Coorg

Coorg was not a marginal frontier. It sat on the passes between the Mysore plateau and the Canara coast, which meant it sat on Mysore's route to its own ports, its Malabar possessions and its dockyards. A hostile Coorg cut the kingdom in half at its narrowest point, and did so repeatedly.

The Kodavas — the province's dominant landholding community, armed as a matter of custom — rose against Mysore rule more than once, in co-ordination at times with the British and with the Raja's exiled family. Each rising was followed by a reprisal, each reprisal by a further rising. Mercara was renamed Zafarabad; a Brahmin officer, Nagappaya, was appointed faujdar of the province — a detail worth holding on to when reading claims that the campaigns were religious in purpose.

The best-known assertion about Coorg is that Tipu Sultan seized and converted 70,000 Kodavas, dividing them into units of a thousand and distributing them among the forts of Mysore.

That account appears in the Sultan-ut-Tawarikh, a Persian chronicle from Tipu Sultan's own circle, and in the Tarikh-i-Khudadadi, which Hasan shows to be the same text rewritten in the first person rather than an autobiography. In these sources the episode is told as a demonstration of piety: the ruler harangues the Kodavas about their customs, warns them, is defied, and then — though the law would permit killing them — mercifully converts them instead.

This is the crux of the source problem on this page. The figure most often quoted as evidence of Tipu Sultan's fanaticism was written down by his admirers, as a compliment.

Kirkpatrick's letter collection has Tipu Sultan giving a figure of 40,000 converts — a different number in a different interested source.

Ram Chandra Rao “Punganuri”, a non-Muslim source, states that 500 men, women and children were converted and sent in groups to Srirangapatna, Bangalore and other forts.

Francis Buchanan, surveying the conquered country in 1800–01 and hostile to Tipu Sultan, discusses his dealings with Coorg at length and does not mention a mass conversion. Edward Moor, who works through Tipu Sultan's policies, does not mention one either. Hasan treats these two silences as significant: neither man had any motive to suppress such a story, and both had every motive to report it.

The arithmetic. Hasan's decisive objection is demographic. The total population of Coorg in this period barely reached 70,000, so a claim that 70,000 were seized and converted is a claim that the province was emptied — which the subsequent history of Coorg, still populated and still Kodava, does not bear out.

Removing an inflated number is not the same as clearing the record. What remains, and is not seriously disputed:

Mysore fought repeated counter-insurgency campaigns in Coorg. Captives were taken and moved out of the province into forts elsewhere — a standard eighteenth-century method of breaking a rebellious district by removing its fighting population. Conversions took place among those captives. Coorg's own memory of the period is of devastation, and that memory is not a modern invention.

The wider question is set out in Religious Policy, the parallel case on the coast in The Canara Christians, and the campaigns themselves in The Military Genius.