After 1799

The Company's problem after taking Srirangapatna was not military but dynastic. A five-year-old Wodeyar was placed on the Mysore throne with Purnaiya as regent, which gave the new arrangement a legitimate face — and left Tipu Sultan's own heirs alive, in the province, and available to anyone who wanted a rallying point.

The solution was distance. The sons were moved to Vellore Fort, the Company's strongest position in the Carnatic, some 200 miles east in Madras territory. With them went the household: the 601 women who had lived permanently in the palace at Srirangapatna, exiled from Mysore and placed under what amounted to house arrest.

They were not destitute. They were pensioned, housed and guarded — an arrangement designed to be comfortable enough to remove any grievance and controlled enough to remove any possibility. It failed on the first count within seven years.

Before dawn on 10 July 1806, sepoys of the Madras army at Vellore turned on their British officers, killing a substantial number before a relief force of dragoons from Arcot broke the rising the same day. The reprisal was severe.

The immediate causes were the Company's own: new regulations governing headgear, the shaving of beards, and the wearing of caste marks and earrings, imposed on Indian troops who read them — with reason — as an attack on the religious practice of Hindus and Muslims alike. Little effort was made to hear the grievance before it became a mutiny. That much has never been seriously disputed.

What the mutineers did next put Tipu Sultan's family at the centre of it. They broke into the fort where the family was lodged, raised the flag of Mysore, and proclaimed Fateh Haidar, Tipu Sultan's eldest son, as king.

After 1806 the Company moved the family again, this time far beyond the reach of any Mysorean loyalty: to Calcutta, the capital of British India, where they were settled on stipends and where the dynasty quietly became a Bengali institution.

Its public figure was the youngest son. Prince Ghulam Muhammad (1795–1872) was four when his father was killed and lived to be seventy-seven, and he spent his adult life doing two things at once: representing his family to the British state, and building institutions in the city he had been exiled to. He raised the Tipu Sultan Shahi Masjid on Dharmatala Street in 1832, and a second mosque at Tollygunge; both still stand and both still carry his father's name in the middle of Kolkata. He was made a Knight Commander of the Order of the Star of India.

The petitioning never stopped. He presented a volume to Queen Victoria in 1854, and in 1859 wrote to the Secretary of State for India pressing for an increase in the stipends paid to Tipu Sultan's descendants — a memorial now held in the Royal Collection. Sixty years after Srirangapatna, the business of the family was still the terms of its defeat.

Tipu Sultan's descendants live today mainly in Kolkata, and their circumstances are, for the most part, ordinary — a fact regularly rediscovered by newspapers, usually with more sentiment than accuracy about who is descended from whom. The reliable part is the shape of it: a ruling house converted by policy into a pensioned family, then into private citizens, over roughly three generations.

The mosque on Dharmatala Street is the most substantial thing the exile left behind. The Company deported the family to Calcutta to end a dynasty, and the dynasty put its name permanently on the capital of British India.

The household before the fall is covered in The Family, the hostage episode of 1792 in The Hostage Princes, the last day itself in The Final Day, and the objects taken from the palace in Objects & Relics.