Mysore under Hyder Ali and Tipu Sultan

Hyder Ali

Hyder Ali rose through the Mysore army from obscure origins to become its commander and then, from 1761, the effective ruler of the state. He built a modern army with French assistance, conquered Malabar and the Karnataka coast, and inflicted on the East India Company the sharpest defeat it suffered in eighteenth-century India — at Pollilur in 1780, where a Company force was destroyed.

He died on campaign in 1782, and his son Tipu continued the war.

Tipu Sultan

Tipu Sultan's seventeen-year reign is among the most argued-over in modern Indian history. He reorganised the revenue and the coinage, promoted sericulture and state trading enterprises, sent embassies to France, Constantinople and Persia, and continued the development of the iron-cased rocket artillery his father had begun. Rockets captured at Srirangapatna were taken to Woolwich and became the basis of the Congreve rocket used by British forces in the following decades.

His treatment of non-Muslim subjects is the substance of the dispute. He made extensive grants to Hindu temples, including the Śṛṅgeri maṭha, whose head he addressed with respect and whose institution he compensated after a Maratha raid; he also conducted forced conversions and deportations in Coorg and Malabar, and against the Mangalorean Catholics, which are recorded in detail. Assessments that admit only one of these bodies of evidence are common and are not defensible; both are documented.

He was killed on 4 May 1799 when the British and their allies stormed Srirangapatna. Mysore was partitioned, the Wodeyars restored, and the principal obstacle to Company supremacy in southern India removed.