While the affair with Khair un-Nissa dominated James’s private life, his official time was fully occupied with coordinating the Hyderabad end of Lord Wellesley’s war with Tipu Sultan.
James’s task was to help keep the massive Company army supplied with sheep and grain, horses and carriage bullocks, a particularly important job now that Tipu had resorted to scorched-earth tactics in the hope of starving the advancing British army into retreat. James also tried to encourage Aristu Jah to send more cash for his sepoys’ salaries, as well as further reinforcements to the front. In the former logistical task he had some success; but cash and reinforcements were not to be had, and the more he pressed the wily Minister on the matter, the more the ‘perverse’ Aristu Jah fobbed him off, often quickly changing the conversation to his greatest passion, cockfighting.
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By April James seems to have come to the conclusion that the most likely way to get anything out of the Minister was to hold out the offer of some prime English fighting cocks as long as Aristu Jah would commit some of his élite Paigah cavalry units to the war effort in return: ‘The Minister is passionately fond of game cocks and very desirous of getting some English ones of the true game breed,’ he wrote urgently to William a month after the Hyderabad forces set off on the road to Mysore. ‘Are any of this kind to be had at Madras?’
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News from the front indicated that the campaign was about to reach its climax. By early April, General Harris had already taken several key forts, and Tipu had been forced to retreat within the great walls of Seringapatam. With only thirty-seven thousand troops, he was heavily outnumbered by the allies, but he remained a formidable enemy. In the three Anglo-Mysore Wars that had preceded the current conflict, the Mysore forces had frequently defeated the East India Company, and 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 after the disastrous British defeat at Pollilur in 1780—‘the most grievous disaster which has yet befallen the British arms in India’, as a contemporary called it at the time.
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ct
Tactically the Mysore forces were fully the match of those of the East India Company, and Tipu’s sepoys were every bit as well trained by their French officers as those of the Company were by theirs; and the steely discipline of the Mysore infantry amazed and worried many British observers.
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Moreover the sepoys’ rifles and cannon were based on the latest French designs, and their artillery had a heavier bore and longer range than anything possessed by the Company’s armies. Indeed in many respects the Mysore troops were more innovative and technologically advanced than the Company armies: firing rockets from their camel cavalry to disperse hostile cavalry, for example, long before William Congreve’s rocket system was adopted by the British army.
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More worrying still for Wellesley, the defences of Seringapatam were designed by French engineers on the latest scientific principles, following Sébastian de Vauban’s research into artillery-resistant fortification designs, as adapted by the Marquis de Montalembert in his book
La Fortification Perpendiculaire.
cu
These provided the most up-to-date defences that the eighteenth century could offer, and took into account the newly increased firepower of cannon, bombs and mines, as well as the latest developments in tactics for storming and laying siege to forts.
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By mid-April the siege of Seringapatam had begun, and Tipu was showing every sign of resisting with his characteristic ingenuity and tenacity. As one British observer 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 élite forces, dressed in tiger-striped uniforms] to advance, and pour in galling vollies of musketry.’
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It was a brave and skilful defence. But by 3 May, after the guns of the Nizam’s contingent had been brought up to within 350 yards of the weakest west corner of the walls, a substantial breach was made, and Harris set the following day for the assault.
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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, who had spent forty-four months in Tipu’s dungeons, roused himself and gave his troops ‘a cheering dram and a biscuit’. He then drew his sword, jumped out of the trench and led a storming party—which included two hundred of Mir Alam’s best Hyderabadi sepoys—over the River Cauvery and straight 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. Within a few hours the city was in British hands. Baird was later taken to Tipu’s body by one of his courtiers. It lay amid a heap of dead and wounded, with three bayonet wounds and a shot through the head. Tipu’s eyes were open and the body was so warm that for a few moments, in the torchlight, Baird wondered whether the Sultan was still alive; but feeling his pulse, he declared him dead.
cv
Already the Mysore casualties hugely outnumbered those of the allies: some nine thousand of Tipu’s troops were dead, as opposed to around 350 of the Company and Hyderabadi sepoys. But that night the city of Seringapatam, home to a hundred thousand 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 on the morning of the 5th and with the greatest exertion, by hanging, flogging etc etc in the course of that day I restored order …
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The prize committee, whose job it was to distribute the booty, began to collect what was left of Tipu’s possessions and the contents of his treasury: around £1.1 million of gold plate, jewellery, palanquins, the Sultan’s solid-gold tiger throne, arms and armour, silks and shawls—‘everything that power could command or money could purchase’.
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It was nearly a fortnight later, on 17 May, that one of James’s
harkaras
cw
finally galloped into Hyderabad with the news of the great victory. James’s confidential
munshi,
or Private Secretary, Aziz Ullah, was already on his way
to the Durbar to pay his respects to the Minister and His Highness on the occasion of the Feast of Sacrifices [
Bakra ’Id
]. He immediately took with him the substance of the News, and upon him communicating it to the Nizam and Solomon [as James dubbed Aristu Jah], the former immediately put a string of his own pearls on the Munshi’s neck, and the latter got up and threw his arms around him. Uzeez Oolah had some difficulty in prevailing on them to postpone a
feu de joye
until I should announce to them the happy event officially, which thank God! I am now enabled to do … [The Nizam] is in prodigious high spirits [and I was welcomed into the old city] … by a continued firing of cannon for an hour together from the walls of the city and of Golcondah.
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It was a great moment, and a vindication of the Anglo-Hyderabadi alliance James had worked so hard to build. But in the sheer scale of the victory and the stupendous quantity of riches seized by the victorious army lay the seeds of much future dissent, not only between the British and the Nizam, and between Aristu Jah and his victorious general Mir Alam, but also between Wellesley and his masters back in London, and, indirectly, between James Kirkpatrick and all these others.
Wilkie Collins’ wonderful Victorian detective story
The Moonstone
opens at the fall of Seringapatam 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 it, before being seized back by its mysterious Hindu guardians.
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The story is of Collins’ own invention, and does not pretend to be based on fact. Yet strangely enough, the looting of Seringapatam did act like a curse on many of the leading participants in the plunder, and, remarkably, a hoard of diamonds seized from Tipu’s treasury did indeed fatally dog the career of Mir Alam from that moment onwards.
cx
It was a full five months before the victorious Hyderabadi army marched back to Golconda, where it received a heroes’ welcome. On 11 October, according to Abdul Lateef Shushtari, who was in the crowd to greet his cousin, ‘Mir Alam returned to Hyderabad, and the Nizam sent his personal elephant for him to make a triumphal entry. He even ordered the nobility to come 2 or 3
farsakhs
out of the city to greet him.’
cy
Other Hyderabadi accounts confirm this picture: ‘When Mir Alam returned from Seringapatam,’ wrote Ghulam Husain Khan, ‘his fame reached the skies.’
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But beneath the surface, tensions were already beginning to become apparent about Mir Alam’s behaviour after the victory over Tipu. As Shushtari put it, ‘This moment of triumph was also the beginning of his downfall, as courtiers itched with envy and started plotting his downfall.’
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The Mir Alam who returned from Seringapatam was a markedly different figure to the man who had set off nine months earlier. Physically, he was weaker, indeed he had been so ill in Madras that his formal audience with Lord Wellesley had had to be delayed, and some even thought he was dying.
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This severe sickness was the first sign that he had caught the leprosy that would slowly eat away at him over the next decade. But for all his ill-health, the Mir had a new self-confidence—even a distinct arrogance—about him. The spectacular victory over Tipu, the close friendships he had forged with the senior British commanders, and his meeting with Lord Wellesley had all combined to give him a new sense that his rapid rise to power was firmly backed by the Company, and rumours quickly began to spread that he was now intent on overthrowing his old master Aristu Jah, who had irritated the Company officials in Calcutta by his lack of urgency in sending reinforcements and funds to the front in Mysore. Certainly, James noticed a big change in Mir Alam’s manner, and soon wrote to William that ‘the whole train of MA’s conduct from the time of his return to Hyderabad has been a heap of inconsistencies & improprieties, and I really believe that his Lordships distinguished reception of him has turned his head’.
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Nor was James the only one to be offended by the Mir’s behaviour. Even before his triumphant return, on 14 September, James had reported that the Nizam was ‘extremely out of humour if not deeply irritated with Meer Allum who has I believe more enemies than friends in the Mahl [
zenana
]’.
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This was an ominous development, for as James well understood, the Nizam’s women—especially the two senior wives, Bakshi Begum and Tînat un-Nissa Begum—had a great deal of influence over the professional life expectancy of the Nizam’s advisers and ministers. If they had taken against Mir Alam, then the Mir had cause to worry. But it seems that in the flush of his success he simply did not notice the effect his behaviour was having.
The Nizam and Aristu Jah did in fact both have several good reasons to be exasperated with Mir Alam. Firstly, they were deeply upset with the way that after the victory in May, Tipu’s dominions had been carved up by the victorious British. The British feared that the Marathas would be seriously alarmed if the Nizam and the British simply divided Tipu’s vast territory between them, thus hugely increasing their power and resources, to the obvious detriment of the Marathas, who had refused to participate in the campaign and were therefore unentitled to any share of the spoils. So a committee which included William Kirkpatrick had come up with an ingenious—if distinctly dishonourable—way of dividing up the state of Mysore without either enraging the Marathas or giving what the British considered to be too much land and power to the Nizam.
Instead of a simple two-way division of Mysore, the British Partition Committee had eventually decided to give relatively modest chunks of land to themselves and the Nizam, while awarding the lion’s share to the ancient Hindu Wadyar dynasty of Mysore, whose lands Tipu’s father had conquered and whose Rajah he had displaced. The British made sure, however, that the newly reinstated Mysore Rajah would be utterly beholden to his British donors, thus gaining firm indirect control of the land they were purportedly giving back to its rightful former owners. Lord Wellesley thought this a brilliant solution; but the Nizam was appalled, and quite understandably thought that as he had provided half the army which had defeated Tipu, he should by right be rewarded with half the winnings. He was especially angry when he discovered that Mir Alam had weakly agreed to the division, and put his own seal to the Partition Treaty rather than sending it on to the Nizam for his formal ratification.
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The Nizam’s anger with Mir Alam was increased still further when it emerged that the Mir had at the same time accepted a ‘very munificent pension’ from Wellesley—a monthly allowance which the Nizam and Aristu Jah suspected was more a reward for his feeble acquiescence in this dubious Partition Treaty than for any help he had afforded during the campaign.
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