Besides I am curious to see whether or not the Mysore and are gonna get past their growing pains and truly start westernizing
A Miss of Grapeshot: Suffren and the Tiger of Mysore
- Thread starter Bad@logic
- Start date
Chapter 12, The March to War: The Indian Armies
With nothing resolved between Mysore and the Marathas and the Nizam of Hyderabad, and ambitious Mysorean plans for aggrandizement, tensions between the Marthas and the Nizam, and factional turmoil among the British, the spectre of war loomed over southern India in the waning years of the 1780s. As much as diplomats made their way from court to court and all schemed for power, for alliances for influence, all parties involved were believers in ultima ratio regum and it would be the armies that would be their mouthpieces of last resort.
The Mysorean navy might have been the pet project of the Tipu Sultan, but it was the Mysorean army that was the bedrock of his rule. Since the time of Haidar Ali, significant reforms had reshaped the face of the Mysorean army, recruiting European (particularly French and Dutch, as well as English deserters) advisors to reform troops, and establishing standardized divisions of troops with set numbers of flintlock muskets. Mysorean troops had uniforms, an officer corps, insignia, training manuals, an established battle order, and even regimental colors, medals, and European-style honors. But traditional cavalry still formed a vital bedrock of the army, including significant amounts of light cavalry with spears or bows.
In tune with other Indian princes, there was a revolution in weaponry and firepower, with the near universal replacement of matchlocks by modern flintlock muskets, overwhelmingly constructed in Mysore itself. A combination of French craftsmen and British prisoners, alongside traditional Indian steel and iron working, helped to build up a modern weapons industry, with arsenals in cities like Seringapatam turning out up to ten muskets a day, and around fifteen musket manufactories scattered throughout the realm. There were even devices such as a water-powered cannon borer, fitting in with Tipu’s love of machinery, although the water-machinery started to fall apart at which point they were replaced with an oxen-driven system, in of itself requiring some significant mechanical adaption.
As with other Indian rulers such as Mahadji Shinde of the Marathas, the Tipu Sultan’s army was a force in flux, with an increasing focus on infantry. The proportion of cavalry to infantry diminished, to the detriment of the former. In 1780, during the final years of Haidar Ali, there were some 32,000 cavalrymen, and only 15,000 infantry, while in 1790 the number of cavalry had fallen somewhat, to 25,000, alongside several thousand camel troops, while the number of infantry exploded to 75,000.
The balance between cavalry and infantry was more complex than in Europe. In theory, infantry was cheaper, and seemed to be the future of battles, and was a vital advantage against other Indian powers with less capable infantry arms. There was also the problem of getting horses to Mysore, as Mysore didn’t have nearly sufficient numbers of horses itself, requiring constant imports. However, the decreasing size of the cavalry arm did limit the traditional mobility and aptitude for irregular warfare that Mysorean armies had enjoyed. Furthermore, in practice cavalry could actually be significantly less expensive, since cavalry, the famous pindari, were irregulars who were not paid a salary but instead in loot. They were brilliantly fast, quick-thinking, and opportunistic, but often lacked for discipline and were of little use in a stand-up fight. As repeated wars with the Marathas showed, their days were far from numbered: any Indian war would have skirmishing, raiding, and pillaging as central themes, and a powerful cavalry army was a vital part of this.
This was matched by a similar focus on artillery, both regular cannons and rockets. Arguably, it was modern artillery, faster firing, more accurate, and far lighter, which was the decisive change in Indian warfare in the 18th century, and not infantry. Infantry might win battles, but winning a battle meant very little since enemy cavalry raids could deny supplies and harry the victors, as happened repeatedly to the British, while neither cavalry nor infantry could take forts on their own, and traditional Indian artillery struggled to achieve much against them. Although this was changing with the Mughals, who brought increasing quantities of artillery to the field, sieges could still be lengthy: in 1685 the Maratha Ramsej fort had been besieged by the Mughals for six and a half years until it fell.
The introduction of modern European style artillery meant that fortifications could be smashed in quick order, implying a dramatic reorganization of the Indian political scene. Mahadji Shinde put this to good use to assert his, and Maratha, authority throughout northern India, but the Mysoreans were also improving their artillery arm and forging more modern artillery, with the Mysoreans being equipped with a dizzying variety of guns - hundreds of them around Seringapatam and hundreds more in various fortifications and coastal defense artillery. For the field army, the Mysoreans relied extensively on European cannoneers, reckoned substantially better than Indian ones, and with an artillery arm that expanded to several hundred field guns over the course of the 1780s. This was built on the back of a state-run arms program, with iron having long been a state monopoly, and forges constructed and expanded throughout the Mysorean highlands and taking advantage of plentiful wood supplies to provide the necessary charcoal.
Rockets were the most innovative aspect of the Mysorean military establishment. They were used in multiple ways, both on the battlefield, and in irregular formations - rocketmen using their mobility to harass enemy units on the march, before melting away. Rockets typically could be divided into two types: one with an explosive charge to burst like a shell, the others hitting the ground and then bouncing again, with the idea of snaking through a formation of enemy troops like roundshot. Although they lacked in accuracy, they were terrifying to face and far more mobile than regular artillery.
There were also some units who were entirely different from anything around in Europe. A camel corps of around 3,000 men mounted two men to a camel, each one with a very long musket with a mount below it to affix it, firing a heavy, 3 ounce musket ball, with great range and accuracy. These troops would follow the cavalry and position themselves on the flanks, pouring in fire on enemy flanking forces and particularly their own cavalry.
One problem that would plague the Mysoreans was a lack of saltpeter supplies. Indian saltpeter was most commonly made in Bengal, where grindingly poor workers boiled down the necessary components, producing saltpeter that was both of far better quality than that elsewhere, such as European scraping methods, and also cheaper, available in quantity, and without the loathed saltpeter collectors that were viewed as a great infringement on liberty. There was some limited local production in Mysore, mostly carried out by the Uppara caste, operating similarly to European saltpeter collectors in scraping for build ups of nitrates along walls and buildings - unsurprisingly they also had a specialization in bricklaying and building. However, as with European states, this was far from adequate to assure gunpowder supplies, and in wartime the British would have an important choke hold over a vital element of any Mysorean arms production.
Fortifications were another aspect of modern war that was updated, with the Frenchman Legoux de Flaix constructing a number of defensive sites between 1773 and 1777, and similar fortification efforts in Bangalore, Srirangapatna, Savandroog, Roostumabad, etc. But at the same time there were such a collection of old hill forts that the sheer number meant that most fortifications were unable to be seriously modernized and made fit for modern warfare. These were generally not provided with regular army troops which were reserved for larger fortifications, but instead only militia troops, which unlike regular troops generally still could only call upon matchlocks instead of more modern flintlock muskets. At the same time while they could hardly withstand a regular siege, they did at least mean that the enemy would need to bring up artillery batteries in front of each one, slowing his progress. Their role was particularly important in repelling Maratha cavalry raids.
The other Indian armies were also making progress in their own ways, although their quality varied even more than Mysorean units. In Hyderabad, the struggles of Hyderabad’s units in the war against Mysore that had led to the Nizam being treated almost as an after-thought in peace negotiations, as well as previous defeats to the Marathas, had made clear a clear desperate need to reform the Nizam’s army. Although only a small force, one of the most important elements in this evolution was Michel Joachim Marie Raymond who had been one of the few Hyderabad units to perform well in the war against Mysore, constituting a force of European-trained and officered native soldiers, which had expanded from 300 men to 700 men and by the early 1790s to over 5,000 with further growth in the works. Compared to the total Hyderabad army this was small, but Raymond was one of the most effective and capable units it had. Besides this, the Nizam’s army had around 35,000 other infantry and 40,000 cavalry, as well as a hundred guns, although discipline and actual combat capability for most of these forces was severely lacking.
Due to its very nature, it is impossible to give such a succinct answer for the Marathas, who had a split into multiple power factions - most importantly being Shinde, the Peshwa, and Holkar. United, the Marathas could put hundreds of thousands of men in the field, including potent cavalry such as the huzurat household cavalry of the Peshwa, and were particularly potent on the defense, since any attacking enemy army could have its supply lines cut and be hacked to death. But internal feuds meant that this would rarely happen, with Shinde’s focus during the 1780s being on a series of military campaigns in the north, which sucked up the most advanced and effective Maratha armies - his European-style army trained by the Savoyard officer De Boigne who was raising new infantry brigades called campoos with artillery, flintlock muskets, and even ambulance corps. Other Maratha leaders were similarly improving their armies, but none matched Shinde’s scale. The Bhonsle family in the east embraced traditional light raiding tactics, while Holkar in the center compromised between this and Shinde's massive investment in modern military technology, similar to the Peshwa in the south.
A common problem in all of them was that their artillery was, although powerful and well-built, slow and often hampered by poor deployment: Maratha artillery could blow apart anything in front of it but lack of mobility meant that that a Maratha campaign against enemy forts was a grinding and slow affair. Shinde's artillery was improving, as shown by it shattering some forts in north India in just a few weeks, but even it had limited operational mobility. Traditional Maratha tactics of raiding had gotten around this by cutting off the forts and slowly strangling them, but in any case this required time.
However, both the Peshwa and Hyderabd had hired British sepoy units as mercenaries. This was partially a sign of weakness on the British part, due to disastrous financial situations that meant that they were unable to maintain their regular armies, and had forced them to hire out their units for some funding - and also a strength, by knitting the native powers into the British power structure. There were 5 British battalions serving with the Marathas, and the Nizam had hired 2 as well.
Of course, an obvious problem with the large number of mercenaries employed by both the Marathas and the Nizam was that they could be politically unreliable, particularly when facing their home country. But as there were no French troops present in India that might cause dissension, and the British were aligned with the states the mercenaries were serving, this was in 1790 a purely theoretical concern. More important was tension between mercenary bodies, such as Hyderabad’s French corps, which the Nizam protected against repeated British attempts to dissolve it, attempting to guard his independence from British domination. How would these French-commanded units cooperate with the British forces hired by them? What's more, although these units were theoretically independent from the British, at two removes, being transferred to the Nawab of the Carnatic and then rented by the Marathas and the Nizam, the political elemnts were impossible to ignore.
The last native army that was to be caught up in the war to come would be Travancore’s. Similar to the Nizam's, the majority of it was composed of relatively poorly trained and ill-equipped forces, but they would be positioned behind the fortified Travancore Lines, helping to somewhat nullify their disadvantages. What’s more, they too had hired 2 British battalions - but there was no firm commitment from the British to actually defend Travancore and political questions hovered over whether they would actually fire in anger…
The Mysorean navy might have been the pet project of the Tipu Sultan, but it was the Mysorean army that was the bedrock of his rule. Since the time of Haidar Ali, significant reforms had reshaped the face of the Mysorean army, recruiting European (particularly French and Dutch, as well as English deserters) advisors to reform troops, and establishing standardized divisions of troops with set numbers of flintlock muskets. Mysorean troops had uniforms, an officer corps, insignia, training manuals, an established battle order, and even regimental colors, medals, and European-style honors. But traditional cavalry still formed a vital bedrock of the army, including significant amounts of light cavalry with spears or bows.
In tune with other Indian princes, there was a revolution in weaponry and firepower, with the near universal replacement of matchlocks by modern flintlock muskets, overwhelmingly constructed in Mysore itself. A combination of French craftsmen and British prisoners, alongside traditional Indian steel and iron working, helped to build up a modern weapons industry, with arsenals in cities like Seringapatam turning out up to ten muskets a day, and around fifteen musket manufactories scattered throughout the realm. There were even devices such as a water-powered cannon borer, fitting in with Tipu’s love of machinery, although the water-machinery started to fall apart at which point they were replaced with an oxen-driven system, in of itself requiring some significant mechanical adaption.
As with other Indian rulers such as Mahadji Shinde of the Marathas, the Tipu Sultan’s army was a force in flux, with an increasing focus on infantry. The proportion of cavalry to infantry diminished, to the detriment of the former. In 1780, during the final years of Haidar Ali, there were some 32,000 cavalrymen, and only 15,000 infantry, while in 1790 the number of cavalry had fallen somewhat, to 25,000, alongside several thousand camel troops, while the number of infantry exploded to 75,000.
The balance between cavalry and infantry was more complex than in Europe. In theory, infantry was cheaper, and seemed to be the future of battles, and was a vital advantage against other Indian powers with less capable infantry arms. There was also the problem of getting horses to Mysore, as Mysore didn’t have nearly sufficient numbers of horses itself, requiring constant imports. However, the decreasing size of the cavalry arm did limit the traditional mobility and aptitude for irregular warfare that Mysorean armies had enjoyed. Furthermore, in practice cavalry could actually be significantly less expensive, since cavalry, the famous pindari, were irregulars who were not paid a salary but instead in loot. They were brilliantly fast, quick-thinking, and opportunistic, but often lacked for discipline and were of little use in a stand-up fight. As repeated wars with the Marathas showed, their days were far from numbered: any Indian war would have skirmishing, raiding, and pillaging as central themes, and a powerful cavalry army was a vital part of this.
This was matched by a similar focus on artillery, both regular cannons and rockets. Arguably, it was modern artillery, faster firing, more accurate, and far lighter, which was the decisive change in Indian warfare in the 18th century, and not infantry. Infantry might win battles, but winning a battle meant very little since enemy cavalry raids could deny supplies and harry the victors, as happened repeatedly to the British, while neither cavalry nor infantry could take forts on their own, and traditional Indian artillery struggled to achieve much against them. Although this was changing with the Mughals, who brought increasing quantities of artillery to the field, sieges could still be lengthy: in 1685 the Maratha Ramsej fort had been besieged by the Mughals for six and a half years until it fell.
The introduction of modern European style artillery meant that fortifications could be smashed in quick order, implying a dramatic reorganization of the Indian political scene. Mahadji Shinde put this to good use to assert his, and Maratha, authority throughout northern India, but the Mysoreans were also improving their artillery arm and forging more modern artillery, with the Mysoreans being equipped with a dizzying variety of guns - hundreds of them around Seringapatam and hundreds more in various fortifications and coastal defense artillery. For the field army, the Mysoreans relied extensively on European cannoneers, reckoned substantially better than Indian ones, and with an artillery arm that expanded to several hundred field guns over the course of the 1780s. This was built on the back of a state-run arms program, with iron having long been a state monopoly, and forges constructed and expanded throughout the Mysorean highlands and taking advantage of plentiful wood supplies to provide the necessary charcoal.
Rockets were the most innovative aspect of the Mysorean military establishment. They were used in multiple ways, both on the battlefield, and in irregular formations - rocketmen using their mobility to harass enemy units on the march, before melting away. Rockets typically could be divided into two types: one with an explosive charge to burst like a shell, the others hitting the ground and then bouncing again, with the idea of snaking through a formation of enemy troops like roundshot. Although they lacked in accuracy, they were terrifying to face and far more mobile than regular artillery.
There were also some units who were entirely different from anything around in Europe. A camel corps of around 3,000 men mounted two men to a camel, each one with a very long musket with a mount below it to affix it, firing a heavy, 3 ounce musket ball, with great range and accuracy. These troops would follow the cavalry and position themselves on the flanks, pouring in fire on enemy flanking forces and particularly their own cavalry.
One problem that would plague the Mysoreans was a lack of saltpeter supplies. Indian saltpeter was most commonly made in Bengal, where grindingly poor workers boiled down the necessary components, producing saltpeter that was both of far better quality than that elsewhere, such as European scraping methods, and also cheaper, available in quantity, and without the loathed saltpeter collectors that were viewed as a great infringement on liberty. There was some limited local production in Mysore, mostly carried out by the Uppara caste, operating similarly to European saltpeter collectors in scraping for build ups of nitrates along walls and buildings - unsurprisingly they also had a specialization in bricklaying and building. However, as with European states, this was far from adequate to assure gunpowder supplies, and in wartime the British would have an important choke hold over a vital element of any Mysorean arms production.
Fortifications were another aspect of modern war that was updated, with the Frenchman Legoux de Flaix constructing a number of defensive sites between 1773 and 1777, and similar fortification efforts in Bangalore, Srirangapatna, Savandroog, Roostumabad, etc. But at the same time there were such a collection of old hill forts that the sheer number meant that most fortifications were unable to be seriously modernized and made fit for modern warfare. These were generally not provided with regular army troops which were reserved for larger fortifications, but instead only militia troops, which unlike regular troops generally still could only call upon matchlocks instead of more modern flintlock muskets. At the same time while they could hardly withstand a regular siege, they did at least mean that the enemy would need to bring up artillery batteries in front of each one, slowing his progress. Their role was particularly important in repelling Maratha cavalry raids.
The other Indian armies were also making progress in their own ways, although their quality varied even more than Mysorean units. In Hyderabad, the struggles of Hyderabad’s units in the war against Mysore that had led to the Nizam being treated almost as an after-thought in peace negotiations, as well as previous defeats to the Marathas, had made clear a clear desperate need to reform the Nizam’s army. Although only a small force, one of the most important elements in this evolution was Michel Joachim Marie Raymond who had been one of the few Hyderabad units to perform well in the war against Mysore, constituting a force of European-trained and officered native soldiers, which had expanded from 300 men to 700 men and by the early 1790s to over 5,000 with further growth in the works. Compared to the total Hyderabad army this was small, but Raymond was one of the most effective and capable units it had. Besides this, the Nizam’s army had around 35,000 other infantry and 40,000 cavalry, as well as a hundred guns, although discipline and actual combat capability for most of these forces was severely lacking.
Due to its very nature, it is impossible to give such a succinct answer for the Marathas, who had a split into multiple power factions - most importantly being Shinde, the Peshwa, and Holkar. United, the Marathas could put hundreds of thousands of men in the field, including potent cavalry such as the huzurat household cavalry of the Peshwa, and were particularly potent on the defense, since any attacking enemy army could have its supply lines cut and be hacked to death. But internal feuds meant that this would rarely happen, with Shinde’s focus during the 1780s being on a series of military campaigns in the north, which sucked up the most advanced and effective Maratha armies - his European-style army trained by the Savoyard officer De Boigne who was raising new infantry brigades called campoos with artillery, flintlock muskets, and even ambulance corps. Other Maratha leaders were similarly improving their armies, but none matched Shinde’s scale. The Bhonsle family in the east embraced traditional light raiding tactics, while Holkar in the center compromised between this and Shinde's massive investment in modern military technology, similar to the Peshwa in the south.
A common problem in all of them was that their artillery was, although powerful and well-built, slow and often hampered by poor deployment: Maratha artillery could blow apart anything in front of it but lack of mobility meant that that a Maratha campaign against enemy forts was a grinding and slow affair. Shinde's artillery was improving, as shown by it shattering some forts in north India in just a few weeks, but even it had limited operational mobility. Traditional Maratha tactics of raiding had gotten around this by cutting off the forts and slowly strangling them, but in any case this required time.
However, both the Peshwa and Hyderabd had hired British sepoy units as mercenaries. This was partially a sign of weakness on the British part, due to disastrous financial situations that meant that they were unable to maintain their regular armies, and had forced them to hire out their units for some funding - and also a strength, by knitting the native powers into the British power structure. There were 5 British battalions serving with the Marathas, and the Nizam had hired 2 as well.
Of course, an obvious problem with the large number of mercenaries employed by both the Marathas and the Nizam was that they could be politically unreliable, particularly when facing their home country. But as there were no French troops present in India that might cause dissension, and the British were aligned with the states the mercenaries were serving, this was in 1790 a purely theoretical concern. More important was tension between mercenary bodies, such as Hyderabad’s French corps, which the Nizam protected against repeated British attempts to dissolve it, attempting to guard his independence from British domination. How would these French-commanded units cooperate with the British forces hired by them? What's more, although these units were theoretically independent from the British, at two removes, being transferred to the Nawab of the Carnatic and then rented by the Marathas and the Nizam, the political elemnts were impossible to ignore.
The last native army that was to be caught up in the war to come would be Travancore’s. Similar to the Nizam's, the majority of it was composed of relatively poorly trained and ill-equipped forces, but they would be positioned behind the fortified Travancore Lines, helping to somewhat nullify their disadvantages. What’s more, they too had hired 2 British battalions - but there was no firm commitment from the British to actually defend Travancore and political questions hovered over whether they would actually fire in anger…
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Nice arms update on Mysore and the rest of the Indian kingdoms. I am wondering how Tipu is going to resolve the problem of having less saltpetre. I am also wondering would levee en masse style tactics would become popular in the Indian subcontinent due to it's huge population.
Is their a likdlihood that the Maratha Empire will descend into a genuine civil war in the future?
Indian society in this era isn't really set up for levee en masse French-style, the armies don't have much of a connection with any particular state and there have been books written about the Indian "military marketplace." Numbers of troops is less of a problem than equipping and paying them. You might see more French-style assault columns though, in the context of limited saltpeter supplies.
Pretty much everyone in India goes through a civil war at some point, the only question is when.
Chapter 13: The Travancore Crisis: Let Slip the Dogs of War
Tensions between Mysore and Travancore had been building for long years. Travancore felt threatened by Mysore, an aggressive and bellicose state intent on expanding its power and territory. Mysore meanwhile had objected to a number of Travancore’s policies, such as Travancore offering refuge and sanctuary to various groups that it viewed as rebels along the Malabar coast, and matters had come to a head when Malabar had bought two forts that Mysore believed was within its territory, Ayacottah and Cranganore, from the Dutch. Combined with territorial disputes over fortification lines, claimed by Mysore as being within Mysorean territory, and relations were frosty.
Travancore had prepared for war with the improvement and strengthening of a line of fortifications termed the Travancore Lines – an impressive and sprawling defensive work consisting of field fortifications connecting together a line of defensive forts. They had actually been constructed several decades before, in the 1740s, but since then they had been repeatedly updated and improved, and with Mysorean forces abutting all of Travancore’s borders, this had been done with the energy of desperation. Louis XIV might have felt a sense of recognition stir in his heart, transported from the lines of ne plus ultra in the great northwestern French plains defending against the invading Allied armies of the darkest years of the War of Spanish Succession, to the Travancore Lines that served as the best guarantee of independence that encircled Travancore had. But then, Marlborough had managed to maneuver his way through the lines of ne plus ultra: how would the Mysoreans fare?
These developments and investments were undertaken on the back of an economy that was being increasingly drawn into world trade patterns, on the basis of flourishing pepper plantations. While Travancore might have lacked Mysore’s state-driven military escalation, it did boast considerable resources from the pepper industry that enriched the coffers of the state. This was another reason for hostilities, although not a major one: Travancore was a significant competitor in the pepper market for Mysore. Its elimination would in turn greatly enrich the Mysoreans. In any case, in the interim, it gave Travancore funds for significant fortification development as well as recruiting substantial numbers of foreign mercenaries.
There had been other endeavors undertaken to attempt to prepare Travancore for a potential invasion from the north. Travancore had had an active role to play in drawing upon foreign resistance, and it was in many ways more Travancore than the British that had led to increasing British participation in aiding Travancore. Desperate for some sort of foreign help, Travancore had hired several British battalions after torturous negotiations stemming from the Maratha-Mysorean war, as well as buying war material such as artillery from both the Dutch and the British. But Travancore lacked any political guarantee from the British to support them – the battalions were once again technically those of the Nawab of the Carnatic, and not even British, and the British steered clear of any commitment to actually support Travancore when war came. Travancore made a number of concessions to attempt to encourage the British, giving additional trading rights and modifying various contracts and commercial practices to British liking, as well as some bribes for some key British leaders, but British policy stayed firm. Travancore would be on its own.
To the north, the Mysoreans, after the inconvenient of the war against Hyderabad and the Marathas, and the need to digest their conquests in the Carnatic, began to increase pressure on Travancore in 1791, demanding that Travancore give up forts in contested border regions, and cease its support for the rebellious nobility in the Mandabar coast. Faced with the prospect of giving up their defensive curtain, and fearful that giving in to Mysorean demands would only beget more demands, the Raja of Travancore held firm. Tipu decided to go to war, confident in victory. He was not blind to the potential risks that the British presented, and the danger of an encircling alliance by the Marathas and Hyderabad, but he believed that he would be able to deal with Travancore, with his battle-hardened and expanded army with its large core of European-trained infantry. What’s more, the Mysorean navy’s tranche of expansion was starting to offer a force that would be capable of blockading coastal fortresses and supporting a littoral campaign. In short, there were three assumptions that Tipu had: 1)Any war with Travancore would be brief, 2)Foreign powers would not intervene, and 3)If they did intervene, these interventions would not be significant.
Unfortunately for Mysorean plans, the war was not smooth sailing. Travancore’s armies fought bitterly in defense of the Travancore lines and the slugging match along the Travancore Lines meant that instead of cleanly punching through, the Mysoreans were at first broadly stalemated. Guns were brought up, but it was not until April that a breach was made. It would take months to manage to smash through entirely, and as a result the rainy Monsoon season hit the Mysoreans, and further reduced their ability to prosecute the war, with outbreaks of disease from the intense rains and difficulties even moving around. At one point, a Travancore ambush almost succeeded in reaching Tipu himself. Things were not going as well as might be hoped.
At this point, British and EIC opinions as to what to do were decidedly mixed. An important faction believed that despite Mysorean setbacks, the sheer overmatch of Mysorean resources to those of Travancore, and the fact that the Mysoreans by this point had managed to breach through the lines, meant that an intervention would be of little use. What’s more, finances were still parlous in India, and British ability to intervene was limited given the lack of a direct connection with Mysore. Writing off south India was regrettable, but necessary.
The interventionist faction rejoined that this was perhaps the last time, leaving asides a civil war, that Mysore’s power might be constrained. If Travancore was swallowed up, all of southern India would be under Mysorean domination. Both Hyderabad and the Marathas had been flipped to the British side. British trade and commercial interests were under attack in Travancore, while Travancore had shown itself as a stalwart and competent ally. The contribution of some British forces could manage to stall Mysorean arms, and the union of Britain, Hyderabad, and the Marathas, at a time when the French were clearly unable to intervene due to domestic political troubles, could hold Mysore in a terrible vice and smash them.
In the end, it would be an event largely outside of the hands of both rulers that sparked events. A British frigate, the Perserverence, sent to retrieve British nationals from the city of Thiruvananthapuram was challenged by two Mysorean frigates who were blockading it from foreign intervention. The resultant parleying broke down, and at some point an over-eager sailor from the British frigate fired on the Mysorean vessels. In the resultant melee both sides sustained heavy damage, until a second British frigate joined in and drove off the Mysorean ships. In the resultant furor, the outraged British called for an indemnity from the Mysoreans and declared that they would enter Travancore ports at will, despite Mysorean naval ships. The Mysoreans refused, and war was declared by both parties soon afterwards. Within a few months, both Hyderabad and the Marathas had once again reentered the war against Mysore, leaving Mysore surrounded on all sides.
It also brought the British units in Travancore more directly into the fray as well, making it clear that Travancore would not fall in a single campaigning season. In disgust, Tipu sent his forces to their monsoon quarters, planning to build up his forces and armies for a final push, even as he pursued diplomatic efforts to try to bring the Marathas and the Nizam to the peace table. But both found the situation entirely too tempting for settling their territorial scores against Mysore to be easily persuaded to make peace. Hyder Ali had warned his son to play the European powers off against each other: in the end, Tipu had managed to do exactly the opposite - it was he, in his ambition, who had united a formidable coalition against him.
And thus in 1791, after seven years of fragile peace between Mysore and Britain, war had come again. It was a fight which the British government, eager of reducing its commitments in India in the face of gathering tensions in Europe, and Mysore, desirous of conquering Travancore with a minimum of foreign intervention, had not desired. But fortune and destiny can pay little to the wills of man. The guns would speak, and the lion and the tiger would at last come to grips.
Travancore had prepared for war with the improvement and strengthening of a line of fortifications termed the Travancore Lines – an impressive and sprawling defensive work consisting of field fortifications connecting together a line of defensive forts. They had actually been constructed several decades before, in the 1740s, but since then they had been repeatedly updated and improved, and with Mysorean forces abutting all of Travancore’s borders, this had been done with the energy of desperation. Louis XIV might have felt a sense of recognition stir in his heart, transported from the lines of ne plus ultra in the great northwestern French plains defending against the invading Allied armies of the darkest years of the War of Spanish Succession, to the Travancore Lines that served as the best guarantee of independence that encircled Travancore had. But then, Marlborough had managed to maneuver his way through the lines of ne plus ultra: how would the Mysoreans fare?
These developments and investments were undertaken on the back of an economy that was being increasingly drawn into world trade patterns, on the basis of flourishing pepper plantations. While Travancore might have lacked Mysore’s state-driven military escalation, it did boast considerable resources from the pepper industry that enriched the coffers of the state. This was another reason for hostilities, although not a major one: Travancore was a significant competitor in the pepper market for Mysore. Its elimination would in turn greatly enrich the Mysoreans. In any case, in the interim, it gave Travancore funds for significant fortification development as well as recruiting substantial numbers of foreign mercenaries.
There had been other endeavors undertaken to attempt to prepare Travancore for a potential invasion from the north. Travancore had had an active role to play in drawing upon foreign resistance, and it was in many ways more Travancore than the British that had led to increasing British participation in aiding Travancore. Desperate for some sort of foreign help, Travancore had hired several British battalions after torturous negotiations stemming from the Maratha-Mysorean war, as well as buying war material such as artillery from both the Dutch and the British. But Travancore lacked any political guarantee from the British to support them – the battalions were once again technically those of the Nawab of the Carnatic, and not even British, and the British steered clear of any commitment to actually support Travancore when war came. Travancore made a number of concessions to attempt to encourage the British, giving additional trading rights and modifying various contracts and commercial practices to British liking, as well as some bribes for some key British leaders, but British policy stayed firm. Travancore would be on its own.
To the north, the Mysoreans, after the inconvenient of the war against Hyderabad and the Marathas, and the need to digest their conquests in the Carnatic, began to increase pressure on Travancore in 1791, demanding that Travancore give up forts in contested border regions, and cease its support for the rebellious nobility in the Mandabar coast. Faced with the prospect of giving up their defensive curtain, and fearful that giving in to Mysorean demands would only beget more demands, the Raja of Travancore held firm. Tipu decided to go to war, confident in victory. He was not blind to the potential risks that the British presented, and the danger of an encircling alliance by the Marathas and Hyderabad, but he believed that he would be able to deal with Travancore, with his battle-hardened and expanded army with its large core of European-trained infantry. What’s more, the Mysorean navy’s tranche of expansion was starting to offer a force that would be capable of blockading coastal fortresses and supporting a littoral campaign. In short, there were three assumptions that Tipu had: 1)Any war with Travancore would be brief, 2)Foreign powers would not intervene, and 3)If they did intervene, these interventions would not be significant.
Unfortunately for Mysorean plans, the war was not smooth sailing. Travancore’s armies fought bitterly in defense of the Travancore lines and the slugging match along the Travancore Lines meant that instead of cleanly punching through, the Mysoreans were at first broadly stalemated. Guns were brought up, but it was not until April that a breach was made. It would take months to manage to smash through entirely, and as a result the rainy Monsoon season hit the Mysoreans, and further reduced their ability to prosecute the war, with outbreaks of disease from the intense rains and difficulties even moving around. At one point, a Travancore ambush almost succeeded in reaching Tipu himself. Things were not going as well as might be hoped.
At this point, British and EIC opinions as to what to do were decidedly mixed. An important faction believed that despite Mysorean setbacks, the sheer overmatch of Mysorean resources to those of Travancore, and the fact that the Mysoreans by this point had managed to breach through the lines, meant that an intervention would be of little use. What’s more, finances were still parlous in India, and British ability to intervene was limited given the lack of a direct connection with Mysore. Writing off south India was regrettable, but necessary.
The interventionist faction rejoined that this was perhaps the last time, leaving asides a civil war, that Mysore’s power might be constrained. If Travancore was swallowed up, all of southern India would be under Mysorean domination. Both Hyderabad and the Marathas had been flipped to the British side. British trade and commercial interests were under attack in Travancore, while Travancore had shown itself as a stalwart and competent ally. The contribution of some British forces could manage to stall Mysorean arms, and the union of Britain, Hyderabad, and the Marathas, at a time when the French were clearly unable to intervene due to domestic political troubles, could hold Mysore in a terrible vice and smash them.
In the end, it would be an event largely outside of the hands of both rulers that sparked events. A British frigate, the Perserverence, sent to retrieve British nationals from the city of Thiruvananthapuram was challenged by two Mysorean frigates who were blockading it from foreign intervention. The resultant parleying broke down, and at some point an over-eager sailor from the British frigate fired on the Mysorean vessels. In the resultant melee both sides sustained heavy damage, until a second British frigate joined in and drove off the Mysorean ships. In the resultant furor, the outraged British called for an indemnity from the Mysoreans and declared that they would enter Travancore ports at will, despite Mysorean naval ships. The Mysoreans refused, and war was declared by both parties soon afterwards. Within a few months, both Hyderabad and the Marathas had once again reentered the war against Mysore, leaving Mysore surrounded on all sides.
It also brought the British units in Travancore more directly into the fray as well, making it clear that Travancore would not fall in a single campaigning season. In disgust, Tipu sent his forces to their monsoon quarters, planning to build up his forces and armies for a final push, even as he pursued diplomatic efforts to try to bring the Marathas and the Nizam to the peace table. But both found the situation entirely too tempting for settling their territorial scores against Mysore to be easily persuaded to make peace. Hyder Ali had warned his son to play the European powers off against each other: in the end, Tipu had managed to do exactly the opposite - it was he, in his ambition, who had united a formidable coalition against him.
And thus in 1791, after seven years of fragile peace between Mysore and Britain, war had come again. It was a fight which the British government, eager of reducing its commitments in India in the face of gathering tensions in Europe, and Mysore, desirous of conquering Travancore with a minimum of foreign intervention, had not desired. But fortune and destiny can pay little to the wills of man. The guns would speak, and the lion and the tiger would at last come to grips.
Man it was extremely bad time for the British to declare especially with the shit show of the French revolutionary wars just around the corner.
Just guessing, Mysore is going to lose the war at sea but is going to win the land front which is going to make Tipu have an extremely big head. Getting compared to Napoleon in the future is going to make him get an even more bigger head.
Just guessing, Mysore is going to lose the war at sea but is going to win the land front which is going to make Tipu have an extremely big head. Getting compared to Napoleon in the future is going to make him get an even more bigger head.
I am wondering if the Maratha and Hyderabadi states will develop as actually independent states.
I can see it happening as for starters they both have their own languages.
It's true that given the way the 1790s are going to develop it's a burden for the British, but in 1791 this is about the best shot they'll ever get - the Mysoreans tied up in a stalemated quagmire in Travancore, both the Marathas and the Nizam on their side, and the French out of the picture due to their domestic problems.
As to what'll happen, in a way yes for your schema but there are some twists in store....
So far as possible I'm hoping to preserve Indian states as the Sikhs, British Bengal, Marathas, Hyderabad, and Mysoreans, with a constellation of minor states as Oudh, Nepal, Bhutan, Sindh, and depending on the finer details of the war, Travancore. Each of the five big states is pretty unique and offers interesting ways to look at how Indian states would develop in their own context.
Chapter 14, The War-Haunted Land: The Carnatic Campaign
With the entrance of Hyderabad and the Marathas into the war, Tipu Sultan was forced to turn his attention north, as the Marathas and Hyderabad launched a new invasion of Mysorean territory. The Nizam and the Marathas had their own tensions, and refused to cooperate upon a joint offensive, and so unlike in the previous war, as soon as the monsoon had come to an end and permitted the armies to sally forth in the fall of 1792, the Marathas launched an offensive in the west, while the Nizam channeled his forces in a campaign along the Carnatic. Both were wary of Tipu, but took heart from Mysore’s quagmire in Travancore, and believed that with Mysore’s army weakened, they would be able to drive into Mysorean territory and wring a favorable peace settlement that would for the Marathas give them the entirety of the disputed belt of territory between them and Mysore, while the Nizam sought the return of the Carnatic to his control. These ambitious plans would require an equally ambitious offensive.
Tipu split his forces to respond, leaving a significant army in Travancore, under the command of Muhammad Ali, a hero of the Battle of Pollilur in the Second Anglo-Mysore War and who had put in further valuable service consolidating Mysorean control over the Carnatic, with orders to deal with the remnants of Travancore’s resistance and to garrison the Travancore coast and to protect Seringapatam against a British descent. He himself moved north and picked up additional forces along the way. He hoped that a sharp defeat of one of the coalition members might force them out of the war, and for this he chose the Nizam, whose troops he believed were less disciplined and combat capable than the Marathas’. In this, the geographic of the Carnatic coastal plain helped him, as he maneuvered freely, hidden from the enemy, in the Mysorean plateau, free to choose almost as he wished where he would debouche into the plains below.
The Nizam’s forces had made significant progress in the flat terrain of the Carnatic, with relatively limited location fortifications, supported as well by the ships of the Royal Navy which helped to resupply them during their march. However, Hyderabadi artillery was slow-moving, slow-firing, and inaccurate, and thus although there was little to oppose the Nizam’s attack, it was a slow process to actually tackle whatever fortifications that existed. Although hill forts like Udayagiri near Nellore could be bypassed, larger ones were too dangerous to be left in the rear. In one of the age-old examples of history not repeating, but that it does rhyme, when they ran into the Fort of Arcot, previously besieged by the Mysoreans in the Second Anglo-Mysorean War, it took a long time to drag up the guns to besiege the fort. Tipu put this time to good use, and he chose to strike not directly at the Nizam, but rather in one of his classic lightning raids, he attacked with his cavalry forces and shattered the screen of the Nizam’s cavalry and garrisons linking him back to Hyderabad. The Nizam was taken by surprise by the sudden Mysorean counter-offensive, and was forced to lift the siege, advancing north through country scorched by the Mysoreans devastating any potential supply lines and interdicting any resupply to his forces. The two armies would finally meet at Akampet as the main Mysorean army attacked into the flank of the retreating Hyderabad forces.
The Hyderabad soldiers tried to heave their guns around to face the Mysoreans and to reform their lines, but the fatigue that afflicted them, and the lack of training and discipline, sorely told. The Mysoreans attacked under a rippling barrage of musket and cannon fire, which decimated repeated charges of Hyderab’s heavy cavalry that sought to close to quarters and smash the Mysoreans. From unexpected angles, volleys of rockets from the rocket corps, pushed aggressively forward, would sow fear and panic among Hyderabadi forces, with something particularly nightmarish about the red lights of rockets that appeared like fireflies out of the great clouds of gun smoke that rose over the battlefield. Gun batteries that tried to put up a fight were gunned down by accurate long-range fire from the camel gunners with their heavy muskets, who drifted away every time that an attempt was made to fight them off. And then, with Hyderabi forces in disarray, time and time again Mysorean light cavalry emerged out of the wall of smoke screaming war cries, scything down the retreating Hyderabi forces in a horrific slaughter that was said to have made the local rivers run red with blood and which brought bodies washing up along the coast as far south as Madras and even Pondicherry.
If not for the valiant stand of the French corps of Raymond, which managed to block the advance of the Mysorean cavalry and formed a square and delayed the pursuing cavalry, the entire army might have been lost. As it stood, the devastation was near-total, and Raymond’s corps itself took horrific casualties, with Raymond barely escaping alive, and he would have to rebuild his force almost from scratch. The shattered remnants fled into Hyderabad, having lost any remaining cohesion and reduced to a mob of brutalized survivors with nothing in common with an army. Even a significant chunk of the Nizam’s harem and household were lost in the terrible days of the retreat. Of the 50,000 men who had reached so far south, some 30,000 of them had been simply lost, and the desperate retreat out of the Carnatic would continue to wreak tremendous losses among Hyderabad forces.
The Battle of Akampet and the apocalyptic defeat inflicted on Hyderabad was a brutal shock to the Nizam and to the anti-Mysorean alliance as a whole. But it did not bring peace: by this time the British had moved their Bengal Army into Hyderabad in preparation for their own Carnatic campaign. Although the French and British were still neutral in Europe, if the British could retake the territory around Madras it would leave them in a strong position if hostilities did break out again, and would enable them to reclaim their old territory. For their own political reasons they had been opposed to the Nizam launching his independent campaign in the Carnatic, believing that the Nizam’s forces if victorious, would delegitimize a British claim, while if they lost it would sorely try the integrity and the resilience of the alliance. For better or worse it had been the latter that had occurred, but the British army, which had been gathered and moved south from Bengal too late to participate in the opening offensive, was now perfectly placed to minimize the follow-on effects.
Under normal circumstances, the Nizam very well might have made peace, and indeed there were a number of small revolts and attempts at claiming the throne that broke out in his territory, which were put down by a combination of the Nizam’s remaining forces and the British. But these were not normal times, and the British army was the only remaining effective field force in the country, and conveniently camped right at Hyderabad. The British were not so crass as to make their power clear over the Nizam, but it was quite clear to him that they would frown upon him leaving the alliance, and their army not only might be the only thing holding his rule together and was one he was powerless against at the moment. Despite him staying in the war, the damage done by the Mysorean victory was quite enough, with the Marathas hurriedly evacuating their troops from the western part of Mysore, save for continued desultory raids, and preparing to defend against a Mysorean attack that they expected to come at them next. The Nizam took hurried to rebuild his crushed forces, but for the interim the British were the only army that might protect his domains against a Mysorean advance, and he himself was powerless.
Coming at the same time as this was the continued advance of Mysorean troops through Travancore, where the British troops joined up with retreating Travancore units to make a stand at Kottarakara. The Mysoreans under Muhammad Ali won a convincing, if unimaginative victory, where Ali used his superiority in guns to pound the Travancore-British army before launching an assault, using his superior numbers to overwhelm them and to send them back reeling to the south. With the field army out of the way, he continued his advance, and within days Mysorean batteries opened fire on Travancore’s largest city of Kollam, the city soon to fall and to cement Mysorean control over Travancore. Although Travancore continued to possess some ports to the south of Kollam, supported by the British whose battered but still intact armies held their cohesion, at this point the continuation of the campaign looked mostly like a mopping-up operations. The fortunes of the coalition appeared to be at their lowest ebb, with victorious Mysorean advances both in the north and the south.
Not all was doom and gloom for the alliance, for the Royal Navy would launch a brilliant raid on the main Mysorean port of Mangalore, the center of the Mysorean naval construction project. Although coastal defense batteries had been significantly improved, the Mysorean defenses were caught unawares when the British showed up, and in the ensuing fighting the nascent Mysorean ship-of-the line squadron in port was wiped out, with two ships of the line captured, another two burned, and the remaining three heavily damaged before the British squadron hove off under intensifying Mysorean cannonades.
Tipu was nothing if not resilient though, and asides from ordering Mangalore’s defenses to be improved, more gun batteries to be built, and the fleet to be reconstructed as soon as possible, Muhammad Ali was ordered to defend the Malabar coast, with his subordinates completing mopping-up operations in Travancore. While the British attack on Mangalore was painful to Mysore’s line-of-battle-fleet, a squadron of Mysorean frigates that put to sea in the Bay of Bengal from the new Mysorean port of Parangipettatai managed to capture a host of British indiamen and merchant ships that recalled Suffren’s ravages on British trade a decade ago, the British themselves not having expected the Mysoreans to go on the offensive. An attempt by the British Bengal fleet to destroy the Mysorean frigate squadron led to the Mysoreans holing up in their home port of Parangipettatai, and the British attack on them failed, with a ship of the line, Sampson, running aground and being captured, and a second, Culloden, nearly burning after a Mysorean rocket ketch managed to loose a volley of rockets into it, with the British having to beat off for the open sea. It made for an ominous note for British commercial power. A series of frigate battles and skirmishes off of the Malabar coast kept both sides busy and reinforced the danger the British felt - that although they could command the seas, they lacked the sheer amount of resources required to keep the Mysoreans truly bottled up, and commerce and trade in the Indian Ocean was spread thin and vulnerable to foreign attack.
It was at this nadir of allied fortunes that Tipu chose to pass to the offensive. Believing that one firm more blow would knock the Nizam out of the war, and break the anti-Mysorean coalition, Tipu quickly repaired the damages to his army, making good losses and reassembling troops, and prepared to bring the war to the enemy. Morale had never been higher as the Mysorean army crossed the pre-war frontier and began its campaign into Hyderabad, and never before had a more valiant and stronger Mysorean army taken the field, as the vast swarms of Mysorean light cavalry struck out across Hyderabad territory leaving a path of devastation in their wake, the infantry marched sweating under the Indian sun but cheerful and confident, singing songs and rhapsodizing about the plunder they would take in the Nizam’s court, and the gunners hauled their guns north swearing as they made their way over every hill only to see another one in the distance. The winter campaigning season of 1792/1793 would be a decisive one for the future of India.
Tipu split his forces to respond, leaving a significant army in Travancore, under the command of Muhammad Ali, a hero of the Battle of Pollilur in the Second Anglo-Mysore War and who had put in further valuable service consolidating Mysorean control over the Carnatic, with orders to deal with the remnants of Travancore’s resistance and to garrison the Travancore coast and to protect Seringapatam against a British descent. He himself moved north and picked up additional forces along the way. He hoped that a sharp defeat of one of the coalition members might force them out of the war, and for this he chose the Nizam, whose troops he believed were less disciplined and combat capable than the Marathas’. In this, the geographic of the Carnatic coastal plain helped him, as he maneuvered freely, hidden from the enemy, in the Mysorean plateau, free to choose almost as he wished where he would debouche into the plains below.
The Nizam’s forces had made significant progress in the flat terrain of the Carnatic, with relatively limited location fortifications, supported as well by the ships of the Royal Navy which helped to resupply them during their march. However, Hyderabadi artillery was slow-moving, slow-firing, and inaccurate, and thus although there was little to oppose the Nizam’s attack, it was a slow process to actually tackle whatever fortifications that existed. Although hill forts like Udayagiri near Nellore could be bypassed, larger ones were too dangerous to be left in the rear. In one of the age-old examples of history not repeating, but that it does rhyme, when they ran into the Fort of Arcot, previously besieged by the Mysoreans in the Second Anglo-Mysorean War, it took a long time to drag up the guns to besiege the fort. Tipu put this time to good use, and he chose to strike not directly at the Nizam, but rather in one of his classic lightning raids, he attacked with his cavalry forces and shattered the screen of the Nizam’s cavalry and garrisons linking him back to Hyderabad. The Nizam was taken by surprise by the sudden Mysorean counter-offensive, and was forced to lift the siege, advancing north through country scorched by the Mysoreans devastating any potential supply lines and interdicting any resupply to his forces. The two armies would finally meet at Akampet as the main Mysorean army attacked into the flank of the retreating Hyderabad forces.
The Hyderabad soldiers tried to heave their guns around to face the Mysoreans and to reform their lines, but the fatigue that afflicted them, and the lack of training and discipline, sorely told. The Mysoreans attacked under a rippling barrage of musket and cannon fire, which decimated repeated charges of Hyderab’s heavy cavalry that sought to close to quarters and smash the Mysoreans. From unexpected angles, volleys of rockets from the rocket corps, pushed aggressively forward, would sow fear and panic among Hyderabadi forces, with something particularly nightmarish about the red lights of rockets that appeared like fireflies out of the great clouds of gun smoke that rose over the battlefield. Gun batteries that tried to put up a fight were gunned down by accurate long-range fire from the camel gunners with their heavy muskets, who drifted away every time that an attempt was made to fight them off. And then, with Hyderabi forces in disarray, time and time again Mysorean light cavalry emerged out of the wall of smoke screaming war cries, scything down the retreating Hyderabi forces in a horrific slaughter that was said to have made the local rivers run red with blood and which brought bodies washing up along the coast as far south as Madras and even Pondicherry.
If not for the valiant stand of the French corps of Raymond, which managed to block the advance of the Mysorean cavalry and formed a square and delayed the pursuing cavalry, the entire army might have been lost. As it stood, the devastation was near-total, and Raymond’s corps itself took horrific casualties, with Raymond barely escaping alive, and he would have to rebuild his force almost from scratch. The shattered remnants fled into Hyderabad, having lost any remaining cohesion and reduced to a mob of brutalized survivors with nothing in common with an army. Even a significant chunk of the Nizam’s harem and household were lost in the terrible days of the retreat. Of the 50,000 men who had reached so far south, some 30,000 of them had been simply lost, and the desperate retreat out of the Carnatic would continue to wreak tremendous losses among Hyderabad forces.
The Battle of Akampet and the apocalyptic defeat inflicted on Hyderabad was a brutal shock to the Nizam and to the anti-Mysorean alliance as a whole. But it did not bring peace: by this time the British had moved their Bengal Army into Hyderabad in preparation for their own Carnatic campaign. Although the French and British were still neutral in Europe, if the British could retake the territory around Madras it would leave them in a strong position if hostilities did break out again, and would enable them to reclaim their old territory. For their own political reasons they had been opposed to the Nizam launching his independent campaign in the Carnatic, believing that the Nizam’s forces if victorious, would delegitimize a British claim, while if they lost it would sorely try the integrity and the resilience of the alliance. For better or worse it had been the latter that had occurred, but the British army, which had been gathered and moved south from Bengal too late to participate in the opening offensive, was now perfectly placed to minimize the follow-on effects.
Under normal circumstances, the Nizam very well might have made peace, and indeed there were a number of small revolts and attempts at claiming the throne that broke out in his territory, which were put down by a combination of the Nizam’s remaining forces and the British. But these were not normal times, and the British army was the only remaining effective field force in the country, and conveniently camped right at Hyderabad. The British were not so crass as to make their power clear over the Nizam, but it was quite clear to him that they would frown upon him leaving the alliance, and their army not only might be the only thing holding his rule together and was one he was powerless against at the moment. Despite him staying in the war, the damage done by the Mysorean victory was quite enough, with the Marathas hurriedly evacuating their troops from the western part of Mysore, save for continued desultory raids, and preparing to defend against a Mysorean attack that they expected to come at them next. The Nizam took hurried to rebuild his crushed forces, but for the interim the British were the only army that might protect his domains against a Mysorean advance, and he himself was powerless.
Coming at the same time as this was the continued advance of Mysorean troops through Travancore, where the British troops joined up with retreating Travancore units to make a stand at Kottarakara. The Mysoreans under Muhammad Ali won a convincing, if unimaginative victory, where Ali used his superiority in guns to pound the Travancore-British army before launching an assault, using his superior numbers to overwhelm them and to send them back reeling to the south. With the field army out of the way, he continued his advance, and within days Mysorean batteries opened fire on Travancore’s largest city of Kollam, the city soon to fall and to cement Mysorean control over Travancore. Although Travancore continued to possess some ports to the south of Kollam, supported by the British whose battered but still intact armies held their cohesion, at this point the continuation of the campaign looked mostly like a mopping-up operations. The fortunes of the coalition appeared to be at their lowest ebb, with victorious Mysorean advances both in the north and the south.
Not all was doom and gloom for the alliance, for the Royal Navy would launch a brilliant raid on the main Mysorean port of Mangalore, the center of the Mysorean naval construction project. Although coastal defense batteries had been significantly improved, the Mysorean defenses were caught unawares when the British showed up, and in the ensuing fighting the nascent Mysorean ship-of-the line squadron in port was wiped out, with two ships of the line captured, another two burned, and the remaining three heavily damaged before the British squadron hove off under intensifying Mysorean cannonades.
Tipu was nothing if not resilient though, and asides from ordering Mangalore’s defenses to be improved, more gun batteries to be built, and the fleet to be reconstructed as soon as possible, Muhammad Ali was ordered to defend the Malabar coast, with his subordinates completing mopping-up operations in Travancore. While the British attack on Mangalore was painful to Mysore’s line-of-battle-fleet, a squadron of Mysorean frigates that put to sea in the Bay of Bengal from the new Mysorean port of Parangipettatai managed to capture a host of British indiamen and merchant ships that recalled Suffren’s ravages on British trade a decade ago, the British themselves not having expected the Mysoreans to go on the offensive. An attempt by the British Bengal fleet to destroy the Mysorean frigate squadron led to the Mysoreans holing up in their home port of Parangipettatai, and the British attack on them failed, with a ship of the line, Sampson, running aground and being captured, and a second, Culloden, nearly burning after a Mysorean rocket ketch managed to loose a volley of rockets into it, with the British having to beat off for the open sea. It made for an ominous note for British commercial power. A series of frigate battles and skirmishes off of the Malabar coast kept both sides busy and reinforced the danger the British felt - that although they could command the seas, they lacked the sheer amount of resources required to keep the Mysoreans truly bottled up, and commerce and trade in the Indian Ocean was spread thin and vulnerable to foreign attack.
It was at this nadir of allied fortunes that Tipu chose to pass to the offensive. Believing that one firm more blow would knock the Nizam out of the war, and break the anti-Mysorean coalition, Tipu quickly repaired the damages to his army, making good losses and reassembling troops, and prepared to bring the war to the enemy. Morale had never been higher as the Mysorean army crossed the pre-war frontier and began its campaign into Hyderabad, and never before had a more valiant and stronger Mysorean army taken the field, as the vast swarms of Mysorean light cavalry struck out across Hyderabad territory leaving a path of devastation in their wake, the infantry marched sweating under the Indian sun but cheerful and confident, singing songs and rhapsodizing about the plunder they would take in the Nizam’s court, and the gunners hauled their guns north swearing as they made their way over every hill only to see another one in the distance. The winter campaigning season of 1792/1793 would be a decisive one for the future of India.
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Howdy! First of all I want to say I'm loving this TL! It is both well written and creates an interesting space to play with.
I was wondering if you had a source or at least the book for what inspired that last bit here, I know someone who studies the Gulf and India and if Tipu really did have plans to lease Basra in real life I'd be fascinated to see that. However you need to reach me please don't hesitate! Can't wait for the next update
Yes, I believe it is State and Diplomacy under Tipu Sultan, edited by Irfan Habib, that goes into the Basra proposal in substantial detail. Confronting Colonialism: Resistance and Modernisation under Haidar Ali and Tipu Sulan, also edited by Irfan Habib, has a list of the various trading posts that Tipu planned to set up which I think is where I drew the rest of them from.Howdy! First of all I want to say I'm loving this TL! It is both well written and creates an interesting space to play with.
I was wondering if you had a source or at least the book for what inspired that last bit here, I know someone who studies the Gulf and India and if Tipu really did have plans to lease Basra in real life I'd be fascinated to see that. However you need to reach me please don't hesitate! Can't wait for the next update
I'm glad you enjoy it as well!
Chapter 15: The Only Thing More Terrible than a Battle Lost: Malkapur, 1793
The British field army in Hyderabad, under the command of the British General John Little, was determined to protect their new de-facto protectorate and to drive back the Mysoreans. Little, despite the reverses sustained by the British in the Second Anglo-Mysore War, as well as the Nizam’s disastrous defeats, believed that he would have the upper hand in any stand-up fight. Previous British defeats had been occasioned by small detachments of British troops cut off and smashed by superior Mysorean forces, or by French naval victories in conjunction with Mysorean raiding cavalry. Here, neither of this was true, and the sturdy British redcoats, superior in discipline and training to their Mysorean counterparts, would have their chance to shine. That the Nizam’s army had been defeated so crushingly meant little, since almost no one had much faith in the Nizam’s military forces anyway.
Swarms of Mysorean raiding cavalry had been the fight sign of the invasion, as with any offensive that Mysore launched. Although the number of Mysorean cavalry had fallen somewhat, with the increased focus on sepoy troops, light cavalry were still a cheap – subsisting off of loot rather than pay – force, lighting-fast, capable of spreading fear and terror, and always very entrepreneurial, quite literally since they looked for any way to make a profit. It must have been a feeling of nostalgia for Tipu, like the days more than a decade ago when Mysorean troops had surged into the Carnatic, him at the head of the light horse, looting and burning to the gates of Madras, sowing terror to the sea. This time he was stuck behind in the slower moving infantry, on an elephant’s back.
The British had the advantage of a firm goal of wanting to annihilate the Mysorean army, while the Mysoreans by contrast were not in an annihilationist mood – their objective was to capture Hyderabad to send a firm political message and to knock Hyderabad out of the war and to shatter the coalition. But the British difficulties were compounded by the swarms of light cavalry, which meant that determining the main concentration of where Mysorean troops were was nearly impossible. As it turned out, the Mysoreans were overconfident about the security their cavalry afforded them. The Mysoreans masked their forward advance with their cavalry, aiming to make their way around the British army, and to cut them off from their lines of communication in Hyderabad. It came very close to working, except for the fact that a Mysorean deserter, one of the cavalrymen who was making life such hell for the British, revealed the Mysorean plan of advance.
Little took immediate advantage of this, pitching camp and marching against the Mysoreans. Brushing aside the screen of Mysorean cavalrymen, they at least gave the Mysoreans the time to deploy for the battle of Malkapur.
Malkapur was southeast of Hyderabad, and the Mysorean army had been traveling along the banks of the Musi river, useful for supplies and for water, thankfully for them arriving in time to assume battle formation. Their right was held by a river, while their left abutted onto mountainous hills. The ground was mildly broken, but not enough to impede effective artillery fire. Given their exposed forward position, attempting to retreat could very well lead to the Mysoreans being savaged by the British, especially since there were the legions of camp followers behind them, who would impede any escape. But on the other hand, Little’s troops were tired from their long day of marching under the burning Indian sun. Perhaps against the wishes of either side, the battle was going to be a decisive one either way: if the British triumphed then the Mysoreans were going to have severe difficulty escaping, and if the Mysoreans won, then the British were going to be pursued and hounded into oblivion by Mysorean cavalry after the battle, already swarming along behind the British flanks.
But on the battlefield itself it was a terrain too narrow to enable much use of cavalry, at least at the opening, and so it would be an infantryman’s battle. The British had brought some 22,000 troops, including 8,000 European troops, to the battlefield, the Mysoreans 40,000. This didn’t include the cavalry forces on both sides, too narrow to really be used.
What a sight it was, to see the stalwart redcoats marching to the attack! Their crimson red was stained by dust and drenched with sweat, and the men were fatigued by their long march under the scorching Indian sun, having barely had time to drink and have their meal before they went unto the assault, but implacably they advanced, serried lines of grim men. The Mysoreans had drawn up a line of their infantry intermixed with batteries of artillery, rockets behind them to fire over them at the advancing British forces. The Mysoreans opened fire at too long of a range with their guns, and although they inflicted casualties with their great roundshot on the advancing British lines, the buildup of smoke served to mask their guns, diminishing what the artillery could have achieved. British guns gave as best as they could get with their own outnumbered batteries moving up and pouring fire into the Mysoreans. Although they weren’t nearly as effective, the rockets were the most terrifying of all, as skittering volleys of brilliant red shot up in the air, descending in jittering madness upon the British lines. But still the British advanced, regardless of the losses.
And then the British entered musket range. The Mysoreans fired a bit long, and a bit high, but again they inflicted painful losses on the British. The British closed further, and volleys of canister ripped holes in their lines, like great shotguns, storms of metal that screamed past, cutting cheese wedges in the British lines as men fell, plucked away by an uncaring god. And then the British leveled their muskets and fired, the brutal, smashing, close-ranged volley that the British were famed for. Then they fixed bayonets, and charged, a line of shimmering steel as whose men seemed larger than life, the eyes of the Mysorean soldiers drawn to the bayonets that glinted at them with painful malice.
The Mysorean first line wavered and then broke under the assault in the center and on the right, but on the left where the more broken terrain slowed the British attack they folded and then reformed, Mysorean sharpshooters in the woods with their long muskets pouring fire into the British flank, their long guns inflicting terribly casualties with their heavy balls. But with the Mysorean center and left folding, the battle looked lost.
Summoning his reserves, with his sword bared, Tipu himself led the counter-charge at the center. His shock-troops charged the British line and a furious melee engaged in the confusion of the action. On the Mysorean right, the gunners who had been overwhelmed had fallen next to their guns and pretended to be dead, and now with the British passed, they jumped up again and re-manned their guns, and as the British right prepared to charge into the Mysorean center, they opened up a devastating volley of cannister, catching the British from behind. Caught by an unexpected attack from behind, the British left wavered, before British horse reserves, with the space to operate now, were thrown in and sabered the Mysorean gunners, stabbing the dead who lay upon the ground again and again until they were sure that they were well and truly extinguished, an orgy of vicious violence unrelieved of any mercy, of desperate men thrown into the whirlwind of agony and despair.
But the distraction of the gunners gave time for Mysorean officers in the fleeing troops to reconstitute some order, and turned about the retreating Mysorean sepoys. The line was shaky, ragged, troops with faces still written with fear, but as the British right attacked, its own line with holes ripped in it, they fired for effect, the only fire that they could carry out in their shocked state, the brutal, crippling, destructive uncontrolled fire, men firing as fast as they could load and pulled the trigger. Here and there the occasional ramrod went spinning off into the void, a shaking, brutalized man firing before he rammed the ball home, but the powder-stained masses kept loading furiously, their hands skinned and bloody from scrapes with their bayonets, their faces blackened by the smoke. Some of the British battalions, like demons, came on, larger than life in the acrid gunsmoke, grim fanatical monsters that the shaky Mysorean line quailed in fear to see. But their numbers were too few, and although some got through, at that line of turban-clad troops, at some point it was too much. They had marched too far, they were too exhausted, they had been shocked by the cannonfire from behind them, and now they faced another line of troops, illuminated by the glare of rocket artillery behind them. They broke. Those who made contact did their brutal work, Rosalie stabbing, and segments of the Mysorean line shattered, men running from those terrible demons, but not enough, as an in invincible force met an unmovable object and was swallowed up in its mass.
On the British right, the shock troops, the grenadiers, had become caught up in the vicious fighting with the bayonet, no quarter asked, no quarter given. The Mysorean long gun troops in the woods and hills who had harried, pestered, tormented them with their horrific guns had their punishment when the British took their revenge, and units of grenadiers and shock troops gained the woods, stabbing any Mysorean soldier they could find, exterminating the helpless skirmishers, unable to fight back with their long ungainly muskets, taking out their anger, their rage, their confusion, their desperation in a vicious fighting in the dappled sunlight of the forests, the normal soothing sigh of the trees replaced with desperate screams and the cries of dying men for their mothers. But the energy of the attack was spent.
And all along the line, the momentum of the British attack, those unstoppable walls of men moving forward, had ground to a halt. It had come within inches of smashing the Mysorean line, but the Mysoreans had somehow, barely, held, had reformed under the shock of the attack. With reports coming in from that tangled hellish nightmare, Little ordered the retreat. The Mysorean soldiers on their right had broken ranks, chasing after the British soldiers fleeing from them, and they faced the last nightmare of the day, when the British apocalypse of their heavy horse cavalry, hidden by the thick clouds of choking smoke, came charging out of the hellish banks, obliterating them in a storm of steel and pounding horses that trampled and smashed the shattered Mysorean infantry formation under foot. But the Mysorean rocket batteries, leveling their rockets to horizontal, with desperate terror to halt the unstoppable heavy European cavalry, fired their blazing red rockets at the horses. The whinnying terror of the mounts stopped the cavalry, Mysorean rockets in a rain heavier than a hail that the Indians had never seen, crazy, inaccurate, rockets mounted on the frames and fired, and then another, men sweating in the heat, sun-bronzed faces turned as black as any of the Sultan’s Abyssinians with smoke of the powder and the backblast, fired with unquenchable terror. The cavalry, milling about in confusion, retreated. The day was over. The Mysoreans had won, but at a cost so terrible that on any other day it would have been reckoned a defeat.
The Battle of Malkapur was the bloodiest battle that the British had ever fought in India. Nearly a third of the army was destroyed in the attack on the Mysoreans, at 7,000 dead, wounded, or captured, with casualties particularly intense for the European infantry, whose losses reached 3,000. On the Mysorean side, casualties were even higher with some 12,000 troops dead or wounded, particularly severe among the camel gunners who had been butchered in the woods, and the gunners, and the Sultan himself was injured, his arm having sustained a slicing blow that thankfully didn’t fester. In fact, the first shocked rumors of the battle which came back to Mysore were that he had been killed, with the Coorg folk song Tipu Has Left for War celebrating his death becoming an enduring piece among them.
But the Mysorean army was much larger, and this was just its main combat elements, with the ruthless light cavalry mostly left untouched. Although the exhausted and shocked Mysorean army, barely believing that they had survived, would rest on the field of battle for another two days, on those hellish fields where the slowly-dying screams of the wounded filled the living with nightmares as they tried to sleep, where fetid odors rose from the decaying bodies,where the river swelled with corpses and its once-clean waters turned fetid and diseased, the Mysorean light cavalry harried and harassed the British all the way back to the coast, as they fled in panic past their prepared bastion of Hyderabad. When they reached the coast and the safety of Royal Navy ships there were barely 8,000 left alive. The Nizam’s hastily-formed armies broke towards the north, leaving Hyderabad to the mercy of the invader.
A week later, the Mysorean army, still battered and bruised, entered Hyderabad, banners waving in triumph and with all the splendor and pomp that Tipu Sultan could put on, with vast gifts of charities and largesse to the people drumming up suitably cheering crowds. Those must have been the happiest days of Tipu’s life, when it seemed as if the coalition had been defeated once and for all, when his forces had achieved decisive victories over the hated British, when all he had to do was wait for groveling envoys from the Nizam to come to him pleading for peace, and he would be the undisputed master of India from the cape to Hyderabad.
But jubilation turned just as quickly to panic, for news arrived to Tipu even as he delighted in the fruits of victory in Hyderabad that the British had landed on the Malabar Coast – and that Seringapatam had risen in revolt.
Swarms of Mysorean raiding cavalry had been the fight sign of the invasion, as with any offensive that Mysore launched. Although the number of Mysorean cavalry had fallen somewhat, with the increased focus on sepoy troops, light cavalry were still a cheap – subsisting off of loot rather than pay – force, lighting-fast, capable of spreading fear and terror, and always very entrepreneurial, quite literally since they looked for any way to make a profit. It must have been a feeling of nostalgia for Tipu, like the days more than a decade ago when Mysorean troops had surged into the Carnatic, him at the head of the light horse, looting and burning to the gates of Madras, sowing terror to the sea. This time he was stuck behind in the slower moving infantry, on an elephant’s back.
The British had the advantage of a firm goal of wanting to annihilate the Mysorean army, while the Mysoreans by contrast were not in an annihilationist mood – their objective was to capture Hyderabad to send a firm political message and to knock Hyderabad out of the war and to shatter the coalition. But the British difficulties were compounded by the swarms of light cavalry, which meant that determining the main concentration of where Mysorean troops were was nearly impossible. As it turned out, the Mysoreans were overconfident about the security their cavalry afforded them. The Mysoreans masked their forward advance with their cavalry, aiming to make their way around the British army, and to cut them off from their lines of communication in Hyderabad. It came very close to working, except for the fact that a Mysorean deserter, one of the cavalrymen who was making life such hell for the British, revealed the Mysorean plan of advance.
Little took immediate advantage of this, pitching camp and marching against the Mysoreans. Brushing aside the screen of Mysorean cavalrymen, they at least gave the Mysoreans the time to deploy for the battle of Malkapur.
Malkapur was southeast of Hyderabad, and the Mysorean army had been traveling along the banks of the Musi river, useful for supplies and for water, thankfully for them arriving in time to assume battle formation. Their right was held by a river, while their left abutted onto mountainous hills. The ground was mildly broken, but not enough to impede effective artillery fire. Given their exposed forward position, attempting to retreat could very well lead to the Mysoreans being savaged by the British, especially since there were the legions of camp followers behind them, who would impede any escape. But on the other hand, Little’s troops were tired from their long day of marching under the burning Indian sun. Perhaps against the wishes of either side, the battle was going to be a decisive one either way: if the British triumphed then the Mysoreans were going to have severe difficulty escaping, and if the Mysoreans won, then the British were going to be pursued and hounded into oblivion by Mysorean cavalry after the battle, already swarming along behind the British flanks.
But on the battlefield itself it was a terrain too narrow to enable much use of cavalry, at least at the opening, and so it would be an infantryman’s battle. The British had brought some 22,000 troops, including 8,000 European troops, to the battlefield, the Mysoreans 40,000. This didn’t include the cavalry forces on both sides, too narrow to really be used.
What a sight it was, to see the stalwart redcoats marching to the attack! Their crimson red was stained by dust and drenched with sweat, and the men were fatigued by their long march under the scorching Indian sun, having barely had time to drink and have their meal before they went unto the assault, but implacably they advanced, serried lines of grim men. The Mysoreans had drawn up a line of their infantry intermixed with batteries of artillery, rockets behind them to fire over them at the advancing British forces. The Mysoreans opened fire at too long of a range with their guns, and although they inflicted casualties with their great roundshot on the advancing British lines, the buildup of smoke served to mask their guns, diminishing what the artillery could have achieved. British guns gave as best as they could get with their own outnumbered batteries moving up and pouring fire into the Mysoreans. Although they weren’t nearly as effective, the rockets were the most terrifying of all, as skittering volleys of brilliant red shot up in the air, descending in jittering madness upon the British lines. But still the British advanced, regardless of the losses.
And then the British entered musket range. The Mysoreans fired a bit long, and a bit high, but again they inflicted painful losses on the British. The British closed further, and volleys of canister ripped holes in their lines, like great shotguns, storms of metal that screamed past, cutting cheese wedges in the British lines as men fell, plucked away by an uncaring god. And then the British leveled their muskets and fired, the brutal, smashing, close-ranged volley that the British were famed for. Then they fixed bayonets, and charged, a line of shimmering steel as whose men seemed larger than life, the eyes of the Mysorean soldiers drawn to the bayonets that glinted at them with painful malice.
The Mysorean first line wavered and then broke under the assault in the center and on the right, but on the left where the more broken terrain slowed the British attack they folded and then reformed, Mysorean sharpshooters in the woods with their long muskets pouring fire into the British flank, their long guns inflicting terribly casualties with their heavy balls. But with the Mysorean center and left folding, the battle looked lost.
Summoning his reserves, with his sword bared, Tipu himself led the counter-charge at the center. His shock-troops charged the British line and a furious melee engaged in the confusion of the action. On the Mysorean right, the gunners who had been overwhelmed had fallen next to their guns and pretended to be dead, and now with the British passed, they jumped up again and re-manned their guns, and as the British right prepared to charge into the Mysorean center, they opened up a devastating volley of cannister, catching the British from behind. Caught by an unexpected attack from behind, the British left wavered, before British horse reserves, with the space to operate now, were thrown in and sabered the Mysorean gunners, stabbing the dead who lay upon the ground again and again until they were sure that they were well and truly extinguished, an orgy of vicious violence unrelieved of any mercy, of desperate men thrown into the whirlwind of agony and despair.
But the distraction of the gunners gave time for Mysorean officers in the fleeing troops to reconstitute some order, and turned about the retreating Mysorean sepoys. The line was shaky, ragged, troops with faces still written with fear, but as the British right attacked, its own line with holes ripped in it, they fired for effect, the only fire that they could carry out in their shocked state, the brutal, crippling, destructive uncontrolled fire, men firing as fast as they could load and pulled the trigger. Here and there the occasional ramrod went spinning off into the void, a shaking, brutalized man firing before he rammed the ball home, but the powder-stained masses kept loading furiously, their hands skinned and bloody from scrapes with their bayonets, their faces blackened by the smoke. Some of the British battalions, like demons, came on, larger than life in the acrid gunsmoke, grim fanatical monsters that the shaky Mysorean line quailed in fear to see. But their numbers were too few, and although some got through, at that line of turban-clad troops, at some point it was too much. They had marched too far, they were too exhausted, they had been shocked by the cannonfire from behind them, and now they faced another line of troops, illuminated by the glare of rocket artillery behind them. They broke. Those who made contact did their brutal work, Rosalie stabbing, and segments of the Mysorean line shattered, men running from those terrible demons, but not enough, as an in invincible force met an unmovable object and was swallowed up in its mass.
On the British right, the shock troops, the grenadiers, had become caught up in the vicious fighting with the bayonet, no quarter asked, no quarter given. The Mysorean long gun troops in the woods and hills who had harried, pestered, tormented them with their horrific guns had their punishment when the British took their revenge, and units of grenadiers and shock troops gained the woods, stabbing any Mysorean soldier they could find, exterminating the helpless skirmishers, unable to fight back with their long ungainly muskets, taking out their anger, their rage, their confusion, their desperation in a vicious fighting in the dappled sunlight of the forests, the normal soothing sigh of the trees replaced with desperate screams and the cries of dying men for their mothers. But the energy of the attack was spent.
And all along the line, the momentum of the British attack, those unstoppable walls of men moving forward, had ground to a halt. It had come within inches of smashing the Mysorean line, but the Mysoreans had somehow, barely, held, had reformed under the shock of the attack. With reports coming in from that tangled hellish nightmare, Little ordered the retreat. The Mysorean soldiers on their right had broken ranks, chasing after the British soldiers fleeing from them, and they faced the last nightmare of the day, when the British apocalypse of their heavy horse cavalry, hidden by the thick clouds of choking smoke, came charging out of the hellish banks, obliterating them in a storm of steel and pounding horses that trampled and smashed the shattered Mysorean infantry formation under foot. But the Mysorean rocket batteries, leveling their rockets to horizontal, with desperate terror to halt the unstoppable heavy European cavalry, fired their blazing red rockets at the horses. The whinnying terror of the mounts stopped the cavalry, Mysorean rockets in a rain heavier than a hail that the Indians had never seen, crazy, inaccurate, rockets mounted on the frames and fired, and then another, men sweating in the heat, sun-bronzed faces turned as black as any of the Sultan’s Abyssinians with smoke of the powder and the backblast, fired with unquenchable terror. The cavalry, milling about in confusion, retreated. The day was over. The Mysoreans had won, but at a cost so terrible that on any other day it would have been reckoned a defeat.
The Battle of Malkapur was the bloodiest battle that the British had ever fought in India. Nearly a third of the army was destroyed in the attack on the Mysoreans, at 7,000 dead, wounded, or captured, with casualties particularly intense for the European infantry, whose losses reached 3,000. On the Mysorean side, casualties were even higher with some 12,000 troops dead or wounded, particularly severe among the camel gunners who had been butchered in the woods, and the gunners, and the Sultan himself was injured, his arm having sustained a slicing blow that thankfully didn’t fester. In fact, the first shocked rumors of the battle which came back to Mysore were that he had been killed, with the Coorg folk song Tipu Has Left for War celebrating his death becoming an enduring piece among them.
But the Mysorean army was much larger, and this was just its main combat elements, with the ruthless light cavalry mostly left untouched. Although the exhausted and shocked Mysorean army, barely believing that they had survived, would rest on the field of battle for another two days, on those hellish fields where the slowly-dying screams of the wounded filled the living with nightmares as they tried to sleep, where fetid odors rose from the decaying bodies,where the river swelled with corpses and its once-clean waters turned fetid and diseased, the Mysorean light cavalry harried and harassed the British all the way back to the coast, as they fled in panic past their prepared bastion of Hyderabad. When they reached the coast and the safety of Royal Navy ships there were barely 8,000 left alive. The Nizam’s hastily-formed armies broke towards the north, leaving Hyderabad to the mercy of the invader.
A week later, the Mysorean army, still battered and bruised, entered Hyderabad, banners waving in triumph and with all the splendor and pomp that Tipu Sultan could put on, with vast gifts of charities and largesse to the people drumming up suitably cheering crowds. Those must have been the happiest days of Tipu’s life, when it seemed as if the coalition had been defeated once and for all, when his forces had achieved decisive victories over the hated British, when all he had to do was wait for groveling envoys from the Nizam to come to him pleading for peace, and he would be the undisputed master of India from the cape to Hyderabad.
But jubilation turned just as quickly to panic, for news arrived to Tipu even as he delighted in the fruits of victory in Hyderabad that the British had landed on the Malabar Coast – and that Seringapatam had risen in revolt.
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I admire how you never lose sight of how damn difficult Mysore's position was.
You mean Tipu's position. I wouldn't equate him with Mysore as a whole, illegitimate usurper that he was. Dastardly person and a religious bigot at par with Aurangzeb on top of that.