Chapter 16: The Years of the Sword I, The Seringapatam Struggle
One of British propaganda’s claims against Mysore, eager to make the link between Mysore and Revolutionary France, was that Tipu Sultan had erected a Tree of Liberty like the Jacobins in France. Mysore in this vision, like Revolutionary France, was a threat to the established order, overthrowing legitimate vested princes in the Carnatic and Travancore, a threat to its neighbors, with a leadership that had overturned the true ruler of Mysore, the Wodeyar dynasty, with a fanatical and violent ideology of the tyrannical Mysorean sultan Tipu, exactly like Robespierre or Saint-Juste in France.
This was an exaggeration and a rumor: although Mysore was close to France, its only real ally, the Mysoeans had not - at least as of 1793 - yet built a tree of liberty, and nor was there a Jacobin club. But even if Mysore hadn’t adopted French ideology, even if no liberty trees or guillotines dotted the streets of Seringapatam, even if no revolutionary cockades were on the turbans of Mysorean soldiers, even if Mysore hadn’t declared war upon all kings and tyrants, if Carnot, the organizer of victory who had saved the French Republic in l’an II, had been dropped into Seringapatam in 1793, he would have felt perfectly at home if he had been presented with an account of events and might have sighed to see those desperate years of 1792 and 1793 were just as torn with agony as in far-off France.
Mysore’s general in charge of affairs in the west was Muhammad Ali, who was a trusted friend of the Tipu Sultan, who he had known for many years, as well as having won previous claim to fame in the Second Anglo-Mysore War. It was an obvious danger for any regime to have a powerful army of forces near the capital under an independent commander, but during the Great Indian War, Mysore was persistently threatened by naval landings by the British, principally along the Carnatic Coast but also along Malabar, which were too strong for the Mysorean navy to be able to guarantee against. This required a central field army that would be able to respond to the threatened British landing. Strategy was based upon holding coastal fortifications and naval bastions, such as Mangalore, Cannanore, Porto Novo, and indirectly (news had not yet arrived of the French Republic's declaration of war on England on February 1st, 1793) the French ports of Mahé, Madras, and Pondicherry, which would tie up enemy forces, for the main field army to then reinforce them and drive them into the sea.
Unfortunately for Tipu’s objectives, Muhammad Ali was an ambitious man, and despite fighting against the British, he also was in communication with them.* Muhammad Ali’s initial plans and contacts with the British were relatively prosaic: the British promised that if he didn’t oppose British landings on the Mandabar coast, they would grant him hefty financial recompensation with some truly massive jagirs: things escalated dramatically however, when the stars aligned and news arrived from the north of Tipu having supposedly fallen in the vicious fighting at Malkapur. Almost at the same time, the British invasion army landed on the coast, seizing Mangalore after quickly overcoming the coastal fortifications (aided by a combination of unfortunately sited foreign exclaves, and the sympathy and collaboration of the local Christian population, something that Tipu would not soon forget) and in parleys between the British and Ali a new plan was worked out - that Ali would side with the British and that Tipu’s brother, Abdul Kharim, would be put on the throne with Ali functioning as the effective eminence grise., with Ali even nursing hopes of eventually founding his own dynasty. After all, had not Tipu's father Haidar himself started out as a mere servant of the Raja?
This plan relied upon a combination of speed and daring to make it work, before political events settled down in Seringapatam - also coincidentally, preferably before news arrived of Tipu not actually being dead, with historians still debating about whether Ali thought Tipu really had perished, or whether he took advantage of the situation. Unfortunately, the situation was about to get even more complicated, since alongside the British, Ali, and Tipu’s forces, a fourth faction was going to enter into the picture - the long-neglected and powerless Chamaraja Wodeyar IX. Or more precisely, the dowager queen with the pithy name Maharani Lakshmammanni, since dear Chamaraja Wodeyar IX, alas, was something of a non-entity. Lakshmammanni most certainly was not however, and this strongwoman was determined to restore her dynasty’s rightful rule - and also shows that it is possible, alas for the British, to have too many friendly agents on the enemy’s side, since Lakshmammani promptly took the occasion to swiftly shove Chamaraja into proclaiming himself the legitimate king again, and in cooperation with the legitimist-sympathizing Hindu groups who largely dominated the bureaucracy of Seringapatam, the Sri Vaishnava, seized control of the capital. It left the British with a horrific headache, since now they had two potentially friendly allies to choose from, with Lakshmammanni having long been in communication with the British and undeniably having greater legitimacy with Chamaraja… but Ali had the guns. Suddenly poleaxed by this unexpected development, the British army dawdled for weeks while trying to figure out what to do in this confusing situation, before ultimately opting for Ali’s side, setting off for Mysore.
But the elapsed time had given both the Wodeyars and Tipu a desperately-needed window - for Tipu to learn what had happened, and to begin the task of fleeing from barely just-captured Hyderabad, while the Wodeyars, unsure of British intentions, still did not dawdle in putting Seringapatam into preparation for a siege, frantically stockpiling food, working to ensure the loyalty of their commanders, and raising troops for the siege - as well as sending out messengers to try to rally the provinces to their side. In this, they were relatively unsuccessful, since the Carnatic was relatively indifferent to the infighting between two Mysorean factions, and among most of the Mysorean population, Tipu was genuinely quite popular, viewed by the peasants as their defender against the landlords, supported by the military for his victories, and with much of the commercial or mercantilist classes in the highlands benefitting from the state-directed war and industry program. The exception was the old capital of Mysore, which joined the Wodeyars. For most figures, it would be a wait and see attitude: events would turn on the clash of arms, and Lakshmammanni was determined that Seringapatam and Mysore would be put into a state of defense, until at least the monsoon arrived to deliver them from the threat of siege.
To add to this simple picture of Tipu, the British, Ali, and the Wodeyars, the sudden power vacuum also led to the Coorgs, who had been painfully oppressed but quite yet broken by Tipu, rising up to the south of Seringapatam. The Coorgs didn’t really have any uniting goal beyond hatred of Tipu, and as a result made order around the capital even more precarious. This also cut off lines of communication to the Mysorean forces in Travancore. Chaos had seized the heart of Mysore, in a war which had suddenly ceased being a simple war of lines, and had become a vicious battle for political authority, with British, rebel, mutinous, legitimist, and loyalist armies all in play throughout the center of the kingdom.
But the situation was about to go from catastrophic to apocalyptic, since taking advantage of the sudden collapse of Mysorean military power in the west, the southern Maratha lords launched an invasion of Mysore. Normally these local Marathan armies were lacking in their ability to challenge front-line Mysorean opponents, without the solid core of Mysorean European-style infantry, but with the Mysorean armies either off in Hyderabad or collapsed around Seringapatam, there was nothing to oppose them, and they rent a path of fire and destruction with their light cavalry across the entirety of Mysore proper. There were fortifications all across their path, but these were supposed to slow down the enemy and provide for the ability for friendly troops to sortie and to impede enemy communications. But without reserves, all that happened was that the fortifications were bypassed by the fast-moving light cavalry.
The only solace that Tipu Sultan could marshal, as he rode at the head of his army, fleeing just-captured Hyderabad, was that his enemies were disunified, and the rebels had no clear plan of what they wished to achieve. But with his capital in revolt, his capital army mutinied, a British army having seized his main naval base of Mangalore and encamped upon his territory, Marathan horsemen strung out all across Mysore, and war on every border, it must have seemed that the wheel of fate had turned again, and he who had been raised to the height of power and triumph was now reduced by the hand of Allah to the lowest and the most abject of His slaves.
What later historians would call the Years of the Sword had begun.
As Tipu Sultan rushed south, Mysorean armies in retreat burned and destroyed Hyderabad with unusual completeness. The catastrophe in and around Seringapatam and across Hyderabad meant that there was no chance to hold Hyderabad, and Tipu Sultan chose a burned earth strategy to gain the buffer space he needed to keep the British at bay if they chose to counter-attack through Hyderabad. Perhaps there was a psychological element too on the part of the troops, out of frustration and a mounting sense of despair at what had befallen the Mysorean situation, a need to take out fear in anger and rage. Entire cities were burned to the ground, orchards were hacked to pieces, fields were reduced to charred ash, smoke giving the sun above a dismal red glare, and the troops took out their rage in a fit of murder, rape, and theft on the local civilians, with the only solace and security being the speed of the Mysorean retreat. The Mysoreans left behind them a desert called peace, but it did accomplish its purpose: there would be no pursuing them from Hyderabad for at least another campaign, although it guaranteed the hate of the people of Hyderabad for generations to come. It also replenished the Mysorean treasuries, through massive exactions and looting of anything valuable, all the more necessary with the country’s financial infrastructure in Seringapatam seized.
The first challenge would be the Marathans who occupied much of northern Mysore. Tipu’s armies smashed through the screen of Maratha cavalry, cutting asides the Maratha swarms of light cavalry facing them. This was Tipu at his best, the daring cavalry commander of old who had won dashing victories based on shock and elan in the Carnatic or at Mangalore, and the weight of his unexpected onslaught against the Marathas, who had expected a counter-offensive but notably underestimated how soon it would be and how fast it would be, caught them terribly off guard. Swarms of Mysorean and Maratha horse fought it out in swirling clouds across Mysore, but the Mysoreans had the advantage of shock, leadership, and the security of their line infantry who were advancing behind them. If they were ever caught flat-footed then they could simply withdraw back to one of the Mysorean infantry cushoons, while the Maratha cavalry simply swarmed around them and were incapable of dealing with the heavier Mysorean troops.
What’s more their supply situation was eased by the presence of the fortifications that had been left intact by the Marathas in their offensive, since their cavalry armies lacked the artillery to reduce them. They provided the necessary supplies in this torched and wrecked landscape to sustain the speed of the advance, although much of the credit also went to the plunder of Hyderabad, with exceptional pay keeping the Mysorean army together and preventing it from dissolving in desertion, as well as Tipu's personal magnitism and charisma. All of these contributed to the success of what surely must have broken some speed records for traversing the continent (if not in preserving the population from suffering, with the movement of armies starting the first, and certainly not the last, of the devastations of the Years of the Sword, decimating the population through massive looting by soldiers on all side and the catastrophic breakdown in security): less than a month had passed from when news of Seringapatam’s mutiny broke to when the advance guards of Tipu’s army arrived in front of Seringapatam nearly 600 kilometers away in what would be named the Sultan's first flight. The situation they faced was far from rosy, since Seringapatam was under siege by Ali and the British - and inside the Wodeyars. As the British-rebel army raised the siege to turn their forces to face Tipu, both sides were painfully aware that the monsoon would be upon them soon. The guns of April, 1793 would have to speak in haste. They would do so with dangerously fragile armies, the Mysoreans exhausted after their long voyage and harrying by Maratha cavalry, and Ali's forces frighteningly uncertain as to their reliability. The fate of Mysore hung in the balance.
*Historically, this led to him being involved with a plot to betray Tipu in 1783, where he was caught and imprisoned and committed suicide: due to the nature of the previous war, this doesn't happen and he lives. There were a lot of various dissidents who put an appearance in in 1783/1784 at the tail end of the Second Anglo-Mysore War, with the British landing in Mangalore and hostilities still at full swing: here Mysore is reaping the fruit of not having had to deal with this earlier with a terrific panpoly of insurrections.
This was an exaggeration and a rumor: although Mysore was close to France, its only real ally, the Mysoeans had not - at least as of 1793 - yet built a tree of liberty, and nor was there a Jacobin club. But even if Mysore hadn’t adopted French ideology, even if no liberty trees or guillotines dotted the streets of Seringapatam, even if no revolutionary cockades were on the turbans of Mysorean soldiers, even if Mysore hadn’t declared war upon all kings and tyrants, if Carnot, the organizer of victory who had saved the French Republic in l’an II, had been dropped into Seringapatam in 1793, he would have felt perfectly at home if he had been presented with an account of events and might have sighed to see those desperate years of 1792 and 1793 were just as torn with agony as in far-off France.
Mysore’s general in charge of affairs in the west was Muhammad Ali, who was a trusted friend of the Tipu Sultan, who he had known for many years, as well as having won previous claim to fame in the Second Anglo-Mysore War. It was an obvious danger for any regime to have a powerful army of forces near the capital under an independent commander, but during the Great Indian War, Mysore was persistently threatened by naval landings by the British, principally along the Carnatic Coast but also along Malabar, which were too strong for the Mysorean navy to be able to guarantee against. This required a central field army that would be able to respond to the threatened British landing. Strategy was based upon holding coastal fortifications and naval bastions, such as Mangalore, Cannanore, Porto Novo, and indirectly (news had not yet arrived of the French Republic's declaration of war on England on February 1st, 1793) the French ports of Mahé, Madras, and Pondicherry, which would tie up enemy forces, for the main field army to then reinforce them and drive them into the sea.
Unfortunately for Tipu’s objectives, Muhammad Ali was an ambitious man, and despite fighting against the British, he also was in communication with them.* Muhammad Ali’s initial plans and contacts with the British were relatively prosaic: the British promised that if he didn’t oppose British landings on the Mandabar coast, they would grant him hefty financial recompensation with some truly massive jagirs: things escalated dramatically however, when the stars aligned and news arrived from the north of Tipu having supposedly fallen in the vicious fighting at Malkapur. Almost at the same time, the British invasion army landed on the coast, seizing Mangalore after quickly overcoming the coastal fortifications (aided by a combination of unfortunately sited foreign exclaves, and the sympathy and collaboration of the local Christian population, something that Tipu would not soon forget) and in parleys between the British and Ali a new plan was worked out - that Ali would side with the British and that Tipu’s brother, Abdul Kharim, would be put on the throne with Ali functioning as the effective eminence grise., with Ali even nursing hopes of eventually founding his own dynasty. After all, had not Tipu's father Haidar himself started out as a mere servant of the Raja?
This plan relied upon a combination of speed and daring to make it work, before political events settled down in Seringapatam - also coincidentally, preferably before news arrived of Tipu not actually being dead, with historians still debating about whether Ali thought Tipu really had perished, or whether he took advantage of the situation. Unfortunately, the situation was about to get even more complicated, since alongside the British, Ali, and Tipu’s forces, a fourth faction was going to enter into the picture - the long-neglected and powerless Chamaraja Wodeyar IX. Or more precisely, the dowager queen with the pithy name Maharani Lakshmammanni, since dear Chamaraja Wodeyar IX, alas, was something of a non-entity. Lakshmammanni most certainly was not however, and this strongwoman was determined to restore her dynasty’s rightful rule - and also shows that it is possible, alas for the British, to have too many friendly agents on the enemy’s side, since Lakshmammani promptly took the occasion to swiftly shove Chamaraja into proclaiming himself the legitimate king again, and in cooperation with the legitimist-sympathizing Hindu groups who largely dominated the bureaucracy of Seringapatam, the Sri Vaishnava, seized control of the capital. It left the British with a horrific headache, since now they had two potentially friendly allies to choose from, with Lakshmammanni having long been in communication with the British and undeniably having greater legitimacy with Chamaraja… but Ali had the guns. Suddenly poleaxed by this unexpected development, the British army dawdled for weeks while trying to figure out what to do in this confusing situation, before ultimately opting for Ali’s side, setting off for Mysore.
But the elapsed time had given both the Wodeyars and Tipu a desperately-needed window - for Tipu to learn what had happened, and to begin the task of fleeing from barely just-captured Hyderabad, while the Wodeyars, unsure of British intentions, still did not dawdle in putting Seringapatam into preparation for a siege, frantically stockpiling food, working to ensure the loyalty of their commanders, and raising troops for the siege - as well as sending out messengers to try to rally the provinces to their side. In this, they were relatively unsuccessful, since the Carnatic was relatively indifferent to the infighting between two Mysorean factions, and among most of the Mysorean population, Tipu was genuinely quite popular, viewed by the peasants as their defender against the landlords, supported by the military for his victories, and with much of the commercial or mercantilist classes in the highlands benefitting from the state-directed war and industry program. The exception was the old capital of Mysore, which joined the Wodeyars. For most figures, it would be a wait and see attitude: events would turn on the clash of arms, and Lakshmammanni was determined that Seringapatam and Mysore would be put into a state of defense, until at least the monsoon arrived to deliver them from the threat of siege.
To add to this simple picture of Tipu, the British, Ali, and the Wodeyars, the sudden power vacuum also led to the Coorgs, who had been painfully oppressed but quite yet broken by Tipu, rising up to the south of Seringapatam. The Coorgs didn’t really have any uniting goal beyond hatred of Tipu, and as a result made order around the capital even more precarious. This also cut off lines of communication to the Mysorean forces in Travancore. Chaos had seized the heart of Mysore, in a war which had suddenly ceased being a simple war of lines, and had become a vicious battle for political authority, with British, rebel, mutinous, legitimist, and loyalist armies all in play throughout the center of the kingdom.
But the situation was about to go from catastrophic to apocalyptic, since taking advantage of the sudden collapse of Mysorean military power in the west, the southern Maratha lords launched an invasion of Mysore. Normally these local Marathan armies were lacking in their ability to challenge front-line Mysorean opponents, without the solid core of Mysorean European-style infantry, but with the Mysorean armies either off in Hyderabad or collapsed around Seringapatam, there was nothing to oppose them, and they rent a path of fire and destruction with their light cavalry across the entirety of Mysore proper. There were fortifications all across their path, but these were supposed to slow down the enemy and provide for the ability for friendly troops to sortie and to impede enemy communications. But without reserves, all that happened was that the fortifications were bypassed by the fast-moving light cavalry.
The only solace that Tipu Sultan could marshal, as he rode at the head of his army, fleeing just-captured Hyderabad, was that his enemies were disunified, and the rebels had no clear plan of what they wished to achieve. But with his capital in revolt, his capital army mutinied, a British army having seized his main naval base of Mangalore and encamped upon his territory, Marathan horsemen strung out all across Mysore, and war on every border, it must have seemed that the wheel of fate had turned again, and he who had been raised to the height of power and triumph was now reduced by the hand of Allah to the lowest and the most abject of His slaves.
What later historians would call the Years of the Sword had begun.
As Tipu Sultan rushed south, Mysorean armies in retreat burned and destroyed Hyderabad with unusual completeness. The catastrophe in and around Seringapatam and across Hyderabad meant that there was no chance to hold Hyderabad, and Tipu Sultan chose a burned earth strategy to gain the buffer space he needed to keep the British at bay if they chose to counter-attack through Hyderabad. Perhaps there was a psychological element too on the part of the troops, out of frustration and a mounting sense of despair at what had befallen the Mysorean situation, a need to take out fear in anger and rage. Entire cities were burned to the ground, orchards were hacked to pieces, fields were reduced to charred ash, smoke giving the sun above a dismal red glare, and the troops took out their rage in a fit of murder, rape, and theft on the local civilians, with the only solace and security being the speed of the Mysorean retreat. The Mysoreans left behind them a desert called peace, but it did accomplish its purpose: there would be no pursuing them from Hyderabad for at least another campaign, although it guaranteed the hate of the people of Hyderabad for generations to come. It also replenished the Mysorean treasuries, through massive exactions and looting of anything valuable, all the more necessary with the country’s financial infrastructure in Seringapatam seized.
The first challenge would be the Marathans who occupied much of northern Mysore. Tipu’s armies smashed through the screen of Maratha cavalry, cutting asides the Maratha swarms of light cavalry facing them. This was Tipu at his best, the daring cavalry commander of old who had won dashing victories based on shock and elan in the Carnatic or at Mangalore, and the weight of his unexpected onslaught against the Marathas, who had expected a counter-offensive but notably underestimated how soon it would be and how fast it would be, caught them terribly off guard. Swarms of Mysorean and Maratha horse fought it out in swirling clouds across Mysore, but the Mysoreans had the advantage of shock, leadership, and the security of their line infantry who were advancing behind them. If they were ever caught flat-footed then they could simply withdraw back to one of the Mysorean infantry cushoons, while the Maratha cavalry simply swarmed around them and were incapable of dealing with the heavier Mysorean troops.
What’s more their supply situation was eased by the presence of the fortifications that had been left intact by the Marathas in their offensive, since their cavalry armies lacked the artillery to reduce them. They provided the necessary supplies in this torched and wrecked landscape to sustain the speed of the advance, although much of the credit also went to the plunder of Hyderabad, with exceptional pay keeping the Mysorean army together and preventing it from dissolving in desertion, as well as Tipu's personal magnitism and charisma. All of these contributed to the success of what surely must have broken some speed records for traversing the continent (if not in preserving the population from suffering, with the movement of armies starting the first, and certainly not the last, of the devastations of the Years of the Sword, decimating the population through massive looting by soldiers on all side and the catastrophic breakdown in security): less than a month had passed from when news of Seringapatam’s mutiny broke to when the advance guards of Tipu’s army arrived in front of Seringapatam nearly 600 kilometers away in what would be named the Sultan's first flight. The situation they faced was far from rosy, since Seringapatam was under siege by Ali and the British - and inside the Wodeyars. As the British-rebel army raised the siege to turn their forces to face Tipu, both sides were painfully aware that the monsoon would be upon them soon. The guns of April, 1793 would have to speak in haste. They would do so with dangerously fragile armies, the Mysoreans exhausted after their long voyage and harrying by Maratha cavalry, and Ali's forces frighteningly uncertain as to their reliability. The fate of Mysore hung in the balance.
*Historically, this led to him being involved with a plot to betray Tipu in 1783, where he was caught and imprisoned and committed suicide: due to the nature of the previous war, this doesn't happen and he lives. There were a lot of various dissidents who put an appearance in in 1783/1784 at the tail end of the Second Anglo-Mysore War, with the British landing in Mangalore and hostilities still at full swing: here Mysore is reaping the fruit of not having had to deal with this earlier with a terrific panpoly of insurrections.
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