The Family

Begin with the basic problem: the sources cannot agree how many sons Tipu Sultan had. The National Army Museum, describing the hostage crisis of 1792, refers to two of his sixteen sons. The British Library, describing the removal of the family after 1799, refers to his thirteen sons. The Royal Collection, cataloguing a manuscript presented by the youngest of them, calls Ghulam Muhammad the fourteenth son.

These are careful institutions working from different documents at different dates, and the discrepancy is the point: sons died, sons were born, and counts were made for different purposes — a treaty needed hostages of a certain rank, a pension list needed dependants, a court chronicle needed a dynasty. Any single figure quoted with confidence is a figure that has quietly picked one document.

The clearest picture of the household comes, uncomfortably, from the moment of its destruction. When Srirangapatna fell, the East India Company found itself responsible for 601 women who lived permanently in the palace, and moved them roughly 200 miles east to Vellore, in Company territory, along with Tipu Sultan's sons.

Jennifer Howes's study of that entourage, published in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society in 2021, is the best modern work on the subject, and its argument matters for how the family is read. The colonial records show these women were not the voiceless dependants of the standard account: they used the domestic authority the Mysore establishment had given them to press the Company over their treatment, and Howes traces a direct line from that pressure to the Vellore Mutiny of 1806.

One of them can be named with confidence. Roshani Begum — originally named Pum Kusur — joined the entourage as a dancer while Tipu Sultan was still a prince, probably in the 1770s, and became the mother of his eldest son, Fateh Haidar, which made her a woman of high standing at court. In 1806 she was one of hundreds under house arrest at Vellore, and she was among those who turned that confinement into a revolt.

Fateh Haidar, the eldest, son of Roshani Begum. A portrait painted in 1801 shows a man in his twenties. He never ruled, but he mattered: when the sepoys at Vellore rose in 1806 they raised the flag of Mysore and proclaimed Fateh Haidar their king.

Abdul Khaliq (1782–1806), the eldest legitimate son, who at ten was handed over as a hostage under the Treaty of Seringapatam. While in British hands he sat for the miniaturist John Smart on 8 August 1792 — one of the few portraits of any of the children made from life, now in the V&A. He died in 1806, the year of the Vellore rising.

Muiz-ud-din, the other hostage of 1792, then aged eight, and the smaller of the two figures in the many paintings of that scene.

Shukr Ullah, described on a drawing made of him by Thomas Hickey on 13 January 1801 as the seventh and favourite son of the late Tipu Sultan. He was eight when his father was killed, ten when he sat for that sketch, and he spent the remainder of his life under house arrest.

Ghulam Muhammad (1795–1872), four years old at the fall, who outlived every one of them and became the family's public face in Calcutta for half a century.

The family survived Tipu Sultan by generations, under conditions the Company designed to make sure they were never a dynasty again: Vellore from 1799, a rising in 1806 that they were blamed for, and then Calcutta, where the last of the sons built a mosque that still carries the family's name.

The family after 1799 →