Timeline

He was named for the Sufi saint Tipu Mastan Aulia of Arcot, whose shrine his parents had visited. Devanahalli lies north of Bangalore, and his father was then a rising military officer in the service of the Wodeyar rajas rather than a ruler. Older accounts give 1751; the year has never been securely fixed.

• The Person →
• Nawab Haidar Ali Khan →

Haidar Ali was born about 1721 at Budikote, orphaned into poverty, and rose through the Mysore army to faujdar of Dindigul before making himself master of the kingdom in the Wodeyars' name. Unlettered himself, he was determined his son would not be: Tipu Sultan was taught the Quran and Islamic law, Persian — the language of administration and diplomacy across much of India — along with Urdu, Kannada and by most accounts some Arabic. The classroom was paired with the camp, and he held his first independent command while still a teenager.

• Nawab Haidar Ali Khan →
• The Sultan →

The Company had drawn the Nizam of Hyderabad and the Marathas into a coalition to partition Mysore. Haidar Ali broke it by diplomacy, lost the set-piece battles at Chengam and Tiruvannamalai in September 1767, then used the arm in which Mysore was superior — cavalry — to appear outside Madras in March 1769 and dictate peace within days. It was also the son's debut: Tipu Sultan's first commanding foray, the September 1767 raid on the outskirts of Madras itself, ended with a hero's return to the camp near Vaniyambadi, and that winter he helped take his first forts at Tirupattur and Vaniyambadi. The Treaty of Madras of 3 April 1769 carried a mutual-defence clause; when the Marathas invaded Mysore in 1771 the Company did nothing, and that refusal became the founding grievance of the dynasty.

• The First Anglo-Mysore War →
• The Wars →

The household eventually included several wives and a large number of children, of whom twelve sons outlived him. It mattered politically as well as personally: after 1799 the Company treated the princes' household as a rallying point to be managed, and the family was moved first to Vellore and then to Calcutta.

• The Person →
• Legacy →

Colonel William Baillie's detachment of about 3,800 was caught on 10 September 1780 before it could join Sir Hector Munro's main army. Tipu Sultan commanded the enveloping attack: cavalry pinned the column, and rocket fire is credited by accounts from both sides with detonating the ammunition tumbrils that broke the formation. Baillie was taken prisoner along with the young David Baird, who would return nineteen years later to storm Srirangapatna. Tipu Sultan had the battle painted across a wall of his summer palace, where it still is.

• The Second Anglo-Mysore War →
• The Pollilur murals →
• Rockets →

Haidar Ali died of a carbuncle in camp on 7 December 1782, while his son was campaigning on the Malabar coast hundreds of miles away. A first-generation dynasty losing its founder mid-campaign, with an army in the field and enemies on three sides, was the classic recipe for collapse. The death was concealed until Tipu Sultan could return; he took control of the treasury and the army and continued the war without a break — among the strongest pieces of evidence for how thoroughly the Mysorean state had been institutionalised.

• The Second Anglo-Mysore War →
• The Sultan →

Signed on 11 March 1784: mutual restitution of all conquests and an exchange of prisoners — no territory lost, no indemnity, no hostages. The French had abandoned the campaign in July 1783, mid-siege at Mangalore; Tipu Sultan carried it on alone and the starved-out garrison capitulated in January 1784. It is remembered as the last treaty the East India Company signed with an Indian state on terms of equality, and the last it signed under duress.

• The Second Anglo-Mysore War →
• Revenue & Agriculture →
• The Economic State →

Some nine hundred people in four ships left the Malabar port of Tadri near Mangalore, reached Basra in the summer of 1786 and arrived at Constantinople in September 1787, close to two years after setting out. They asked the caliph for four things: recognition as an independent sovereign, the port of Basra, the right to repair the shrines at Najaf and Karbala, and an army. They came home with the first — a real diplomatic victory, and not the one that would have saved Mysore.

• Tipu Sultan and the Ottoman Empire →
• The Diplomat →

Mohammad Darvesh Khan, Akbar Ali Khan and Mohammad Osman Khan left Mysore in 1787 and were received by Louis XVI in public audience at Versailles on 10 August 1788, where they became a sensation — painted, engraved, and described in the press by a court with months of ordinary life left. Their brief, which survives, asked for a formal offensive and defensive alliance and for French troops. The treasury was empty and the ministry would not commit to a war in Asia; they returned with ceremony, gifts and commercial assurances.

• Tipu Sultan and France →
• The Economic State →

On 29 December 1789 he attacked the fortified barrier the Raja of Travancore had built across the approaches to his territory. He had a case — Travancore had bought two forts in Cochin that he claimed through his vassal, and had sheltered Malabar chiefs in rebellion against him — but Travancore was a Company ally, and the attack was an act of war under the treaty system. Cornwallis declared hostilities on 27 January 1790 and had the Nizam and the Marathas bound into a triple alliance within months.

• The Third Anglo-Mysore War →
• Cornwallis →

Cornwallis changed the method: rather than chase Mysorean cavalry he took fortresses and forced Tipu Sultan to defend fixed places. He stormed Bangalore in March 1791, then fought outside the capital at Arakere on 15 May — winning the field and losing the campaign, his draught cattle dead and his supplies gone. Over the second half of 1791 he took the hill forts that screened Mysore, Savandurga among them, and in February 1792 advanced on Srirangapatna itself.

• The Third Anglo-Mysore War →
• Bangalore →
• Fortifications →

Signed on 18 March 1792. Roughly half of Mysore was ceded and divided among the victors — Malabar, Coorg, Dindigul and the Baramahal to the Company, which gained the western coast and the passes inland. The indemnity was three crore and thirty lakh rupees, payable in instalments, and two of Tipu Sultan's young sons, Abdul Khaliq and Muiz-ud-din, were handed to Cornwallis as security. They were returned in 1794 when the money was paid; the scene of their delivery was painted repeatedly and became one of the most reproduced images of the empire.

• The Third Anglo-Mysore War →
• Cornwallis →

The Board was to build frigates and ships of the line at Mangalore, Wajidabad and Molidabad. The programme was cut short by the war of 1799, but it shows how completely Tipu Sultan understood that the Company's power was ultimately seaborne — and what he was still trying to build four years after losing half his revenue base.

• The military system →
• Persia and Afghanistan →

Tipu Sultan's envoys reached Mauritius, where the governor, Anne Joseph Hippolyte de Malartic, having few troops to offer, published a proclamation advertising the alliance and calling for volunteers. It produced a handful of men and a document the Company could quote. Bonaparte landed in Egypt in July 1798 and for a few months the threat looked real. The alliance never produced an army — only, in the end, the paperwork used to justify destroying him.

• Tipu Sultan and France →
• The East India Company →

British batteries had beaten the north-west angle of the walls into a practicable breach, and the Kaveri was at its dry-season lowest. At about one o'clock on 4 May — the hottest hour, chosen because the garrison rested at midday — General Baird led some 4,000 men into the riverbed, and the breach was won in six or seven minutes. Tipu Sultan fought on the ramparts for perhaps an hour before being carried wounded toward the Water Gate, where a British soldier grabbed at his sword-belt and shot him through the temple. Baird found the body by torchlight that evening, under heaps of dead in the archway.

• The Fourth Anglo-Mysore War →
• The Final Day, hour by hour →
• The Gumbaz →

The Wodeyar dynasty was restored under a subsidiary alliance, and the administration was handed to the man who already knew how it worked: Purnaiya, who had run Tipu Sultan's revenue and military departments, served the restored raj as Diwan until 1811. Captured rockets went to Woolwich for analysis, where William Congreve worked on them and by 1805 demonstrated the iron-cased rocket that carried his name — to Boulogne, to Copenhagen, and in 1814 to Baltimore.

• Legacy →
• Rockets →
• The American connection →