Reference

Five Letters

Thousands of Tipu Sultan's letters survive because his enemies published them. These five are the ones to read first — the most famous, the most fought-over, and the most revealing of how he actually governed — each linked to the page it is printed on.

How to read a translated enemy edition

Four of the five letters below reach English through William Kirkpatrick, a Company officer translating captured correspondence in 1811 to prove a case. The letters are genuine documents; the selection, the bracketed insertions and the facing “Observations” are his. Excerpts here are quoted as he printed them, brackets included, so that his hand stays visible. The fifth letter has a different custody entirely — it survived in the records of the Hindu institution that received it.

One absence worth naming: the famous saying about living one day as a tiger rather than long years as a sheep appears in none of his correspondence. Whatever its origin, it is not a letter.

The silk-worm order

Letter CLV — to Mir Kazim, his commercial consul at Muscat

Dated 11th Hydery (mid-November); Kirkpatrick prints no year

“Silk-worms and their eggs are produced there. We wish you to procure some of both, and to dispatch them to us, together with five or six men, acquainted with the proper mode of rearing them.”

The same letter orders that his ships be unloaded at Muscat within two days and reloaded — sulphur, lead, copper — within two more, the consul to answer personally for any delay.

Why it is famous: This is the founding document of Mysore sericulture, and Karnataka is the largest silk-producing state in India today because the programme it began took root. It is also a perfect specimen of how he governed: a new industry and a port turnaround rule in the same dictation.
What to watch: Nothing contested here — which is itself the point. The everyday letters are the ones nobody had a motive to forge.

Find it in the scan (search: silk-worms) →The Economic State →

Rocket-men to Kittoor

Letter CXLVII — to Burhanuddin, commanding near Kittoor

Dated 29th Zuburjudy (early November); no year printed

“You must, in the first instance, send and invite the Daisye of that place to an interview, and give encouraging assurances to his managing servants. You will next dispatch some rocket-men for the protection of the country. After the aforesaid Daisye shall have arrived at your quarters, let the fort be occupied by a party of the Sircar's troops.”

Why it is famous: Rockets are the most romanticised thing about Mysore, and here they are in their working clothes: one line in a cold little instruction where the invitation, the reassurance and the occupation of the fort are a single manoeuvre. This is what the military correspondence actually sounds like.
What to watch: Kirkpatrick's facing note glosses the episode for a British reader — his commentary starts the moment the letter ends, here as everywhere.

Find it in the scan (search: Kittoor) →Mysorean Rockets →

Robes of honour, delivered at night

The dispatch to his agents at the Mughal court, naming five courtiers to receive khilats

During the Maratha–Mysore war of 1786–87

“The five Khilauts, above-mentioned, must be delivered secretly, and at night, together with this message … that Nizam ud Dowlah, having united with the Mahrattahs, and engaged in war against us, and this proceeding being manifestly contrary to [the interests of] Islam, it is due to the support of [our] religion, that you, who are near the person of his Majesty, the Divine Shadow, and are moreover Musulman leaders, should pursue such effectual measures as may [at once] bring the … to ruin and disgrace, and impart additional strength to the true Ahmedy faith.”

Why it is famous: Religion as an instrument of diplomacy, caught in the act: robes of honour smuggled to sympathetic courtiers by night, and the faith invoked against a Muslim prince for allying with the Marathas. The ruler who wrote this endowed Sringeri four years later — both letters are his, and any account that keeps only one of them is selling something.
What to watch: Kirkpatrick's 'Observations' face the letter and argue with it; the ellipses above are gaps he left in his own translation. Read the letter and the editor as two documents.

Read it at page 364 of the scan →The Diplomat →

The Coorg letter

Letter CXCVI — to Runmust Khan, chief of Kurnool

Dated 5th January; no year printed — the Coorg seizures of the mid-1780s

“… the exciters of sedition in the Koorg country … raised their heads, one and all, in tumult. Immediately on our hearing of this circumstance, we proceeded with the utmost speed, and, at once, made prisoners of forty thousand occasion-seeking and sedition-exciting Koorgs, who, alarmed at the approach of our victorious army, had slunk into woods, and concealed themselves in lofty mountains … Then carrying them away from their native country …”

Why it is famous: The most-quoted letter in the entire argument over Tipu Sultan — the one produced whenever his record in Coorg is debated, because it reads as a confession in his own voice.
What to watch: Everything about it is contested except its fame. The figure of forty thousand conflicts with the seventy thousand of his own court chronicle and with the five hundred of Punganuri, a non-Muslim source; the province's population could not have supplied the larger numbers; and Mohibbul Hasan argues the 'confessional' letters in Kirkpatrick should not be treated as authentic at all. It is printed here because a reference should show you the disputed document itself, not just the dispute.

Find it in the scan (search: Runmust) →Coorg: the evidence weighed →

To the Shankaracharya of Sringeri

To the Jagadguru, after Maratha horsemen sacked the math

6 July 1791, in the middle of the Third Anglo-Mysore War

“People who have sinned against such a holy place are sure to suffer the consequences of their misdeeds at no distant date … Treachery to gurus will undoubtedly result in the destruction of the line of descent.”

He sent money and grain for the re-consecration of the goddess Sharada, and went on writing — twenty-nine letters to the Acharya survive from 1791 to 1798, asking for the performance of rites and crediting them afterwards for rain and success.

Why it is famous: The best-documented episode of the reign, and the standard counterweight to the Coorg letter above. It owes its authority to its custody: the correspondence was found in the math's own records in 1916, in Kannada, by the Mysore archaeology department — not published by anyone with a case to make about him.
What to watch: It is evidence of real patronage, not a character reference. The same reign produced both this letter and the deportations; the religious-policy pages hold the two side by side.

The math's own account of the correspondence →Religious Policy →

Dates, and why some are missing

The full collections

These five are a doorway, not a summary. The full Kirkpatrick volume — four hundred letters with the editor arguing in the margins — and the other primary sources are on the Documents page, each with a note on what it was written to do.

Sources for this page

William Kirkpatrick (trans.), Select Letters of Tippoo Sultan (1811) — Letters CXLVII, CLV, CXCVI, and the court dispatch at p. 364; excerpts quoted as printed, brackets his.
Mysore Archaeological Report, 1916 — the Sringeri correspondence, found in the math's records by the Director of Archaeology; the excerpt follows its rendering.
Sringeri Sharada Peetham, the math's account of the twenty-nine letters, 1791–1798.
Mohibbul Hasan, History of Tipu Sultan (Calcutta, 1951; rev. 1971), ch. XXI and Appendix K — on the authenticity of the 'confessional' letters and the conflicting Coorg figures.
Ram Chandra Rao 'Punganuri' — the figure of five hundred.

Full bibliography and how we weigh sources: Sources & Method