The Shape of the State

The Sarkar-i-Khudadad did not hold the territory on this map the way a modern state holds ground. It held it as a list: thirty-seven provinces divided into some hundred and twenty-four taluks, each with a named officer on a cash salary, each returning written accounts to one of six central departments at Srirangapatna. That is the reason the map is drawn with a dashed edge and a solid capital. The line is a guess; the districts and the fort lists are documented, and they are what the administration actually ran on.

It is also why the frontier moved so much and mattered so little to the machinery. A district changing hands was a line struck from a revenue roll, not a redrawn nation. What the treaties took was income, ports and passes — and it was the loss of those specific things, rather than of area, that decided what Mysore could still attempt.

Look at 1784 and then at 1792, and the single most consequential change is not the size of the shaded area but the disappearance of the shoreline. Until 1792 Mysore held Canara and Malabar: the pepper and cardamom of the Malabar coast, the sandalwood of the interior, the ports through which some thirty state trading houses reached Muscat, Basra and beyond, and the yards where a navy was ordered in 1796.

The embassy to Constantinople sailed from Tadri, on the Canara coast, in 1785–86. Eight years later there was no Mysorean port for an embassy to sail from. A state that had understood, earlier than most, that the Company's power was seaborne, spent its last seven years unable to reach the sea.

The Treaty of Seringapatam of 18 March 1792 divided roughly half of Mysore among the three victors. To the Company: Malabar, Coorg, Dindigul and the Baramahal — which together gave it the western coast and the passes into the plateau. To the Marathas: the country around the Tungabhadra. To the Nizam: the lands running from the Krishna toward the Pennar. On top of the territory came an indemnity of three crore and thirty lakh rupees and two of Tipu Sultan's sons as hostages against payment.

Seven years later the remainder was partitioned again, and a smaller Mysore was returned to the Wodeyar dynasty under a subsidiary alliance. The full course of both wars is on the Third and Fourth Anglo-Mysore War pages.