History – Tipu Sultan – {Ep.240}

A story from History about Tipu Sultan, the Tiger of Mysore, who struck terror in the hearts of the British during the four Anglo-Mysore wars, with advanced rocket technology!

Welcome to “Stories From India”. This is a podcast that will take you on a journey through the rich mythology, folklore and history of the Indian subcontinent. I am Narada Muni, the celestial storyteller and the original “time lord”. With my ability to travel through space and time, I can bring you fascinating stories from the past, the present, and the future. From the epic tales of the Mahabharata and Ramayana to the folktales of the Panchatantra to stories of Akbar-Birbal and Tenali Raman, I have a story for every occasion.

The purpose of the stories is neither to pass judgment nor to indoctrinate. My goal is only to share these stories with people who may not have heard them before and to make them more entertaining for those who have.

Today’s Story

In this episode, we’re talking about the Tiger of Mysore. Tipu Sultan. The title of Tiger was not lightly earned. And you’ll see why Tipu deserved it.

The story begins in 1767, with a British soldier talking to the ruler of the state of Hyderabad. I know what you’re thinking. Hyderabad is a city. Or maybe even two cities, if you count the one in Pakistan.

Colonel Joseph Smith of the British East India Company sat sipping tea with Nizam Ali Khan, the Nizam of Hyderabad. Smith was explaining a recent battle.

“My dear old Nizam, you had to be there to see it. You know these Marathas, they’re like Ninjas don’t you know. They jump out of  the shadows and hold their swords to your neck before you could say Jack Robinson”

The Nizam wondered who Jack Robinson was, and whether it was a tradition amongst the British to invoke his name. Being polite though, he said nothing. Instead he asked who the rascals had got this time.

“Hyder Ali, the ruler of Mysore,” was the reply.

This puzzled the Nizam. He was getting older, but he could distinctly remember that the ruler of Mysore was not Hyder Ali. It was some guy named Woodcar, or Yarwood or something.

“Wodeyar” Joseph Smith clarified. “And he still is, but I mean he also isn’t if you follow my drift. What I meant to say, my dear Nizam, is that Wodeyar is just a figurehead. Hyder Ali, the military commander, pulls all the strings.”

Again, the Nizam was confused but decided not to interrupt to ask what strings. Just as well.

Joseph Smith was going on with his story. “But, hang on to your hat, Nizam! What happened next between the Marathas and Hyder Ali will shock you!”

Despite the clickbait-like commentary the Nizam was hooked. John Smith was now describing how the Marathas had invaded the Mysore Kingdom, and threatened to make things worse, unless Hyder Ali paid them. Apparently, this was the marathas’ M.O. for quickly making a pretty indecent pile of money. This strategy played on Hyder Ali’s psychology. Surely he didn’t want war. War would cost him much more than the 18 lakh rupees he could pay instead. Hyder Ali coughed up the money and the Marathas went back their merry way. The whole interaction was rather reminiscent of the bully Moe taking Calvin’s lunch money.

Joseph Smith insisted that the Nizam should give this a try, and he might coerce some money out of Hyder Ali too. “Mysore rulers hate this one weird trick!” the colonel added for good measure.

Nizam Ali Khan was too polite to refuse, especially when Joseph Smith had his soldiers accompany the Nizam’s soldiers into battle.

That was the first Anglo-Mysore war. Tipu Sultan thought that calling it the Hyder-Hyderabad war would make for a more catchy and memorable title. Besides why call it the First Anglo-Mysore war. It’s almost like everyone expected a second, a third and a fourth to follow.

Tipu Sultan was just 16 but he was commanding a section of the cavalry. True, being the son of the commander in chief must have helped in landing that job. But no one had any cause for complaint. The boy proved ferocious in battle. Even then, people nicknamed him a tiger, which only led to confusion amongst the British, who had never known tigers to ride horseback. And given that he’d identified his name (at least in one case) as “Nawab Tipu Sultan Fateh Ali Khan”, and because Shere is the hindi word for Tiger, you could say that Tipu Sultan was the original “Shere Khan.”

Anyway, back to the war. The odds were badly stacked against Hyder Ali’s forces, and to make things worse, British troops from Bombay attacked Mysore from the west. Call it a pincer movement from the sneaky British. Though Colonel Joseph Smith would have been proud of how the British troops were acting, he might have hated to be reminded of the 21 ways that Hyder Ali’s troops outsmarted him, and number 9 amazed him!

Because, to everyone’s surprise, perhaps including Hyder Ali’s own, the British were beaten. The Nizam withdrew his troops from battle. He hadn’t seen the point in this battle. It’s not like he needed to extort money anyway, never mind whether or not the Marathas wanted to keep playing that trick.

Hyder Ali’s troops were at the gates of Madras, which made many of the British very nervous. What awaited them was a certain defeat, and there was no way to get out of this. Maybe they would even have to leave the country forever. But on the off-chance, their stellar negotiator proposed a truce. Which to everyone’s shock was readily accepted! 

This was the Treaty of Madras. Hyder Ali really wanted a clause built into the treaty where each  side would rush to the help of the other in battle. But the British insisted on doing this in defense only. Not to invade other places.

And with that, the status quo ante bellum was restored. Meaning everyone went back to the positions they were in before all this happened. Many people thought it was a waste of effort.

As it turns out it was worse than that. The treaty of Madras meant that when Mysore went into war with the Marathas a couple of years later, Haider Ali was counting on help from the British. But that help never came. The British complained about some frivolous technicality. That the treaty hadn’t been specific enough or something.

That angered Hyder Ali, and his tiger cub of a son. And that may have been a factor in the second Anglo-Mysore war.

A second factor a few years later was that the British attacked Mahe, which was a part of the region of Puducherry. This was a French colony, and Tipu, an ally of the French, had placed it under his own protection. To have the British conquer it was the equivalent of someone stealing a Tiger’s kill from under its very nose.

The response was quick. This time Tipu was determined to drive the British out of Madras. There were multiple battles, and not even Hyder Ali’s passing in 1782 slowed Tipu down.

It wasn’t just personal ferocity that Tipu demonstrated when in battle. He had a not-so-secret weapon in battle. Rockets. Mysorean rocketry was not new, but it flourished under him.

Tipu invested heavily in building more and more rockets with a longer range than ever before. 

Tipu had set up R&D labs in Bangalore and this is where most of the research really took off. You could say it was the launching pad for the best and brightest minds. Tipu’s rocket scientists were as smart as, well… rocket scientists. They built a rocket launcher that could fire 6 rockets at practically the same time. It is not an exaggeration by any means to say that Mysorean rockets were far more advanced technology than any similar weapon the British had come up with.

The demand for rocket scientists, well… skyrocketed. The R&D lab staged a few demonstrations of their work, and watching those test rockets take off was so uplifting. Not just for the rocket physically, but for the soldiers’ morale. 

Rumor had it that the latest project from these rocket scientists was a rocket that could eat another rocket mid-flight. They called it a cannibalistic rocket. 

All that is to say, the British were on the backfoot against superior technology. When multiple rockets were fired at them from different angles, the British Army were overwhelmed by the space jam resulting from all that rocket traffic above their heads.

The outcome of the war was again similar to the first Anglo-Mysore war. Tipu agreed to a status quo ante bellum, which meant everything returned back to just the way it was before the war. On second thoughts, not everything. A few things. Actually make that just one thing – only the borders between these places returned to what they were. 

British reputation took a massive hit after their utter humiliation in this war. That might puzzle you. They did get back their territories, didn’t they? So what was the problem?

The problem was that they had to exit the war on Tipu’s terms, which amounts to defeat. Especially after Hyder Ali passed away, Mysore should have been a pushover, but it wasn’t. 

One particular thing that happened was that during the signing of the treaty, the Commissioner of the Madras Presidency had to travel all the way to Mangalore on the other coast to sign the treaty. If the same thing had happened in the 21st century, the signatory might think to themselves, “Hey, business trip! Time to earn an insane number of reward points from hotels and flights.” But no such perks in 1784.

This was bad. It was a lot worse than just this war. Because just months before the British had lost the American revolutionary war.

You could easily imagine the elderly British aristocrat clucking their tongues and telling their stockbroker to sell all their holdings of the British East India company. Stock prices took a nose-dive. This was supposed to be the beginning of the end of British presence in India.

That worried the British government. They couldn’t let the East India company fail. It represented a sixth of the entire British income. Via Pitt’s India act, the British government took direct control of affairs in India. And the way they did that was by appointing Charles Cornwallis as the Commander in chief of British India.

Cornwallis, who was a British bigwig. He was coming off of another defeat. On the other side of the world, he had surrendered to American Revolutionaries. And yet he retained enough of the government’s confidence to be appointed to take charge of British India.

He explained his strategy to his officers.

“Tipu Sultan is just a flash in the pan. Right now, he may soar high like one of his rockets, but soon he’ll fall like a stick.

All we have to do is to pit the Peshwas against Mysore, Hyderabad against the French, pit Travancore against Mysore and against the French, the Sikh against Mysore, and Bob’s your uncle! Good old Divide and Rule!

“Didn’t work so well in the Battle of Yorktown did it?” thought the soldiers, but no one dared to say a word. Cornwallis was probably off his rocker.

But on this occasion, Cornwallis was right. Divide and rule worked, unfortunately for Mysore.

In 1790 Tipu Sultan invaded the Kingdom of Travancore which was a British ally.

Cornwallis responded by attacking Mysore from all sides. The Peshwas, Hyderabad, Travancore, and multiple sets of British troops attacked Mysore from all directions, and all at once. Tipu had to surrender half his kingdom to all the vultures that had gathered for the spoils. For the Tiger of Mysore, this was a Catastrophe.

Besides giving up territory he had to pay a huge amount of money as “war damages.” And until he did, his two young sons – aged 10 and 8 years, were held captive.

It took a while to raise that kind of money the British were expecting, but Tipu managed it finally. And in the meantime he had become pen-pals with another ruler who had also rocketed into history books. Napoleon Bonaparte. Tipu sought French help to throw off British rule. Napoleon was more than willing to provide it, and his motives weren’t all altruistic.

The French had designs on India’s rich natural resources, just as the British did.

But help did not arrive, Napoleon was himself tied up with fighting the British on the Nile, and dealing with the consequences of his loss. The British attacked Mysore again, beginning the Fourth Anglo Mysore war. Again, they were supported by the state of Hyderabad, which had almost become a recurring sidekick in this series of Anglo-Mysorean wars.

An accident worsened Tipu’s already weak position, when a rocket failed to launch properly. I guess it had thrust issues. It didn’t get fired for not doing its job properly. Instead it hit a pile of unlaunched rockets. The result was a horrific mess.

Tipu went through the roof but what could he do? He was being met with an overwhelming force. The might of the British empire passionate about crushing his spirit, by crushing his empire.

Tipu Sultan’s stronghold in Seringapatam was surrounded. Tipu had a chance to escape – thanks to an early warning from a French spy. But he chose not to escape. He famously said – “I’d rather live one day as a tiger, than a thousand years as a sheep” which you could say was a condensed version of William Wallace’s speech from Braveheart.

But Tipu was shot and killed and that ended the war. Krishnaraja Wodeyar the third.

When he got the news of Tipu’s death, General George Harris of the British Raj, not to be confused with the beatle, George Harrison, exclaimed “India is ours”. Quite in contrast to George Harrison who discovered a kinship with the people of India

Once the British got their hands on Mysorean rocket technology, they adapted it of course. The Congreve rocket used in the Napoleonic wars was based on designs from Mysore. The catch is that the rocket had not been patented. So, Sir William Congreve did with it what he pleased.

That’s all for now

Next Time

In the next episode, we’ll do another Singhasan Battisi story, as Raja Bhoj takes another step towards the throne.

Feedback

Thank you all for the comments on Social Media and on Spotify’s Q&A! I can’t directly reply to the questions there, but I’ll address them here on this show.

Thank you Sakshi, Ridhi, Shiv, and Deepti for your comments.

MCKS – absolutely, yes. I can do more stories like the Akbar Birbal one. Let me know if you have a specific one in mind.

Deepti, love that you are a fellow Vishnu fan! Ramayana episode will come up soon. At this point, we only have a few stories remaining to tell from the main storyline of this great epic.

Ckgk – great idea on including a question in the poll to quiz you listeners. I’ll look to start something soon.

Hariprasad, thanks for the feedback!

And I’ll plan on covering Madhawacharya’s story in March. Appreciate the ample heads up.

Bala, thank you for your patience – the asuras and devs story is lined up, and we will get to it soon.

Shalu, thank you as always for the thoughtful feedback. 

In Episode 225, I briefly alluded to the system Draupadi and the Pandavas worked out. But I will explain in a future Mahabharata episode the circumstances here

Deepinjoy, that’s an interesting observation. Yes, it’s been over 4 years and 270 episodes, and I’ve still not really uttered that catchphrase I am popularly associated with. I did explain back in Episode 49 why that is so. Do check it out if you haven’t already.

Samay – thank you for the lovely idea, I’ll certainly look into it.

Moshroom – I am honored! Thank you for the generous praise!

Vishruth, happy Sankranti to you and to all you listeners as well! Ponniyin Selvan is coming up. I am doing some research on it, and I appreciate your patience in the meantime.

Prasanna, thank you for the high praise, and I’m glad I’m able to bring you these stories

Ayra, Singhasan Battisi is indeed coming up next week.

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