-General Wellesley.
In extenuation much was made of the fact that Napoleon had just landed in Egypt and made no secret of his designs on the British in India. When, therefore, Tipu was discovered to be in correspondence with the French commander at the Île de Bourbon in the Indian Ocean and to have recently received from there a few Jacobin recruits, Wellesley had the pretext he needed. Under cover of an exchange of letters protesting mutual amity between Calcutta and Mysore, he mobilised some forty thousand troops, who were joined by double that number of camp-followers plus the 100,000 bullocks required for the largest ox-drawn baggage and munitions train ever organised.
Meanwhile Wellesley smugly recorded his satisfaction at having ‘drawn the Beast of the jungle [i.e. Tipu] into the toils’. The ‘toils’ barely amounted to a campaign. Compared to the logistical problem of supplying such an invasion, the fighting was something of a formality. It was all over in three months. Srirangapatnam was stormed, then sacked with an ardour that would not have disgraced Attila. Amongst the perhaps nine thousand Mysore dead was found the body of Tipu Sultan. He had been cut about with bayonets, shot twice, and then robbed of his jewelled sword-belt. British casualties totalled fewer than four hundred, mostly just wounded.
The ‘settlement’ which followed left the British unchallenged throughout the peninsula. Mysore was pared down to something not much bigger than the statelet it had been before Haidar Ali’s conquests. This was then awarded to a child of the old Wodeyar dynasty, assisted by a sufficient British presence, and burdened by sufficient British safeguards, to ensure subordination. The British helped themselves to more territory, including the coastline of Karnataka; and in 1800 the other beneficiary, the nizam, helped them to still more. In lieu of the subsidy he was expected to pay for the presence of British troops in his existing territories, he handed over to the Company all those lands awarded to him in Mysore. Thanks to this arrangement, the nizams would enjoy British protection at no expense, plus great personal affluence if rather less power, for the next 150 years.
THE MARATHAS MANAGED
India thus entered the nineteenth century with an unusual political configuration. Regions which had normally enjoyed immunity from outside interference, like the south and east, were directly or indirectly under foreign rule, while the usually more vulnerable west and north remained under indigenous regimes. These latter regimes were numerous. In another reversal of roles it was the playing fields of empire in the north which were now subdivided into a patchwork of political lots. They included the numerous rajput states in Rajasthan and elsewhere, various Indo-Afghan enclaves like Rohilkand, Muslim amirates and chieftaincies in Sind and on the frontier, and some newer caste-based hegemonies of uncertain extent like that established by Jat cultivators in the Agra region, plus a closely related tangle of Jat-Sikh and non-Sikh states in the Panjab.
Then there were the Marathas. Collectively they controlled much the most territory, the most revenue and the most forces. For a time in the early decades of the eighteenth century they had also acted collectively. But by 1740 the big Maratha families had begun to peel away. In a decentralising process similar to that which had overtaken the Mughal empire, the Holkars of Indore, Scindias of Gwalior, Gaikwads of Baroda and Bhonsles of Nagpur continued to recognise the authority of the peshwa-ship in Pune while treating individual peshwas as fellow leaders whose sanction, though desirable, was not an essential asset.
Given the loosely confederate nature of Maratha power and the spread of Maratha operations to practically the entire subcontinent, it was perhaps inevitable that each would in time respond more to local opportunities and challenges. The Maratha incursions into Orissa and Bengal which had so tested Nawab Alivardi Khan in the 1740s and had prompted construction of Calcutta’s ‘Maratha Ditch’ were the work of the Bhonsles of Nagpur. The peshwa objected and even sent his own troops to Bengal to oppose the Bhonsle incursions. Thereafter Nagpur would often defy Pune and, much preoccupied with extorting revenue in Orissa and along its common frontier with the nizam, would play a marginal role in joint Maratha operations.
In the following decade other Marathas, particularly Malhar Rao Holkar of Indore and Jayappa Scindia soon of Gwalior, took advantage of succession disputes amongst the rajputs to extend their revenue claims in Rajasthan. In 1752–3 they again intervened in the chaotic affairs of Delhi and were a party to the blinding and removal of the then emperor. Further Maratha expansion saw Raghunath Rao, the brother of the peshwa Balaji Baji Rao (son of Baji Rao I), pushing into the Panjab in the wake of the Afghan withdrawal after Ahmed Shah Abdali’s plunder of Delhi in 1756. In Lahore as in Delhi, the Marathas were now major players, while far away in the Deccan a defeat of the nizam in 1760 left the peshwas at Pune secure in possession of their Maharashtrian homeland.
Indeed 1760 is taken to mark ‘the zenith of Mahratta power’. Freezing the moment for all its glory, James Grant Duff, author of the classic nineteenth-century History of the Mahrattas, seems to pay unintentional homage to the imagery of those fulsome dynastic inscriptions of an earlier age.
The pre-eminence to which the Mahrattas had attained was animating and glorious; their right to tribute was acknowledged on the banks of the Coleroon [the lower Kaveri in Tamil Nadu], and the Deccan horse had quenched their thirst from the waters of the Indus. The Mahratta people felt a pride in the conquests of their countrymen … 19
The moment was short-lived. Before the year was out the peshwa’s general, fresh from his victory over the nizam, led the main Maratha army north to meet the threat posed by the reinvading Abdali. Abdali could count on the support of fellow Afghans, like the Rohillas, and had also won over the powerful (and then still independent) Nawab of Awadh. On the other hand Holkar, the Scindia family and other Maratha chiefs dutifully joined the swelling army of the peshwa. Well equipped with artillery, and with Duff’s ‘Deccan horse’ looking especially splendid, this was the largest and most magnificent force ever assembled by the Marathas. In an age when sectarian loyalties rarely transcended political advantage, it might even have passed for a Hindu host had the hoped-for support of coreligionists like the rajputs and Jats materialised.
Notwithstanding, Delhi was retaken and the Marathas moved on up the Jamuna. On 14 January 1761 at Panipat, a hundred kilometres north of the capital and the scene, like nearby Karnal, Tarain and Kurukshetra, of so many decisive battles, they finally engaged the main Afghan army. For a few hours the Marathas seemed to prevail. Then in time-honoured fashion Abdali introduced his ten thousand reserve cavalry. As he told it in a letter to Raja Madho Singh of Jaipur, ‘Suddenly the breeze of victory began to blow and, as willed by the Divine Lord, the wretched Deccanis suffered utter defeat … Forty to fifty thousand troopers and infantrymen of the enemy became as grass before our pitiless swords.’20
As was his wont, Abdali soon withdrew again; as was their wont, bands of Sikh irregulars preyed on his treasure-laden convoys as they lumbered home across the Panjab. Such tactics had traditionally been those of the Marathas; had they preferred them to formal confrontation on the pitch of Panipat, they might have fared better. The Maratha leaders would quickly recoup their losses, reassert their authority in regions previously under their control, and reclaim their revenue rights in others, like the rajput states. But the prestige of the peshwa was seriously damaged by Panipat. The incumbent Balaji Baji Rao collapsed a few weeks later, supposedly of a broken heart. Although his young successor, Madhava Rao, briefly restored some authority, when he died prematurely in 1772 there began a succession crisis of mind-boggling complexity which lasted for a generation and would drain the office of much power. The Mughal emperor, his own office long since drained of power, had fared no better; Panipat left him a dependant of the Nawab of Awadh. And as for the nawab himself, the only Indian prince to emerge from the battle a winner, he was humbled five years later by the British at Baksar.
In retrospect it is often asserted that the British were the real winners from the great tourney of Panipat. But this was not obvious at the time, and throughout the next two decades the Company’s policy remained that of ‘ring-fencing’ Bengal and their other settlements with amenable buffer states capable of absorbing the still formidable impact of Maratha muscle. The Company’s London directors had been deeply critical of the military expenditure incurred by the likes of Clive and Munro in Bengal and Awadh. Financial retrenchment was ordered, and to Warren Hastings in the 1770s the avoidance of Maratha attentions was crucial.
In a rare display of unanimity both the governor-general and his council therefore denounced the local alliance of 1775 which precipitated the First Anglo – Maratha War as ‘unreasonable, impolitic, unjust and unauthorised’. It was unauthorised because the government of Bombay had concluded it without consulting its superior in Calcutta, unjust because it was no business of the British to blunder into the labyrinthine succession dispute over the peshwa-ship, impolitic because it flew in the face of Hastings’ hands-off policy, and unreasonable because Bombay lacked the means to fulfil its share in the venture. The First Maratha War was not, then, a sequel to Panipat nor another assault on Maratha hegemony. An untidy affair with as many treaties as battles, it was more a piece of Bombay mischief.