The Marathas

Mysore's quarrel with the Marathas long predated Tipu Sultan. The Maratha confederacy claimed tribute (chauth) over much of the Deccan, including territory Haidar Ali had taken; Haidar had fought them repeatedly, sometimes paying, sometimes not. Every ruler in the region understood the arithmetic: Mysore and the Marathas were each other's most dangerous neighbour, and the Company was a third party that could be rented by whichever felt more threatened.

The relationship starts badly and from below. Under the Peshwa Madhavrao I, Maratha armies beat Haidar Ali in 1764, 1766 and again in 1771. He bought peace each time, on one occasion for a tribute in the order of twenty-eight lakh rupees together with the return of captured territory. For the first decade of his rule the man who would humble the East India Company could not hold his own northern frontier.

The correction came with a death rather than a battle. When Madhavrao died in 1772 the Maratha confederacy fell into a succession crisis, and between 1774 and 1776 Haidar Ali took back everything he had conceded and more. Mysorean strength in the north was, from the beginning, a function of Maratha distraction.

The Maratha invasion of 1771 matters for a reason beyond the fighting. Under the Treaty of Madras of 1769, the East India Company had undertaken to come to Mysore's aid if it were attacked by a third power. Mysore was attacked by a third power. The Company did nothing.

That refusal is the hinge of the whole subsequent history. It converted Haidar Ali from a ruler who did business with the Company into one who assumed its word was worthless, and it is cited explicitly as a cause of the Second Anglo-Mysore War. The Marathas, in other words, are not merely one of Tipu Sultan's problems — a Maratha invasion is the occasion on which his father learned the lesson he passed to his son.

Between 1785 and 1787 Tipu Sultan fought the Marathas — in alliance with the Nizam — over the usual mixture of tribute arrears and border forts, and got the better of the fighting. What he did next is the clearest evidence that he understood his strategic position: at the Treaty of Gajendragad (1787) he offered notably generous terms, conceding territory and agreeing to tribute payments he could have refused.

The terms were real concessions, not gestures: alongside territory, Tipu Sultan accepted an annual tribute to Pune reported at twelve lakhs. A ruler who had just had the better of the fighting agreed to pay the losers every year.

The purpose was explicit. He did not want Pune available to the British when the next English war came. He was buying neutrality with concessions, and he was right to try.

It bought nothing. In 1790 the Marathas joined Cornwallis's triple alliance; Maratha cavalry ravaged Mysorean territory throughout the Third Anglo-Mysore War and shared in the partition of 1792. In 1799 Pune stayed out of the fighting but did nothing to help — which amounted to the same thing.

The reasons were structural. The Marathas gained territory and tribute by joining the Company and risked nothing by it; they feared a resurgent Mysore on their southern border more than a Company they still believed they could manage. And Tipu Sultan's own conduct did not help: the 1791 Maratha raid on the Sringeri math — which he condemned and paid to repair — is a reminder that these were armies plundering each other's country as a matter of routine, not natural partners divided by misunderstanding.

There is an epilogue that settles the argument about whether joining the Company was shrewd. Mysore fell in 1799. Four years later the Company turned on the Marathas, and in the Second Anglo-Maratha War of 1803–05 the confederacy was broken in the field — at Assaye in September 1803 by Arthur Wellesley, the same officer who had commanded at Mallavelly against Tipu Sultan four years earlier, and who later called Assaye the hardest fighting he ever saw.

The Marathas had helped remove the one Indian power capable of resisting the Company in the south, and were themselves dismantled within half a decade by a general who had learned his trade doing it. Whatever else Tipu Sultan got wrong about them, he was right about what came after.