Reference

The Documents

Every page on this site ends with a list of sources. This page goes one step further and hands you the sources themselves: full scans of the primary material, free to read, with a note on what each one was written to do.

Why this page exists

A reference that asks to be trusted should make itself checkable. The books below are the primary evidence for almost everything stated elsewhere on this site, they are all out of copyright, and they are all scanned and readable in full without a login. If a claim here looks wrong to you, you can go to the same page we did.

They are not equally reliable, and none of them is neutral. The shortest way to describe the problem is that most of the surviving record about Tipu Sultan was written either by his own court or by the men who destroyed him, and that both had a case to make.

How to read them

Three questions do most of the work on any document on this page. Who was it written for? Kirmani wrote for a Mysorean readership under British rule; Beatson wrote for a British public that was paying for the war. What did the writer want from the reader? Belief in a dynasty, or belief in a necessary conquest. What did the writer have no reason to invent? Grain prices, distances, the names of officials, the order of events — the incidental detail is usually where the value is.

Mysorean · Written from inside the state

Select Letters of Tippoo Sultan to Various Public Functionaries

Translated and edited by William Kirkpatrick · 1811

What it is: Around four hundred of Tipu Sultan's own letters and orders, captured at Srirangapatna in 1799 and translated by a Company officer who had been Resident at Hyderabad.
Why it matters: This is the closest thing there is to hearing him govern: instructions on revenue, garrisons, rocket-men, grain prices, promotions and punishments, in the register of a ruler who read everything and dictated constantly.
How to read it: Kirkpatrick chose which letters to print, and his footnotes and “observations” argue continuously that the letters prove a tyrant. Read the letters; read the editor's voice as a separate, hostile document sitting on top of them.

Read the full scan →Search inside for his orders on rocket-men →

Mysorean · Written from inside the state

The History of Hydur Naik

Mir Hussein Ali Khan Kirmani, translated by W. Miles · 1842 (written c. 1802)

What it is: The first part of the Mysorean court chronicle — the rise of Haidar Ali, written by a man who served the dynasty, in Persian, for a Mysorean readership.
Why it matters: It is the view from inside the state, and the only substantial narrative of the period that is not written by the winners of the war.
How to read it: Kirmani wrote after the fall, under British rule, and is loyal to the dynasty and elastic about numbers. Its value is in the texture — court procedure, names, motives, the sense of what was normal — rather than in its arithmetic.

Read the full scan →

Mysorean · Written from inside the state

History of the Reign of Tipú Sultán (Nishan-i-Haidari, part two)

Mir Hussein Ali Khan Kirmani, translated by W. Miles · 1864

What it is: The continuation covering Tipu Sultan's own reign to his death, including the court's account of the last siege.
Why it matters: The Mysorean account of the same events the British narratives below describe — including the betrayal at the water gate, which British and Mysorean sources tell very differently.
How to read it: Same cautions as the first part, plus a translator working from a manuscript tradition with variants. Where it conflicts with Beatson on a matter of fact, neither is automatically right.

Read the full scan →

British official · Produced by the Company or its officers on duty

A View of the Origin and Conduct of the War with Tippoo Sultaun

Alexander Beatson · 1800

What it is: The official account of the 1799 war, written by an officer on the staff and published within a year, with an appendix of captured correspondence and official papers.
Why it matters: It is the Company's own justification for the war, published while the justification was still needed — and its appendix prints documents whose originals are scattered or lost.
How to read it: The narrative is a legal brief for a pre-emptive war and should be read as one. The appendix is far more valuable than the argument it was assembled to support.

Read the full scan →

British narrative · Written by a participant for a British readership

A Narrative of the Campaign in India which Terminated the War with Tippoo Sultan in 1792

Major Alexander Dirom · 1793

What it is: An eyewitness account of the third war by Cornwallis's deputy adjutant-general, covering the siege of Srirangapatna, the peace negotiations, and the surrender of the two hostage princes.
Why it matters: The best contemporary description of how the 1792 settlement was actually negotiated, day by day — and of the hostage episode that British history painting then made famous.
How to read it: Dirom admires his own commander and is generous to Tipu Sultan mainly where generosity makes the victory larger. He is nonetheless describing things he watched.

Read the full scan →Search inside for the definitive treaty →

British narrative · Written by a participant for a British readership

Historical Sketches of the South of India

Colonel Mark Wilks · 1810–1817

What it is: The first full history of Mysore in English, by the British Resident at the restored Wodeyar court, drawing on Mysorean records he had access to as Resident.
Why it matters: It set the framework nearly every later English account followed, and it preserves material from Mysorean sources that has since disappeared.
How to read it: Wilks is the origin of a great deal of the standard hostile characterisation, written by the official of the government that replaced the one he is describing. Treat his facts as evidence and his judgements as an interested party's.

Read the full scan →

British official · Produced by the Company or its officers on duty

A Journey from Madras through the Countries of Mysore, Canara and Malabar

Francis Buchanan · 1807

What it is: A commissioned survey of the conquered territory, made in 1800–1801: crops, irrigation, manufactures, castes, trade, prices, village by village.
Why it matters: It is the most detailed picture that exists of the economy Tipu Sultan actually ran, recorded within a year or two of the state's destruction. Almost every modern account of Mysore's agriculture and industry rests on it.
How to read it: Buchanan was surveying an asset for its new owners, and his informants had every reason to describe the old regime as the new one wished to hear. The measurements are far more reliable than the opinions attached to them.

Read the full scan →

Treaty texts · The agreements themselves

A Collection of Treaties, Engagements and Sanads, Vol. IX: Hyderabad, Mysore and Coorg

C. U. Aitchison · 1909 edition

What it is: The official compilation of treaty texts, including the settlements that bracket Tipu Sultan's reign and the 1799 partition of his kingdom, with its schedules of who took which districts.
Why it matters: The treaties are where the wars stop being narrative and become terms: territory, indemnity, hostages. The 1799 schedules show the dismemberment of the state as an administrative list.
How to read it: Aitchison prints the British text of each agreement. Persian and Marathi versions did not always say quite the same thing, and the compilation's purpose was to establish what was in force, not to preserve what was superseded.

Read the full scan →Search inside for the 1799 partition schedules →

The documents that are not here

Three sources this site relies on heavily cannot be linked in the same way, and it is more useful to say so than to pretend the record is uniformly open.

The Fathul Mujahidin, Tipu Sultan's military code, and the Mysorean Revenue Regulations in Burrish Crisp's 1792 translation, exist in scattered and often poor digitisations rather than one clean public scan; this site works from the printed editions and quotes them with clause references. The dream register survives in Mahmud Husain's modern translation, which is in copyright and should be bought or borrowed rather than found on a file-sharing site.

What each of them contains, and what this site takes from them, is set out on The Fathul Mujahidin, Revenue & Agriculture and The Dream Register.

The scholarship built on them

Reading primary sources without the modern critical literature is how people end up repeating 1800. The editorial method of this site, the works of Mohibbul Hasan and Irfan Habib that it follows, and the rules it uses when sources conflict are set out in Sources & Method.

Sources for this page

William Kirkpatrick (trans.), Select Letters of Tippoo Sultan (1811).
Mir Hussein Ali Khan Kirmani, The History of Hydur Naik (trans. W. Miles, 1842) and History of the Reign of Tipú Sultán (trans. W. Miles, 1864).
Alexander Beatson, A View of the Origin and Conduct of the War with Tippoo Sultaun (1800).
Alexander Dirom, A Narrative of the Campaign in India which Terminated the War with Tippoo Sultan in 1792 (1793).
Mark Wilks, Historical Sketches of the South of India (1810–17).
Francis Buchanan, A Journey from Madras through the Countries of Mysore, Canara and Malabar (1807).
C. U. Aitchison, A Collection of Treaties, Engagements and Sanads, Vol. IX (1909 edition).
Scans hosted by the Internet Archive; all titles listed are out of copyright and free to read in full.

Full bibliography and how we weigh sources: Sources & Method