The chief obstacle in the way of British imperial expansion in India was Tipu Sultan, the combative ruler who occupied the southern gateway to the heart of the continent. He had been humbled by General Cornwallis in 1792, and now a new and more imperious governor-general had arrived, determined to destroy a ruler perceived to be too friendly to French interests and to the ideals of the French Revolution. ‘Citizen’ Tipu had to be overthrown.
Richard Wellesley, Lord Mornington, had become the new ruler of British India in 1797. He was also a man schooled in Ireland, and a civilian politician determined to end the years of pacific manipulation which had sometimes characterised British policy in India. Years later, in 1821, he was to return to Ireland as lord-lieutenant, with a mission to crush the rural resistance that continued after the suppression of the rebellion of 1798. With Wellesley was his younger brother, Colonel Arthur Wellesley, later famous as the Duke of Wellington.
Richard Wellesley ordered his officers in 1798 to prepare their armies to destroy Tipu, and secured support for this task from the Nizam of Hyderabad and his substantial army. Seringapatam came under attack in February 1799 from an army of 4,000 European soldiers and 16,000 sepoys, led by General George Harris, the British commander-in-chief. Yet another veteran of the American wars, Harris had fought in the campaigns against Tipu earlier in the decade. After a preliminary bombardment, a truce was ordered to discuss peace terms.
The terms laid before Tipu by General Harris were infinitely more onerous than those dictated by Cornwallis in 1792, and were clearly intended to be rejected. Tipu was required to give up half of his remaining kingdom, pay an immense fine, and send four of his sons and four of his generals to be kept as hostages by the British. Tipu refused to accept.
Battle was renewed, and the final bombardment of the fortress began on 4 May. Tipu himself died in the battle. In the scrum, as the British troops poured into the city, an attendant saved himself by creeping beneath Tipu’s palanquin. He crawled out, faint and wounded, ‘to show where his dead master lay. Corpse after corpse was lifted and passed out for examination under the ghastly torchlight until at last the body was found of a man. . . which the attendants recognised to be that of Tipu Sultan.’
Tipu was buried beside his father, Haidar Ali Khan, with ceremonial salutes and an escort of the British Grenadiers. A thunderstorm of unusual violence burst over Seringapatam that day, killing two officers of the Bombay army. The dynasty of Haidar Ali had come to an end, and the troops broke loose that night to pillage and plunder.1
Command of the city was secured the following morning by Colonel Arthur Wellesley. ‘By the greatest exertion’, he wrote in a letter to his mother, ‘by hanging, flogging, etc, I restored order among the troops.’ Tipu’s possessions were sold at an improvised auction and the army eventually received a million pounds in treasure and jewels as prize money; the gilded tiger’s head from the Sultan’s throne was sent to the British monarch at Windsor Castle. One bizarre item, discovered in Tipu’s ‘music room’, was a ‘musical tyger’. This was, a London paper recorded,
A most curious piece of mechanism, as large as life, representing a royal tyger in the act of devouring a prostrate European officer. . . There are some barrels in imitation of an organ within the body of the tyger, and a row of keys of natural notes. The sounds produced by the organ are intended to resemble the cries of a person in distress, intermixed with the horrid roar of the tyger. The machinery is so contrived that while the organ is playing, the hand of the European is often lifted up to express the agony of his helpless and deplorable condition.2
The British claimed that the mechanical tiger attacking the officer was proof of Tipu’s ‘deep hate and extreme loathing’ towards them.3 Certainly Tipu had good reason for such a view, shared by many of those who disliked the British presence in India. It was said that he had commissioned the piece and designed it himself, and gazed at it every afternoon.4 The tiger was taken to London and displayed in the East India Company’s museum. Eventually, later in the century, it found sanctuary in the Victoria and Albert Museum.
The British capture of the tiger symbolised the crushing of Tipu’s Muslim dynasty in Mysore. This meant more than the mere division of his territory; it was a flrst step towards the establishment of British authority in southern India. Mysore was soon to be used by the British as a springboard for moving into the territories of the Marathas to the north.
In June 1800, Doondia Wao, known as ‘King of the Two Worlds’, watched as British soldiers advanced on his fortress at Bednore, in the north of Mysore. Doondia Wao appears in the annals of the British conquerors as a ‘brigand’, and is little more than a footnote in the career of Britain’s Duke of Wellington, then still Colonel Wellesley. The campaign against him was to forge Wellington’s formidable reputation as a soldier, but the greatest British soldier of his age did not have everything his own way. Doondia Wao outwitted him for several months.
Formerly a soldier in the Mysore army of Haidar Ali, Doondia had become an independent rebel leader. ‘His extraordinary resourcefulness, boldness, and address’, noted one contemporary, had been found ‘highly useful by those he served.’ Deserting from Tipu’s service in the early 1790s, during Cornwallis’s campaigns in Mysore, Doondia created his own rebel band, operating from a base in the district of Darwar. He was recaptured by Tipu’s soldiers and detained at Seringapatam. There, as was the custom with Tipu’s captives, he was converted to Islam. Escaping from prison during the great storm on the day of Tipu’s funeral, he was joined by other veterans of Tipu’s army, and established himself as the ruler of Bednore. As such, he was a clear threat to the hegemony of the new British rulers.
Great confusion and disorder in Mysore followed in the wake of Tipu’s death. No Indian ruler had illusions about what lay ahead. The British were in an expansionist mood. Indian princes had to decide whether to accept the bribes the British offered to join their camp, or to resist. Many rulers paused before making a final decision, leaving small armies of leaderless men to roam through the territories of southern India that the British had nominally acquired. If a suitable leader emerged, either British or Indian, such men could be formed into a formidable resistance force. It was a time when ‘any man possessed of a bold heart and a discerning brain might hope to carve out a kingdom for himself’, wrote Colonel John Biddulph a century later.5 Britain’s Wellington was just such a man, yet so was Doondia. Aged about sixty in 1800, Doondia was a competent and popular guerrilla commander. A chief promising plunder could command a following that might eventually grow into an army. This was the strategy of the Indian resistance as well as that of the British.
With the destruction of Seringapatam, the British were anxious both to explore new territory and to mop up the resistance. Doondia was attacked in July 1799, and his district was occupied after much slaughter. Doondia himself escaped, to return in strength the following year. His army was said to number 40,000 men, and increased as it marched, wrote Wellington, like a snowball.
Doondia, wrote a later historian, ‘was well served by the local population, imparting him correct [and] timely information of the plans and movements of his pursuers’.6 This further challenge to British rule could not be allowed to go unchecked. Wellington was ordered by the governor-general to hunt him down, and to hang him from the nearest tree. A vast army was assembled at Chitteldroog.
Doondia retreated into the neighbouring territory of the Marathas, for Wellington’s army had greater discipline and firepower. He was pursued to Bednore, where the fort was stormed. Some 500 of his men were slaughtered.
Doondia escaped, as he had done so often before; but eventually, in September, he was cornered and killed at Bhanu, near Bellary. Doondia had survived as an independent challenger to the British for more than a year, and his name was to live on. During the Maratha resistance in the Deccan over the next twenty years, other rebels, basking in reflected glory, sometimes gave themselves the name of Doondia Wao.
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