The Fathul Mujahidin

The Fathul Mujahidin — “Victory of the Mujahids” — was composed in Persian in 1783 by Zainul Abedin Shustari at Tipu Sultan's direction, in the year he succeeded his father and while the Second Anglo-Mysore War was still being fought. Copies were distributed to his officers.

That last detail is the significant one. The manual belongs to the same instinct that produced the revenue regulations and the commercial code: the conviction that a state should operate by written, published rule rather than by the accumulated habit of whoever happened to be in command. An army that has a manual can train replacements, standardize a company across twenty brigades, and be audited. An army that has only veterans cannot.

The manual set out a clear hierarchy, using Persianate ranks over a structure that borrowed from European practice — the combination that characterised Mysore's whole military system.

A company establishment of 121 men, itemised by appointment, is not ceremonial writing. Specifying the water-carriers and the barbers alongside the scouts and the officers is the mark of a document meant to be used — someone had to raise, pay, feed, and replace these men, and the manual told him exactly how many of each he was accountable for.

It also explains a fact that puzzled British observers: why Mysore's army did not dissolve between campaigns as most Indian armies of the period did. The manual describes a standing professional force — directly recruited, regularly drilled, uniformed, and paid in cash from the treasury rather than through a contractor. Structure on paper is what let the army survive four wars and a change of ruler in the middle of one of them.

The contrast is what makes this document remarkable. A typical Indian army of the 1780s was assembled rather than organised. Much of it came from military contractors and chiefs who brought their own followers and were paid as a body; pay was frequently in arrears and often took the form of an assignment on the revenue of a district; establishments were whatever a commander had managed to raise; drill and equipment varied from contingent to contingent; and the knowledge of how things were done lived in the heads of experienced men. When the campaign ended or the money ran out, much of the army went home. None of that was incompetence — it was the normal way of raising force in the period, and European companies had grown out of the same practice within living memory.

Mysore formalised the lot. Set against its contemporaries the manual fixes, in writing and in advance:

• Establishments — the exact strength of every formation from brigade down to the 121-man company.
• Ranks and command — a defined hierarchy with named appointments, so authority did not depend on personal standing.
• Pay — in cash, from the treasury, on a scale, rather than through a contractor or a revenue assignment.
• Drill and training — a common standard, so a company in one brigade matched a company in another.
• Camp routine and sanitation — down to who lays out the encampment, who carries the water, and who inspects the men.
• Weapons doctrine — including how rockets were to be crewed and at what elevation they were to be fired.

Written down, all of it becomes transferable and enforceable. A replacement officer could be handed the book; a new company could be raised to the same pattern; an inspector could check a unit against a published standard. This is administration applied to war, and it is the same instinct that produced the revenue regulations and the commercial code — a state that governed by document rather than by custom, at a time when almost no one else in India did.

The manual's most consequential passages concern the weapon Mysore had made its own. It fixed 200 rocketmen within every cushoon — not a separate curiosity corps but an integral part of each infantry brigade, which is precisely what made the rocket a tactical instrument rather than a firework.

It went further into technique than any comparable document of the period. Rocketmen were trained to set the launch angle to control the trajectory and where the rocket would come down — elevation as a controllable variable, taught as a skill. The manual prescribed different natures of rocket, including incendiary types and rockets with blades fixed to the bamboo guide-rod. And it describes a multiple launcher — likened to a musical organ — capable of discharging up to ten rockets at once.

What that doctrine produced can be measured at the siege of Srirangapatna in 1792, where British accounts describe barrages in the order of two thousand rockets fired together. The full story of the weapon is on the Mysorean Rockets page.

Fathul Mujahidin translates as something like “Victory of the Strivers”, and modern readers should be careful with it. The words mujahid and jihad carry connotations in twenty-first-century English that they simply did not carry in a Persian court treatise of 1783, and importing today's associations into an eighteenth-century military document produces a badly distorted picture of what this book is.

What this book is, is an army code. Elevated religious phrasing was the conventional register for a Persian composition of this kind, in the same way that European military treatises of the period opened with invocations of God and dedications to a prince — nobody reads an eighteenth-century English drill manual as a devotional work because of its preface. Set the title aside and the contents are relentlessly practical: establishments, ranks, pay, drill, camp routine, the duties of a water-carrier, and the elevation at which to launch a rocket. Its purpose was standardisation.

The army it governed makes the same point. Mysore's forces were recruited, paid, and promoted without religious test; Hindu officers and soldiers served throughout the formations this manual defines, under a commander-in-chief whose finance minister was a Brahmin. A manual issued to that army, to be used by those officers, is a professional handbook that happens to be titled in the idiom of its time.

The work survived the conquest, and reached a wider readership only in the twentieth century: an edition compiled from the Persian was published in Karachi in 1950 by the Urdu Academy Sind, edited by Mahmud Husain — who also translated Tipu Sultan's dream register — with a foreword by Liaquat Ali Khan. It is the version most later writers have worked from, and it is why the manual is cited across this site: on the military system, on the rockets, and wherever the question is what Mysore's army was actually instructed to do rather than what its enemies said about it.