The War Turban

The object the National Army Museum catalogues as Tipu Sultan's war turban is a helmet. The frame is wicker covered in leather; over it lies quilted green silk, and inside it a lining of green silk velvet. Around the body of the helmet is wound a pagri — a length of fine green muslin — its ends tie-dyed pink. It is armour built the way the region had long built light armour: layers of textile over a rigid core, cooler and lighter than steel under a South Indian sun.

The decoration is what makes it unmistakably his. The quilting is worked in bubris — the stylised tiger stripe Tipu Sultan used as a personal emblem — and the steel guard is blued and damascened in gold with six conjoined bubris, each ending in a tiger's head, framing verses from the Qur'an written in nastaliq, the courtly Persian hand. The tiger and the faith, on one object, worn on the head of the state.

The bubri was the closest thing the Sarkar-i-Khudadad had to a logotype. It appears on the golden throne, on the uniforms of his regular infantry, on cannon barrels, sword hilts, mortars and flags — and on this helmet, quilted into the very padding. A soldier who picked it up in 1799 did not need to be told whose it was; no other ruler in India dressed his possessions in tiger skin.

The same emblem dressed his infantry: Robert Home painted a soldier of the army from life in 1793–94, wearing the tiger-patterned jacket that was the uniform of the Sultan's regular troops.

The tradition attached to the helmet — recorded by the museum that holds it — is that it was dipped in the well of Zamzam at Mecca, to render the man who wore it invincible in battle.

There is no way to verify what was done to a helmet two and a half centuries ago, and the claim should be read as what it is: the kind of story that travelled with the object. But it is entirely consistent with the man. Tipu Sultan named his state the God-given government, kept a private register of dreams he mined for signs, and had the guard of this same helmet inscribed with Qur'anic verses. A ruler who understood war as fought under heaven's eye is exactly the ruler whose armour acquires a pilgrimage story.

Whatever protection the tradition promised, the record of 4 May 1799 is that its owner died fighting at the Water Gate, and the helmet outlived him into the hands of a prize committee.

Srirangapatna fell on the afternoon of 4 May 1799, and within days the looting had been bureaucratised: prize agents appointed, the palace inventoried, the contents valued and divided by rank. The most spectacular objects were reserved for presentation, and on 17 May 1799 the Committee of Prize resolved “That the war Turban of Tippoo Sultan…be presented to Marquis Cornwallis.”

The choice of recipient is the interesting part. Cornwallis was not there. He had left India six years earlier and was by then Lord Lieutenant of Ireland; the army of 1799 was commanded by other men. But it was Cornwallis who had broken Mysore in 1792, taken half its territory and two of Tipu Sultan's sons as security, and the officers of 1799 saw their victory as the completion of his. The committee's chairman, Colonel John Floyd, had commanded cavalry under Cornwallis in that earlier war — the museum's own reading is that the gift to his old commander was very likely Floyd's doing.

So the dead Sultan's helmet was sent, as tribute, from one British general's army to another British general's house — a piece of the man distributed the way everything else he owned was distributed. What the gesture said was plain: the tiger's head-covering for the man who first caged him.

The helmet stayed with the Cornwallis family for a hundred and seventy years, passing down the generations with the rest of the Srirangapatna presentations, until it came to the National Army Museum in London in 1971, where it is accessioned as 1971-07-3-1. The same museum holds the jewelled khanjar presented to Cornwallis after the fall of the capital, and Robert Home's painting of him receiving the hostage princes in 1792 — donor, trophy and image of the victory, all under one roof.

The rest of what left the palace is catalogued in Objects & Relics; the day the helmet changed hands is reconstructed hour by hour in The Final Day; and the man the army chose to honour with it has his own page, Lord Cornwallis.