A Miss of Grapeshot: Suffren and the Tiger of Mysore

[Bad@logic]

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.

 

[Death's Little Helper]

Wow! Mysore is not having a great time of it, the comparisons to the early French Republic are apt. Here's hoping Tipu Sultan can pull off similar major comeback.

 

[PerhapsItsChondoLal]

at least as of 1793

Portents of things to come? Does Mysore go Republican, I wonder...

 

[Bad@logic]

The Battle of Kyathanahalli, a small village to the north-west of Mysore, would be the third great battle of the first year of the Third Anglo-Mysorean War, one that would bring together a great number of troops, but tired and of doubtful loyalty respectively, into a fateful clash of arms. On the Mysorean side there were some 30,000 soldiers, and on the British side there were 25,0000 – a combination of a British army of around 5,000 and Muhammad Ali’s 20,000 defectors. The British had their troops drawn up on the left, while their allied rebel army was on the right.

Tipu had been attempting to bring Muhammad Ali back onto his side, promising him an amnesty, a substantial jagir, and potentially even the marriage of one of Ali’s daughters to one of his sons, and hoped that his attempts at negotiation might work to resolve the crisis. What’s more, he also had been told by his astrologers that the stars wer propitious to defeat the British, and thus he decided to not attack the Mysorean rebel army, and rather to concentrate his entire force against the British. He drove his artillery batteries forward, and subjected the British to an intense bombardment with all of his guns and his rockets. The British batteries fired back, but heavily outnumbered they struggled against the Mysorean guns. And then the Mysoreans went on the attack, their battalions attacking forward against the red-coated British soldiers.

For hours the brutal slugging match went on, the guns firing until they were red hot, gunners stripping down until they were naked in the Indian heat, rockets rising up in glaring flashy red streaks, powder smoke filling the field. By the middle afternoon it looked like the British might break, so intense and so furious were the Mysorean attacks, under the intense pounding of the Mysorean guns and the incessant attacks of Mysorean infantry, and all this time Muhammad Ali hadn’t budged. Tipu sent in his last reserves to break the British line…

And then Muhammad Ali attacked, slamming into Mysore’s side. Historians still debate why he had waited so long. Was it to see both the British and Tipu weakened before he attacked himself? Was he genuinely convinced by Tipu until he changed his mind suddenly? Was he simply indecisive? Whatever reason it may be, the sudden attack, despite the Mysorean screen in front of him, was a shock to the Mysoreans. After nearly a full day in the hot sun, tired, nay exhausted from their long march, convinced that they were on the verge of victory, and then suddenly attacked from the flank by enemies who they had been told wouldn’t budged, proved to be too much for them.

The Mysorean army simply disintegrated, only the Sultan’s guards standing and at horrific and brutal cost managing to stem the advance enough for Tipu’s army to escape. But the rebel cavalry in the rout wiped out thousands upon thousands of men from the Mysorean army, which didn’t stop running until it had fled far into the mountains to the north of Seringapatam, and Tipu had to flee the battlefield and the surroundings of Seringapatam, leaving behind his baggage train and much of his vaunted artillery.

These were the darkest days of Tipu, who wallowed in depression and despair after the battle, far from his normally energetic, even aggressive and bellicose, self. Tipu had filled letters before speaking of crushing the infidels, he lived a life of confidence and power, and he was certain that fate - in his Sufi-influenced thoughts, a combination of both Allah and local powers and spirits - was on his side. How tragic it would have been, even for his enemies, to see the powerful, forceful man, plunged into the darkest of spirits, as he wandered among his fleeing troops, his face wet with tears, his clothes rent and dirtied! His guards had to restrain him from throwing himself into the enemy, from seeking an honorable death, reminding him that there was no assured heir who would command the respect of Mysore, and that for him to die would mean a civil war even more terrible than that which wracked the kingdom now. For it was true: Tipu’s harem, family, and children were all held as prisoners in fallen Seringapatam, and this too weighed heavily upon the dejected sovereign.

But at the darkest of these moments, Tipu received news that one of his sons, and his intended heir, Shahzada Muiz ud-din Mohammed Sultan Sahib, had been smuggled out of Seringapatam while the fighting raged. It would do much to raise Tipu’s spirits and secure his position in those terrible days, and combined with the timely intervention of one of Tipu’s mystics, Darshan Hondadakatti, who managed to convince him that the loss in the battle merely represented a tribulation from Allah and that he would ultimately triumph, he managed to seize back control of himself, leading the shattered army in retreat back to secure Mysorean territory.

Tipu set up his new seat of power in Bangalore, the second city of the kingdom, moving into his summer palace, recently finished there in 1791. Although Tipu had vowed to never use it until the British army was defeated, he sourly went back on the oath and settled into the palace, setting up his court and trying to put affairs back into order. To an outside observer, his panoply of efforts might appear a heterodox mixture of projects. Some were obvious, as he put in supplies, accumulated munitions and gunpowder (consumption had been massive in the previous year’s campaign and supplies were tight), trained his troops and made good losses. But he also gathered around himself an increasing number of mainly Sufi mystics, and placed greater importance on inscriptions and talismans. Tipu’s turban was already inscribed with the calligraphy of one such declaration:

O god! May thy fortune be ever awake

May fate ever be propitious to thee

May the flower of thy greatness forever bloom

And be a thorn in the sides of thy enemies

Now, Tipu redoubled adding charms and inscriptions, with various embroidered calligraphy or adornments calling for the overthrow of the British and other infidels and enemies upon the turbans of his troops, and upon his cannons and arms. Regardless of whether these worked or not, the situation did stabilize for the rump Mysore, with administration settling back down and the army being put back on a stable footing. If Mysore was wounded by the defeat of Kyathanahalli, it was not dead.

As it turned out, the victory was largely an empty one for the British and Muhammad Ali’s forces. Although they resumed their siege of Seringapatam, the disruption, and the continued lack of the necessary heavy siege artillery, meant that they were unable to breach the walls before the monsoon came. On May 4th, 1793, the deluge broke from the heavens with torrential spouts of water, flooding the trenches and raising the river water around Seringapatam. The British and Muhammad Ali called off the siege, retreating to the coast, solidifying their control over their territory but having to renounce to a knock-out blow. Both sides settled into monsoon quarters, putting an end to the fateful terrible year. The Wodeyars would put the off-season to use to establish their control over the territory surrounding Seringapatam and Mysore, moving their capital away from Seringapatam to their traditional residence in Mysore. The survival of the Wodeyars was perhaps the most surprising feature of the campaign, and they faced the challenge of what to do now, with their palace coup having managed to seize the palace but not much else. Here again, the existence of factions in the quadruple alliance was revealed as they cozied up to the Marathas, after having been shunned by the British. The division of Tipu as an Islamic and Sufi leader and the Wodeyars as Hindu defenders is too simple, but the Wodeyars continued to work to build up their status as the legitimist alternative to Tipu, who would bring peace back to Mysore, put an end to the constant wars and crushing taxation, and restore dharam.

Despite their successes, the British situation was not rosy itself. Questions were being asked in Calcutta about the disaster in front of Hyderabad, but even more seriously, despite having captured significant territory, they now had the dreadful expense of paying to keep Muhammad Ali’s army intact, with local revenues being insufficient to pay for him himself. Over the coming monsoon season, his army would slowly atrophy. More serious for the future was that the British and Travancore, taking advantage of Mysorean confusion and the Coorg’s revolt cutting off Mysorean lines of communication, launched a counter-attack and drove the Mysoreans out of most of Travancore, turning the flank of the Mysorean army with a naval landing north of Kollam that outflanked the Mysoreans and inflicted a crushing defeat on them, sending them in headlong retreat north. When the campaigning season dawned, would they march north, to free the remainder of Travancore, or east, to bring war once more to the Carnatic?

If Mysore had not entirely crumbled under the blows of the quadruple alliance, it had nevertheless been a terrible and frightful one for the Mysoreans. With perhaps a third of the kingdom under foreign occupation, multiple competing factions, and the Mysorean army having been badly battered, the question would be whether Mysore would survive the next year. But Tipu was unbowed, and he was buoyed when news reached India that hostilities had formally broken out between France and Britain. Although formal French aid would be limited for Mysore, due to the troubled sea lanes connecting France and India, the distance, France’s domestic troubles, and more pressing priorities for France, a French embassy nevertheless managed to make its way to Mysore by the beginning of 1794, bearing a cargo of gifts, technicians and skilled workers, and even a hot air balloon from the newly forming French Aerostatic Corps. It raramped up excitement and agitation in the French territories with the spread of revolutionary propaganda, and even France’s Indian ocean fleet nevertheless gave an important boost to the Mysorean fleet despite its limitations. Although unable to confront the British fleet conventionally, the Mysoreans and their French allies would prove to be an increasingly severe threat to British trade in the region, with packs of Mysorean frigates pouncing on any lone British East Indiaman.

La guerre de course also had its political ramifications. As Mysorean centralized power either collapsed or had to be directed to more important and pressing priorities, the coastal provinces were increasingly left to their own devices with the naval fleets, and the outfitting of ships, and even their construction, was increasingly funded and supported by local elites. This had multiple, contradictory effects. On the one hand, particularly in the Carnatic, it drew them into Mysore’s power structure. On the other hand, it also represented a weakening, a centrifugal force, away from the envisioned Mysorean central fleet. What’s more, it was a dangerous decentralization in India, where local elites could gain autonomy and independence with ease. But with Mysore’s government unable to meet its challenges, somebody had to. The Great Indian War would continue in all of its butchery and bloodshed.

 

[Bad@logic]

The map I've drawn up is too large to fit apparently, so here is a post for it

https://imgur.com/uhSQ6sY

.

Also a direct link if that doesn't work, sometimes it doesn't properly display for me. Based on an edited version of a map I got from wikipedia by PlaneMad.

 

[Quinkana]

Ooh this is quite interesting, I wonder if we'd see Nizam be conquered by tipu with the Brits being more and more distracted by the french and failing to help their native allies during a major defeat.

A Mysore TL is interesting and I'm having fun reading it!

 

[Bad@logic]

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.

Prescient! Not too much of a fan of Tipu's personality myself, I remember reading some of his writings on fighting against the British at the end of the Second Anglo-Mysore War and they're crude, hostile, violent. Anyway, a lot of Mysoreans certainly seem to aggree with you right now.

Wow! Mysore is not having a great time of it, the comparisons to the early French Republic are apt. Here's hoping Tipu Sultan can pull off similar major comeback.

No promises, I still haven't decided on the intermediate period of the war, things very well might get even worse.

Portents of things to come? Does Mysore go Republican, I wonder...

Perhaps not Republican but there are some interesting papers I have somewhere talking about the reaction to the French Revolution among the indigenous inhabitants of Pondicherry that I need to read (reread? I don't think I read them but maybe I did and I have forgotten) and hopefully play off of.

Ooh this is quite interesting, I wonder if we'd see Nizam be conquered by tipu with the Brits being more and more distracted by the french and failing to help their native allies during a major defeat.

A Mysore TL is interesting and I'm having fun reading it!

Glad you enjoy it! I do have some plans for the Nizam and his fate later on in the 1790s that you'll hopefully find interesting.

 

[MagicalPhantom345]

So will the state of Hyderabad implode on itself now that Tipu burned it to the ground?

 

[Quinkana]

Glad you enjoy it! I do have some plans for the Nizam and his fate later on in the 1790s that you'll hopefully find interesting.

ooh that's nice, I don't know a lot about Indian history but this is still very interesting! thx!

 

[Bad@logic]

Descendons dans nos souterrains :
La liberté nous y convie ;
Elle parle, républicains
Et c'est la voix de la patrie.
Lavez la terre, en un tonneau ;
En faisant évaporer l'eau,
Bientôt le nitre va paraître.
Pour visiter Pitt, en bateau,
Il ne nous faut que du salpêtre.

Mettons fin à l'ambition
De tous les rois, tyrans du monde,
De ces pirates d'Albion,
Qui prétendaient régner sur l'onde ;
Nous avons tout ce qu'ils n'ont pas :
Nous avons le cœur et les bras,
D'hommes libres et faits pour l'être ;
Nous avons du fer, des soldats :
Ce qu'il nous faut, c'est du salpêtre.

C'est dans le sol de nos caveaux,
Que gît l'esprit de mes ancêtres :
Ils enterraient sous leurs tonneaux,
Le noir chagrin d'avoir des maîtres.
Cachant sous l'air de la gaîté,
Leur amour pour la liberté,
Ce sentiment n'osait paraître ;
Mais dans le sol, il est resté,
Et cet esprit, c'est du salpêtre.

On verra le feu du Français,
Fondre la glace germanique ;
Tout doit répondre à ses succès,
Vive à jamais la République !
Précurseurs de la liberté,
Des lois et de l'égalité,
Tels partout on doit nous connaître :
Vainqueurs des bons, par la bonté,
Et des méchants, par le salpêtre.

Au public qui a demandé l'auteur :
Trouve-t-on quelque vérité,
C'est un devoir de la répandre :
Tout doit avec fraternité,
Se publier comme s'entendre.
Les vers ont tort, s'ils sont mal faits ;
Si vous en êtes satisfaits,
Qu'est-ce qu'un nom, quel qu'il puisse être ?
Tandis qu'on chante ses couplets,
L'auteur chez lui, fait du salpêtre.
Le Saltpêtre républicain​

The allies had learned their lessons well from the 1792 campaign, when a series of non-concerted blows had enabled Tipu to strike suddenly and brutally at the over-extended Hyderabi forces, smashing their army and eviscerating the Nizam’s military power. This time, the British aimed to concentrate their forces for a single blow, planning to take the Carnatic region. The forces from Travancore would advance north, aiming to take Porto Novo (Parangipettai), while Bengal’s army would descend on the coastline at Madras, aiming to capture the city – with the capture of these two major ports hopefully putting an end to the Franco-Mysorean privateer fleet, especially if successful and the momentum could be continued to take Pondicherry.

Surrounded on all sides, Tipu had an embarrassment of choices for where he might want to strike. It was not like Tipu to rest on the defensive, being an aggressive, bellicose man, but even he slipped into a degree of paralysis – strike north against the Marathas, strike west against Seringapatam, strike south again Travancore? Tipu’s instinct was to try to advance against Seringapatam, but ultimately agreed with his councilor’s advice – that it would be better to let the rebels under Muhammad Ali and the Wodeyars fight it out. These lengthy discussions and an early British campaign meant that it would be the British who launched their attack first, moving into the Carnatic.

Tipu hoped to achieve a similar effect as during those halycon days of 1792, when the invading armies of the Nizam had been destroyed in a vicious campaign of maneuver and shock in the north of the Carnatic, taking advantage of Mysorean interior lines to descend upon the Hyderabi from the flanks. However, there were a variety of problems that plagued the Mysoreans with this – the British were far more militarily capable than Hyderabad, they did not over-extend themselves, and large swathes of Mysore’s cavalry were engaged in a vicious tit-for-tat war of raids and reprisals with the Marathas and plunder around Seringapatam and Mysore that he lacked the same swarms of cavalry troops for the Carnatic campaign.

Nevertheless, there would be hard fought battles in the campaign, both by the Mysoreans, and by their French allies. Here, a few words deserve to be said about the French.

With the Carnatic an open theater of war now, the French would now be directly involved on land. Political events however, were moving forward at a hectic rate in French India. As in the New World, but to a lesser extent, internal tensions and discontents in the French Indian Empire threatened to explode, and the outbreak and the gradual spiral of violence associated with the Revolution was driving these tensions to the breaking point. French India consisted of a scattering of different cities, including Mahe on the Malabar coast, Chandernagore in Bengal, and most importantly Pondicherry and the recently captured city of Madras on the Carnatic as well as the smaller cities of Karikal and Yanaon. There were of course, normal merchant tensions and rivalries, but there were also serious political tensions.

One was a rivalry between Madras and Pondicherry, with Pondicherry attempting to assert its control over Madras, and the new city, displeased at Pondicherry’s presumption, growing increasingly irritated and on ill-terms with the traditional capital of French India. Both however, were dismayed by broader systemic changes as well. The French Indian establishments had not reacted well to the reestablishment of the French East India Company after the war, which regardless of the potential economic merits or security arguments, posed a severe threat to the interests of the independent merchants. Even more so however, they dismayed by the decision of the French government to transfer authority in French India away from French India itself, to Ile-de-France. Despite France’s victories during the war, France was still ultimately small fry in the Indian continent, and most of its strength and power stemmed from reinforcements and naval units that it could surge into the theater, based from Ile-de-France, which along with the growth of the sugar plantations in Ile-de-France justified the decision to center French administration in India on the island. But the Indian establishments found this subjugation to the planter interests and distant islands of Ile-de-France and Reunion deeply distasteful, and these discontents swam to the surface when the French Revolution, cahiers de doléance, and citizen assemblies entered into the fray, with Frenchmen free to express their opinions about French policy.

Which is where the second stage of the French Revolution in India entered into the equation, since the operative word was Frenchmen. The French citizens in Pondicherry rejected the proposal for the Tamils to enter into the newly formed National Guard, but in this they were surpassed by events, since Madras, with a much smaller French population, more acutely exposed to British retaliation, and with military leadership possessing a more important role, moved to establish a National Guard and to bring Tamils into it.[1] When Pondicherry’s government continued to protest, affairs were ultimately settled when a coup by the Pondicherry sepoys overthrew the municipal government and established a new administration, under the control of a rapidly-rising Tamil officer, Jeteesh Mohanapriyan.

Theoretically only a minor tactical battle, it opened up the floodgates to a dramatic escalation of the Revolution in the Carnatic. As in the West Indies, what had been a clash between narrow interests, between the French merchants and colonists in the Carnatic and the French East India Company and government in Ile-de-France was beginning to transform into a much more fundamental reshaping of the established order. The new ruling eminence in the city, Mohanapriyan pressed forward with a campaign of revolutionary enthusiasm which would bring the sword to the forefront of the annals of the French Revolution in India. He established Jacobin clubs, trees of liberty, expanded the national guard, and began a radical attack on what he saw as feudal or anti-Republican elements – often coincidentally his enemies, with the flashing guillotine displaying its first appearance in India, based on reports of the European equivalent (although not working as well and leaving quite a few victims in quivering agony until the blade could be wrenched up to finish them off). The basis of support for these policies were resentment against the wealthy merchants and landowners, with Mohanapriyan, a born demagogue, being able to kill three birds with one stone by dismantling rivals, gaining popular support, and enhancing his revolutionary credentials for Paris.

Mohanapriyan was a pragmatic though, and also fundamentally a Hindu, which would influence him dramatically. If the direction of the Revolution in Europe would be along fundamentally secular and atheistic lines, in India, Mohanapriyan embraced Hinduism as a motivating factor and aimed to incorporate it into his new machinery of power. As he explained it in some of the few writings surviving of his principles, Hinduism, unlike Catholicism in Europe, was a fundamentally democratic religion which was opposed to tyranny, since it represented a pursuit of a fundamental state of dharma and spiritual cleanliness, which the French Republic was carrying out – and by virtue of its more decentralized structure, without established churches and state power like in France, it was not the tyrant and oppressor of reason as Voltaire had so bitterly complained about Catholicism. And Mohanapriyan mostly brushed aside issues of caste[2]. It would be a peculiarly Indian take on the Revolution’s principles, and it can genuinely be questioned how many of the recruits that Mohanapriyan drew up understood it. What’s more, this is only speaking of Pondicherry – Madras was under the control of a more sensible, pragmatic government, where the establishments’ quicker establishment of a Tamil national guard had headed off of discontent. The cities’ traditional rivalry was only intensified by this.

The first blows would come in the southern Carnatic however, where the British army crossed the frontier and made its way north. With modern, high-quality British guns, the numerous hill forts and garrisons in their way collapsed in short order before the pounding of the British artillery. Believing that the British were outrunning themselves as the Nizam did, Tipu hurled his forces into the British flank, and at the Battle of Madurai was savagely bloodied by a British defensive force, far-stronger than he had anticipated, which held its own against his troops and ultimately threw the Mysoreans back. Glum at this defeat, Tipu switched his attention, choosing to try to delay the British frontally while launching a series of raids and constant cavalry pillaging against British supply lines in the hope of wearing them down. It was a demoralizing grind backwards, one marked by constant small skirmishes, Mysorean flanking attack, sieges, and long-range cannonades, but one where the progress of the British army forward was greatly slowed, if not stopped.

In the north, the second British army landed north of Madras, and marched on the city. Here, they had to face the unsteady French national guard, which they promptly thrashed at Kalanji, and then again at Minjur. But the French learned, and if their guard was pushed back, it didn’t break, and the resulting Siege of Madras – the fourth one in almost as many decades – proved to be a more bitter fight than the British had expected. The turning point came when a quick French sloop managed to make its way out of the city and get to Pondicherry, and the Pacte républicain agreed that Madras would recognize Pondicherry’s predominance in India in exchange for Pondicherry’s assistance against the British attackers. Mohanapriyan marched north, and if his own troops were also of poor quality, their sheer mass was worth something, and the British chose to lift the siege and withdraw to their transports. The northern arm of the British offensive had been foiled, but it also made it clear to the French under Mohanapriyan that they and not Tipu were the effective power in the Carnatic, so long as Tipu was caught up in war against the British. Here, his attempts to get the French to actively support him in his campaign in the southern Carnatic proved futile, which also led to increasingly strained relations between Tipu and the local representatives of France….

In the west, this relative failure could be at least parried with Travancore’s army driving the remaining Mysorean forces out of their territory, the surviving Mysorean troops fleeing through Coorg territory – which few of them made it out of alive, the Coorgs eager to have their revenge on their Mysorean oppressors. More glumly however, would be the failure of the most important arrow in the British quiver, Muhammad Ali. Here, internecine Mysorean politics got in the British way, since Muhammad Ali was, for reasons of prestige and legitimacy, determined to capture Seringapatam and Mysore. The British were indifferent to the fight against the Wodeyars, but Muhammad Ali was insistent. The resultant campaign however, turned out to be farcical, with the decomposing army of Muhammad Ali facing constant cavalry raids by Mysorean cavalry eager for plunder and facing a scorched earth campaign by the Wodeyars, his army launched an indifferent siege of Seringapatam and then was driven back.

With disgust at Muhammad Ali’s failure in front of Seringapatam and Mysore, for the second time, the British resumed their secret negotiations with the Wodeyars. The British volte-face agreed that they would recognize the Wodeyars as the legitimate rulers of Mysore (leaving the extent and boundaries of Mysore unstated), and that they would endeavor to bring Muhammad Ali’s troops over to the Wodeyar side. Muhammad Ali proved to be recalcitrant and a hard bargainer, and the ultimate technique around it was to assassinate him, promoting in his place one of his lieutenants, Balakrishna Saudagar. This succeeded, and rid Britain of a lodestone around its neck, but the internal infighting, the military defeat, and the decline of Ali’s army meant that it also meant that the force largely evaporated, leaving the British without a remaining native army on their side. In any case however, with EIC finances looking increasingly disastrous, there simply would have been no money to pay it in any case. If it saved the British situation and technically brought them control, or at least influence, over Seringapatam itself, it was a largely empty victory, and any hope of a quick victory in the war had largely evaporated, and what's more tensions between Saudagar's army and the Wodeyars quickly flared up.

Less noticeable at first, if perhaps equally profound as these political transformations in the long run, was the first real scientific invention in India in the 18th century, a mixture of sugar and saltpeter that exploded onto the Indian scene in 1795.

The discovery that would revolutionize Mysorean rocket technology came as a combination of chance, luck, and a fair deal of corruption. Gurubachan Mylavarapu, a provisioner for the Mysorean army, saw a potential way to make a good profit out of the growing gunpowder shortage – to use a partial amount of sugar instead. Sugar, unlike gunpowder, was still available in reasonably abundant quantities to the Mysoreans, grown throughout Mysore, as well as not being under the same strangulation with supplies as saltpeter, with continued imports from Benares. Mysorean textbooks largely ignored that Mylavarapu was doing this out of pure corruption, hoping that the sugar, which would burn, would provide a cheaper substitute for the gunpowder while not being as obvious to detect as say, sand.

Where Mylavarapu's genius and adaptability came into play, was that he seized on the realization that the mixture of sugar and gunpowder actually worked and did so even better than regular gunpowder, immediately threw himself into experimenting with it. Instead of a mixture of potassium nitrate, ie. saltpeter, charcoal, and sulfur, he found that a combination of some 60% saltpeter (instead of 75% in regular gunpowder) combined with 40% sugar made for a remarkably powerful propellant[2]Sulfur. was actually entirely unnecessary in this, and when he eventually figured out to leave it out, he found that the power of the fuel was dramatically higher than normal gunpowder.

There were drawbacks to the new technology. For one, its shelf life was relatively short, meaning that there had to be some time for preparation beforehand, to rapidly cook it. This could vary from place to place. In India’s hot climate, in field conditions, it might last just a few weeks before deterioration would set in. In cooler magazines, a shelf life of several months might be expected.

The discovery of what the Mysoreans would term “tiger sugar,” and what the British would call “Tipu’s sugar,” couldn’t have come at a better time. After the bloody 1794/1795 campaigning season, with constant siege warfare and vicious fighting, constant skirmishing, sieges, and training of new soldiers, Mysorean gunpowder supplies were almost exhausted. The new material would be cheaper, more powerful, and less dangerous to handle. Although it would not immediately take over from gunpowder, Tipu’s excitement at its discovery would impel the Mysoreans towards rapid adoption of the new powder, as preparations for the next campaign went ahead.

On the British side, while the year had ended without the British armies being defeated, even the massive resources afforded to the company by the possession of Bengal and its trading interests were woefully insufficient of what was needed. Keeping tens of thousands of men and major fleets in the field constantly, as well as propping up allies like Travancore and Muhammad Ali, all in the context of major trade disruptions, strained the EIC’s resources to the breaking point.

Both sides were eagerly seeking a way out of the war at this stage, the Mysoreans cracking under British military pressure, the British financially exhausted. But incompatible demands, with the British demanding a Mysorean war indemnity and cession of Mysorean territories in the Carnatic, as well as conflicting war aims between Hyderabad, the Marathas, and the British led to these to fail – also helped by an uncompromising Mysorean determination to gain their claimed borders against Travancore. The war ground on, and both sides were turning to some way to break the stalemate and to destroy the enemy’s will to fight. As the battered sides dragged themselves into nearly the third year of war, with unparalleled death and destruction across south India that had reduced entire once-flourishing regions to howling deserts picked over by the vultures of both side’s cavalry, there was no end in sight.

[1]Historically, these tensions were developing in Pondicherry, but of course Pondicherry was an isolated enclave that was doomed to fall to British attack. Here, it’s very similar to fermentation – more time around, and more material to work with, to develop this explosion.

[2]Although caste is notably less rigid at this time in Indian history. I'm hoping to eventually get a more complete update on it.

[3]This is rocket candy, which OTL was actually only invented sometime in the 1960s. But fundamentally there’s no reason why rocket candy can’t be speeded up, it’s an incredibly simple combination of sugar, black powder, and some heat treatment. I think that its discovery, in the context of a ruler fascinated with novelties like Tipu, a severe shortage of gunpowder leading to a degree of adulteration, and continued and higher-intensity war in South India, is entirely possible. Of course technology in any timeline is difficult because a lot of things are clearly obvious in retrospect, but some things in Europe will be slowed down.

 

[Bad@logic]

I had been busy reading some other books since I got a number of books for Christmas for people and prefer to read them before I pass them on, and had been looking for some books dealing with the French Carnatic, so I was rather distracted from doing another update. Plus some delays in managing to transfer this from work to post here. Hoping to get back to more regular posting. And a day late, but Merry Christmas to everyone reading this!

 

[Hydra1234]

Sugar rockets are brilliant! It is one of those technologies that is surprisingly low-tech in retrospect, but simply was not discovered due to a wide variety of reasons. However, necessity is the mother of invention after all, and wartime shortages are a great reason to improvise with sugar instead of charcoal/sulfur.

I've always been fascinated by militaries with a large rocketry portion, and I think iron-cased rockets with rocket candy could remain viable all the way to the development of rifled artillery.

I am interested to see how the war will end. The British are running out of time given that the Revolutionary Wars in Europe will kick up a notch, but Tipu is still running out of men and material.

 

[Tyler96]

Had never heard of rocket candy. Fascinating.

 

[Bad@logic]

Sugar rockets are brilliant! It is one of those technologies that is surprisingly low-tech in retrospect, but simply was not discovered due to a wide variety of reasons. However, necessity is the mother of invention after all, and wartime shortages are a great reason to improvise with sugar instead of charcoal/sulfur.

I've always been fascinated by militaries with a large rocketry portion, and I think iron-cased rockets with rocket candy could remain viable all the way to the development of rifled artillery.

I am interested to see how the war will end. The British are running out of time given that the Revolutionary Wars in Europe will kick up a notch, but Tipu is still running out of men and material.

It's an intriguing development, and I'm glad you think it is reasonable. Of course, there is the problem that most of the time it is easy to think of technology that could have come about earlier, than technology that would be delayed or never happen. Off hand my idea for technological variance is that the Mysore world will have greater development in rocketry, biological sciences, and perhaps some elements of physics or mathematics, while on the other hand metallurgy, chemistry, various applied industrial branches with textiles in particular will have a slower development, with global development mildly slower as a whole.
Psychology of course will be different, as will economics, but those are largely fake sciences so don't count.

 

[PerhapsItsChondoLal]

Quite late, and you probably have already read them, but found some interesting stuff:
Tipu Sultan’s Plans to Import Industrial Technology:
Instructions to Ambassadors to Turkey and (as originally intended) to France in 1785

“Good carpenters and ironsmiths, for construction of ships and other craftsmen that are not available in this country [Mysore], should be brought from the country of Turkey (Rum) and of the French king. Similarly a skillful astronomer, geomancer and physician should also be brought…
French, German and English muskets should be purchased in whatever quantity these are available.
The services of four expert persons as are skilled in recognising the presence of (seams of) coal should be obtained and they should be brought with you.”

Statement for Ambassadors to present to the Ruler (Khundkar) of Turkey, 1785

“By the Grace of God, innumerable muskets and cannon-pieces are manufactured in the country of this Government [Mysore]. Thus the persons accompanying us carry those very muskets. [The Ottoman Ruler] should give us better craftsmen to manufacture muskets, cannon-pieces, clocks (gharial), glass, chinaware and mirrors. This would be a source of pleasure to our master and also of the strengthening of the community of faith.”

Statement of Instruction to Ambassadors [actually] sent to France, 1786.

“You should bring one printer (chhapasaz) of books with you by giving him an advance of a proper amount. You should tell the King of France: “Owing to God’s benevolence and the Prophet’s help, there are ten musket-factories under Asadullahi (Tipu Sultan’s) Government, and innumerable muskets are manufactured here, and similarly cannon pieces. The requirement of friendship is that Your Majesty [the King of France] may send to out master other craftsmen, capable of making new kinds of muskets and bejars and bir, i.e., iron-cannon pieces, and besides these, clock-makers, makers of chinaware, glass- and mirror-makers and other artisans of your country, ten each of every sort, so that our friendship may increase, and we may take them with us after giving them amounts of money in advance…”

• Persian MS copies of Tipu Sultan’s instructions and draft statements for his ambassadors to Turkey and France (1785-86), Asiatic Society, Calcutta, MS No. 1677, as translated by Iqbal Hussain in State and Diplomacy under Tipu Sultan, edited by Irfan Habib

 

[Harshavardhana]

Nice chapter! Good to see how the revolutionary era would effect India as a whole. Never heard of rocket candy before so it was fascinating. Would be quite useful in rockets.

 

[Bad@logic]

There are as many paths to god as there are souls on Earth - Rumi​

A calendar shapes our way of thinking about the world, the natural human tendency to see patterns and draw conclusions. Mysore during the Years of the Sword could be thought of as a different collection of dates – was it l’An II de la République, or the various years of the different Hindu calendar and the age of Kali Yuga? All returned a different way of thinking about the world, and a different meaning. Few in Mysore would have thought in terms of the end of a century as the guns rumbled across the Deccan plateau, as swarms of cavalry laid waste to entire regions of peasant cultivators, as cities were laid to the sword and sacked, as swathes of once-prosperous lands were turned to howling wildernesses – but they might have recognized it as an end of an era nevertheless. For many of those involved, it felt not so much the end of an era, but the end of the world, and in those dark days of rapine and butchery the turn was to the comfort of mysticism and the hope of divine intervention. The 1790s was an era of religious revival in Mysore, and yet also, paradoxically, of intense religious creativity and syntheticism.

The Mysorean ruler, Tipu’s, role in it was an important one of course, as Tipu himself was an intensely superstitious man. Superstitious is in its own way a foreign concept, a prejudicial one to label onto a person operating under different assumptions and different ideals. For Tipu, the world was imbued with magic, spirits, cosmic energy, in a Sufi vision of seeing the world that was far removed from the pure, bitter, austere Islam under the harsh boundless skies of Arabia with its drifting sands and waterless wastes. Tipu believed in horoscopes, which he consulted ceaselessly, in divination, in the power of charms and calligraphy, inscriptions and spells. His troops carried inscriptions invoking heavenly aid, and he himself had elaborate and intricate calligraphy woven into his turban that he believed would protect him from bullets and blows.

Tipu’s court in Bangalore was also magnetized, quite literally, by the arrival of a French philosophe - some might say charlatan – Saint Etienne Jean Pierre de la Rocque, a discipline of the French (originally German) magnetist Franz Mesmer. Mesmer’s theories argued that the entire universe was replete with a form of energy, and that disease or unwellness was caused by a disbalance in these forces, a disbalance that could be corrected through magnets. This had interesting parallels with Hindu texts that argued that the universe was full of an energy called shakhti, one that could be transferred to others – such as an exaggerating yawn recharging someone with shakhti. De la Rocque’s arrival was a fertile ground for the development of this syncretism of European and Hindu ideas, the two sides excitedly comparing and working together upon their energy-channeling schemes, and even supposedly curing Tipu himself when he had fallen ill at one point. India had been transformed by European political intervention, but this would be one of the most significant cultural trends in an independent Indian state stemming from Europe.

These were all events at the top, the wiles of a single man and his court. But there were broader forces at work across India, beyond even the borders of Mysore, that brought about both superstition and also syncretism, most pronounced on the two great Indian religions, Hinduism and Islam. Here too, something must be spoken of an Indian contet, rather than broad terms. For if Islam changed India, so too India changed Islam. What other land would see Muslim women troop to the shrines of Hindu saints, offering sacrifices, prayers, offerings for a successful childbirth? Where Shivaji’s paternal grandmother, a Hindu, would go to a Sufi saint and pray for a son, and give birth to the father of Shivaji, whose legacy would bring the Empire of the Great Mughal to its knees? Would have Hindu temples offer their prayers to a Muslim king, and Muslim sultans appear at dawn upon the balconies of their palaces, in the ancient Hindu tradition of solar worship and energy? It was a bubbling cauldron, the land of gods and kings, and it was one that required constant effort to keep the sons of the prophet and the sons of the Vegas and the Upanishads apart, to keep the dividing line between the two straight and clear.

In Mysore, the Vaishnavites and Sufis had an important overlap as well. Both held ceremonies and rituals which were alive with the sound of music, dancing, and vibrant joy and merry-making. There had long been usage of opium, drugs, and alcohol amid the Central Asians and these practices spread into India, with Sufi celebrations mystical and dreamy with the usage of intoxicants, and there was also an overlap for a number of holidays. Such trends only amplified during the 1790s. The sudden collapse of central authority and the Wodeyar revolt was at least in part based upon the backing of the Vaishnavite faction, but ironically the sect in practice encouraged a rapprochement between Sufis and the Vaishnavite with their similarity of their practices led to a syncretism in the capital and the area around it, one encouraged by the sudden absence of formal orthodox Islamic authorities.

The spiritual revival and growth of syncretism in south India was based too upon more practical affairs, of Sufi and Hindu shrines and temples as the only remaining organizing pillars of the community. With central authority in collapse in many areas, shrines and tombs became important centers of local self-defense and community organization. The line between spiritual and secular could become blurred in this perspective: as elsewhere, people prayed to their icons, idols, saints, gods, God, Allah, whatever they believed would protect them, and credited them as such – but were practical enough for hard steel and gunpowder to be relied upon as well. In Mysore in the 1790s, charms and mystical defenses multiplied and exploded, and gurus and Sufi mystics alike offered defense to the poor masses – for most of whom, it mattered not to whom they turned, and in many a case it was to both. Economically, many Sufi shrines, similar to European monasteries, played an important role in local grain supplies, based upon streams and with water-powered grain-milling, which was generally substantially in excess of their own supply needs, and these too attracted all faiths and all hands.

All of this sounds logical, reasonable, and rational. But anyone who reads history will be struck by the tendency of the same situation to produce different results. In other areas, stress and pain was not the sign of syncretism, a rapprochement, drawing-together: it was the sign for a revitalization, a purification, an enhancement of orthodoxy. What made India different?

If Islam divided the world into the house of war and the house of peace, then in India the houses had burned down and crumbed into an amorphous mass, across the whole of the 18th century with the collapse of the Empire of the Great Moghul. In this scattered and amorphous land faiths lay intertangled and intermixed. A pall of depression lay over the sons of the prophet, in the riven stricken sun-beaten expanses of India, and perhaps it was this, more than anything, this cultural miasma and retreat-unto-oneself of the rural gentry in the north Indian plain that had led the northern part of the continent to crumble to the logic of British expansion, while in the south it had been Hyder Ali and Tipu that were the other response to the European encroachment, resistance and the sword. But now the 1790s themselves had become a time of black despair, a time that felt like the end of the very world, where the certainties of life were breaking down, a world that was both in turmoil and yet also intensely isolated. It seemed that the Mysorean project had run out of steam in the chaos and the agony of the Years of the Sword, and this too was another blow to the certainties of the religion of the crescent. In Mysore, things were falling apart, psychologically, politically, and religiously, in a heady undermining of orthodoxy that could only take place in the deadly churning ashes of the disaster.

So it was more than Tipu, more than simply a sultan with his troops with inscriptions woven into their turbans. It was a land of Sufis, of saints, of fakirs, and it was a land in ferment, who prayed and looked to all comers for salvation. Who cared who saved you from the rapacious cavalryman, from the brutal infantryman, from the grasping hordes of camp follows, from the swarms of bandits, from the uncaring artillery, from famine and despair, save that you were indeed saved? From the sea to the sea, they prayed for a miracle. But to pray for a miracle has a very different meaning amongst those who believe in them, and so as the Years of the Sword entered their bitter, tragic, interminable third year, Tipu and his subjects dreamed of a miracle to rescue them from their long nightmare – and believed.

 

[PerhapsItsChondoLal]

How do you write so beautifully????

 

[Harshavardhana]

Man the chapter was really beautiful...

I am just wondering, after the war, would Mysore go around the world and meet the various kingdoms and empires in Europe and East Asia? Because I got a really devious idea if they do.

 

[Bad@logic]

Quite late, and you probably have already read them, but found some interesting stuff:

Thank you for the suggested book but it is unfortunately one I've read already 🙃 Good taste though, it is a very useful resource! I'm hoping to eventually do a post on a separate site and then link it here about the resources available for research about Tipu, I have somewhere around 15? or so books that I've read dealing with him, and they really do vary dramatically in quality. When I do that I'll make sure to tag you with it, perhaps there will be some that I've missed.

How do you write so beautifully????

Man the chapter was really beautiful...

I am just wondering, after the war, would Mysore go around the world and meet the various kingdoms and empires in Europe and East Asia? Because I got a really devious idea if they do.

Thanks, I appreciate that you like the style. We all have our strengths when it comes to writing, and I have shortcomings in characters and plot development, but I like to think that I have some strengths in prose. I also had plenty of time to do revisions on this - it has been maturing for well over a month, but I wasn't able to get it out of work until tonight.