India: A History. Revised and Updated (73 page)

Meanwhile Madras, besieged by the French in 1759, had been relieved. The arrival of more British troops also resulted in a hefty French defeat at Wandiwash, and in 1761 Pondicherry itself fell to the British. Although the city was later restored to French rule, the 1763 Treaty of Paris which ended the Seven Years’ War also looked to have ended French ambitions in India.

But if the French
Compagnie
had lost its most important ally and surrogate in Hyderabad, the British soon credited it with another. During the siege of Pondicherry French hopes had briefly soared when a detachment of cavalry under the little-known Haidar Ali Khan had swept past the British to come to the aid of the hard-pressed defence. They departed a month later, dissatisfied; but it was a sign of things to come. From the Mysore region of the southern Deccan two formidable and ferociously anti-British dynasts in the persons of Haidar Ali and his son, Tipu Sultan, were about to pose a direct challenge to British hegemony in the Carnatic. Compared to these new challengers, the over-extended and seldom united Marathas were more an irritation than a threat; they could be ‘ring-fenced’ and then picked off as occasion offered. But in British eyes Mysore was a serious contender, a peninsular rival with the political and military credentials of genuine statehood. Whether or not Mysore was championed by France, it must be defeated.

The so-called ‘kingdom’ of Mysore had been one of the several dependent chieftancies and nayak-ships to survive from the ruins of the Vijayanagar empire. Although vulnerable to the expansionist ambitions of the Deccan sultanates in the seventeenth century and of the Marathas in the eighteenth century, its relations with the Mughal empire had been inconspicuous. Exceptionally, therefore, it was not a legatee of Mughal authority. Unlike, say, Hyderabad or Awadh, it did not correspond to a Mughal province; unlike the rajput and Maratha ruling families, its Wodeyar rulers had not been top-ranking
mansabdars
; and unlike the Nawab-Nizam of Hyderabad, the Nawab of Awadh or the Nawab of Bengal, the Mysore Wodeyars and their successors lacked the stature and legitimacy of high imperial office. If precedents be sought for the relationships on which their kingdom was based and for the economic and geographical factors which
determined its expansion, they lurk in the history of earlier Hindu dynasties in southern Karnataka like the Hoysalas of Belur/Halebid or even the Chalukyas of Badami/Aihole.

Yet the Mysore which confronted the British was not a born-again Hindu kingdom like that which was so self-consciously reconstituted by Shivaji in Maharashtra. For in the 1730s the incumbent Wodeyar raja had been relieved of authority by two brothers, and it was in their service that Haidar Ali Khan, a devout Muslim whose ancestors had fought in the armies of the sultans of Bijapur, rose to prominence. In 1749, while participating in the succession struggle which followed the death of Nizam-ul-Mulk of Hyderabad (the first nizam), Haidar Ali had obtained both considerable wealth and the services of some French deserters. The first enabled him to increase his forces and the second helped train them in European techniques. During the Carnatic Wars he learned more about European tactics and acquired both artillery and French gunners. Thus in 1758, when Mysore was attacked by the Marathas, Haidar Ali was the obvious choice for commander of the Mysore forces. He acquitted himself well and, following a brief trial of strength with the incumbent brothers, had by 1761 become the undisputed ruler of Mysore.
¹³

Meanwhile in Hyderabad the French-installed nizam had been deposed by his brother, Nizam Ali. The latter proposed an assault on Mysore to which the British in Madras, fearful that recent Mysore conquests in Kerala might be repeated in the Carnatic, readily agreed. Unconsciously treading the ancient trail of countless Pallava and Chola armies, an Anglo-Hyderabad expedition duly toiled up to the Deccan plateau and, with this piece of gratuitous and unashamed aggression, the First Mysore War got underway in 1767.

It was the first of four. No one could seriously maintain that the British conquest of India partook of the premeditated. The four Mysore wars, the three Maratha wars and the two Sikh wars, not to mention a host of lesser campaigns, hint at piecemeal policies and uncoordinated direction. They also suggest a willingness on the part of Company officials to disown or disguise aggressive designs and on the part of subsequent British scholarship to diminish the scale of resistance. Where no long-term rationale for conquest was available, the exigencies of the moment provided a compelling logic for only limited mischief. Moreover, many short wars attracted less attention than a few long ones; ideally they were fought and won before London’s usually negative response could reach India. In retrospect they would seem so chronologically jumbled together as to throw all but the more dogged historians off the scent. Premeditation may indeed be discounted; yet a pattern of conquest, a progression of arms, does emerge.
The conquest of Bengal by the Company in Calcutta fuelled the ambitions of its Madras establishment in Mysore; Mysore’s conquest opened the way to intervention in the Maratha territories; and the conquest of the Marathas brought the British up against the Sikhs.

The First Mysore War was chiefly notable as a demonstration of Haidar Ali’s diplomatic and military skills. Having persuaded the nizam to defect, he drove the British back down to the Carnatic, sent his seventeen-year old son Tipu on a flying raid through the stately thoroughfares of Madras itself, and repeated this feat in person in the following year. Most unusually, when peace was concluded in 1769, no territories changed hands and no indemnity was mentioned. For the first time since Child’s ‘Mughal War’ the British had been militarily checked by an Indian regime.

Included in the peace terms of 1769 was a defensive alliance which promised unequivocal British support in the event of an attack on Mysore by a third party. Haidar Ali set great store by this provision and soon had cause to invoke it. When Maratha forces swooped into southern Karnataka and laid siege to his great fort of Srirangapatnam (Seringapatam) near Mysore, he immediately turned to his British allies. They turned away. Haidar repeatedly invoked the defensive alliance, and Madras repeatedly prevaricated. Albion’s perfidy, of which Haidar had no doubt heard from his French employees, was amply demonstrated. He damned the British as ‘the most faithless and usurping of all mankind’ and, if not already rabidly Anglophobe, both father and son now became so.

During the 1770s Haidar’s reputation soared. The Marathas were pushed back and, excluding the nizam’s territories and those of the British and their puppet Nawabs of Arcot and Tanjore, Mysore’s sway came to embrace most of the peninsula south of the Kistna-Tungabhadra rivers. A revival of Anglo–French hostilities in the context of the American War of Independence distracted Madras’s attention and brought Haidar more French arms and recruits. Meanwhile Governor-General Warren Hastings in Calcutta was preoccupied with Anglo–Maratha relations. It was a good moment to strike. Not without ample provocation, Haidar Ali launched the Second Mysore War with a pre-emptive assault on the Carnatic in 1780.

In a distinct escalation, this war involved far more troops, lasted twice as long (1780–4), and was fought on two fronts; while Haidar Ali engaged the Madras forces in the Carnatic, his son Tipu was detached to the Malabar coast in 1782 to oppose an expedition from Bombay. Again the Mysore army impressed, most notably at Polilur (near Kanchipuram) where in 1780 a British relieving force of about four thousand was practically annihilated. Only sixteen of its eighty-six European officers emerged unscathed;
even Hector Munro, the victor of Baksar, had to make an undignified dash for the safety of Madras, abandoning his artillery and baggage in the process. Polilur was the greatest defeat hitherto inflicted on the British by an Indian power. In his new summer palace beside the rushing Kaveri at Srirangapatnam, Tipu celebrated victory by commissioning a wall-to-wall painting of the engagement. It displays a tactical awareness more reminiscent of European battle-scenes than anything in Mughal art.

With Arcot captured and Haidar triumphant throughout the Carnatic, it was now Calcutta’s turn to come to the rescue of Madras. A Company army of five thousand began the long march down the east coast from Bengal to Madras while a smaller force was sent by sea. There followed what Penderel Moon, author of the hefty
The British Conquest and Dominion of India
(1989), rightly calls ‘three and a half years of profitless and uninteresting war’.
¹⁴
The British made gains on the west coast and then lost them. On the east coast, British victories were negated by the greater manoeuvrability of the Mysore forces. In 1782 Haidar Ali died, in 1783 Tipu was enthroned, and in 1784 the Peace of Mangalore again did little more than restore the situation as at the beginning of hostilities.

Tipu blamed his French allies for his failure to win a more convincing victory. Their support in the war had been negligible and their separate peace had been an act of treachery. To further overtures from Pondicherry he therefore replied by insisting on direct dealings with Versailles. In a refreshing reversal of roles, an Indian ruler was about to take the diplomatic game to the court of a European sovereign.

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.