Sharpe's Tiger

Historical Note

The siege and fall of Seringapatam (now Sriringapatna) in May 1799 ended decades of warfare between the remarkable Muslim dynasty that ruled the state of Mysore and the invading British. The British, under Lord Cornwallis, had captured the city before, in 1792, and at that time they decided to leave the Tippoo on his throne, but mutual antagonisms, and the Tippoo's preference for a French alliance, led to the final Mysore war. The aim of the war was simple: to do what had not been done in 1792, unthrone the Tippoo, to which end the British concocted some very thin reasons to justify an invasion of Mysore, ignored the Tippoo's overtures for peace and so marched on Seringapatam. It was a brutally naked piece of aggression, but successful, for with the Tippoo's death the most formidable obstacle to British rule in southern India was removed, and with it the increasingly slim chance that Napoleon, then at the head of a French army stranded in Egypt, would intervene in the subcontinent.

The novel's description of the city's fall is mostly accurate. Two Forlorn Hopes, one headed by the unfortunate Sergeant Graham, led two columns of attacking troops across the wide South Cauvery and up the breach, and there the columns separated, one going north about the city's outer ramparts and the other south. Major General David Baird commanded the assault, and he, judging in the heat of battle that the resistance to the south was more formidable, turned that way. In fact the northern column encountered the stiffest opposition, most probably caused by the Tippoo's own leadership. Many eyewitnesses, from both sides, testified to the Tippoo's personal bravery. He was gaudily dressed and bright with gems, but he insisted on fighting in the front rank of his men. Further difficulties were caused by the defenders firing from the inner wall's sheltered firestep, and it was not until Captain Goodall, the commander of the 12th Regiment's Light Company, had led his men across the buttressing cross-wall and so began the capture of the inner ramparts that the defence collapsed. The fight was short, but exceptionally bloody, causing 1400 casualties among the attackers and over 6000 from the Tippoo's troops.

I did take one great liberty with the historical facts of the assault. There was no disused western gateway, nor any mine either, but the idea for the mine came from an enormous and spectacular explosion which occurred in the city two days before the assault. It is believed that a British shell somehow ignited one of the Tippoo's magazines, which then blew up. I changed the nature of that explosion, and delayed it by two days, because fictional heroes must be given suitable employment.

There were a few French troops in Seringapatam, but Nelson's victory at the Nile had effectively ended any real chance of French intervention in India. Colonel Gudin is a fictional character, though someone very like him did lead a small French battalion in the battle. Others of the novel's characters, like Colonel Gent, did exist. Major Shee, a somewhat intemperate and unfortunate Irishman, commanded the 33rd during the time Wellesley served as one of Harris's deputies and Lieutenant Fitzgerald, brother of the Knight of Kerry, was killed in the confused night attack on the Sultanpetah tope, probably by a bayonet thrust. That setback was Wellesley's only military defeat and it gave him a lifelong aversion to night actions. Major General Baird did dislike Wellesley and fiercely resented the fact that General Harris appointed the younger man to be the Governor of Seringapatam after the siege, although, given Baird's hatred of the Indians, the appointment was undoubtedly wise. Baird's jealousy lasted many years, though in his later life the Scotsman generously admitted that Wellesley was his military superior. By then, of course, Arthur Wellesley had become the first Duke of Wellington. In 1815 only Napoleon still regarded Wellington with contempt, dubbing him the 'Sepoy General', but the Sepoy General still whipped Napoleon.

The Tippoo Sultan, of course, existed. His defeat was celebrated in Britain where the Tippoo was regarded as a peculiarly brutal and ferocious despot and for years afterwards, despite many other momentous victories over much more formidable enemies, the British still harked back to the Tippoo's defeat and death. The event was celebrated in numerous prints, it was turned into at least six stage plays and it occupied many books, all tributes to the curious fascination the Tippoo exercised over his erstwhile enemies. Yet his death, despite being pictured and re-enacted so many times, was never fully explained because no one ever discovered who exactly killed him (it was most probably a soldier of the 12th's Grenadier Company). The Tippoo's body was found, but his killer never came forward and it is presumed that this reticence was caused by the man's unwillingness to admit to ownership of the Tippoo's jewels. Where many of those jewels are today, no one knows.

But much of the Tippoo's grandeur can still be seen. The Inner Palace of Seringapatam, alas, was demolished in the nineteenth century (local guides insist it was destroyed by the British bombardment, but in fact the building survived the siege intact) and all that remains of its splendour are a few ruined walls and some pillars which now support the canopy of Sriringapatna's railway station, but the Summer Palace, the Daria Dowlat, still exists. The mural of the British defeat at Pollilur was restored by Wellesley, who lived in this exquisite little palace while he governed Mysore. It is now a museum. The Tippoo's mosque still stands, there is another small palace in the city of Bangalore, and, perhaps most moving of all, the Gumbaz, the elegant mausoleum where the Tippoo lies with his parents. To this day his tomb is covered with a cloth patterned with tiger stripes.

The Tippoo revered the tiger, and used tiger motifs wherever he could. His fabulous tiger throne existed, but it was broken up at his death, though large parts of it can still be seen, notably in Windsor Castle. His dreadful toy, the tiger organ, is now in London's Victoria and Albert Museum. The organ was sadly damaged during the Blitz, but it has been superbly restored, though, alas, its voice is not what it was. The Tippoo did keep six tigers in his palace courtyard (Wellesley ordered them shot).

Sriringapatna's outer wall still stands. The town, which has fewer inhabitants now than it did in 1799, is an attractive place and the site of the assault, overlooking the South Cauvery, is marked by an obelisk that stands immediately to the north of the repaired breach. Just behind the breach, and filling the whole north-western corner of the defences, is an enormous earthen bastion — all that remains of the inner wall. The rest of the inner wall has disappeared completely, probably demolished by Wellesley shortly after the siege. Later, during the high noon of the Raj, various sites were identified in Sriringapatna as historically significant locations, but I believe the absence of the inner wall caused some confusion. Modern visitors to Sriringapatna will discover plaques or memorials displayed at the Tippoo's dungeons, at the Water Gate where he was supposedly killed and, much farther east, at the place where his body was found, but of the three I suspect only the last is accurate.

The so-called dungeons are beneath the Sultan Battery, and while it is quite possible they were used as cells in the 1780s (and thus the place where Baird spent his uncomfortable forty-four months) they were not so employed in 1799. By then the inner wall had been built (it was hastily constructed after Cornwallis's 1792 siege), and it is much more likely that the 'dungeons' were thereafter employed as a magazine (a use for which they were obviously intended). The Tippoo's surviving prisoners all attested that they were held inside the inner wall during the siege, so that is where I placed Sharpe, Lawford, McCandless and Hakeswill.

A plaque marks the Water Gate through the outer wall as the site of the Tippoo's death, but again this seems wrong. The evidence of Mysorean survivors, some of whom were close to the Tippoo at the end, clearly states that the Tippoo was trying to get inside the city when he was killed. We know he had been fighting on the outer wall and that when he broke off that fight he came down to the space between the walls, and there the story becomes muddled. British sources claim he tried to escape the city through the outer wall's Water Gate, but the Indian testimonies all agree that he tried to go through the inner wall's Water Gate into the city itself. That second Water Gate has since vanished, but I suspect it was there that he died and not at the existing gate. It might seem logical that he should have attempted to flee the city, but the remaining Water Gate led, and still leads, to the flooded ditch inside the glacis, and even if he had negotiated those obstacles (under fire from the attackers on the wall above him), he would only have reached the southern bank of the Cauvery which was under the guns of the British forces north of the river. By cutting through the city he could have reached the Bangalore Gate which offered a much greater chance of successful escape. Indeed, after the Tippoo's death, or perhaps while he was still dying, some of his loyal retainers found him, placed him in the palanquin, and carried him eastwards, presumably in an attempt to reach the Bangalore Gate. They were intercepted, the palanquin was overturned and the Tippoo's body lay undiscovered for several hours. It seems a pity to abandon the present Water Gate as the place where the Tippoo was shot, for its gloomy dank tunnel has a certain eerie drama, but doubtless the matching gate in the inner wall was equally atmospheric.

The Tippoo's body was treated with honour, and next day, as the novel describes, he was buried beside his parents in the Gumbaz mausoleum. Wellesley, meanwhile, stamped out the looting in the city (he hung four looters, a remedy he would employ in the wake of future sieges), but what the common soldier could not take, the senior officers happily plundered for themselves. The East India Company's Prize Agents tallied the Tippoo's treasures at a value of two million pounds (1799 pounds) and half of that fabulous fortune was declared to be prize money, so that many senior officers became rich men through that single day's work. Most of the treasures returned to Britain, where they remain, some on public view, but many still in private hands.

Today the Tippoo is a hero to many Indians who regard him as a proto-independence fighter. This seems a perverse judgement. Most of the Tippoo's enemies were other Indian states, though admittedly his fiercest fights were against the British (and their Indian allies), but he could never entirely rely on his Hindu subjects. No one is certain that he was betrayed on the day of his death, but it seems more than likely that several Hindu officers, like the fictional Appah Rao, were deliberately lukewarm in their support. The Tippoo's Muslim religion and his preference for the Persian language mark him as being outside the mainstream of modern Indian tradition, which is perhaps why I was assured by one educated Indian that the Tippoo had, in truth, been a Hindu. He was not, and no amount of wishful thinking can make him into a more acceptably 'Indian' hero. Nor does his story need embellishment, for he was a hero anyway, even if he never did fight for Indian independence. He fought for Mysorean domination over India, which was a quite different thing.

I would like to thank Elizabeth Cartmale-Freedman who ransacked the files of London's India House and did much other research for Sharpe's Tiger, and for all the useful things she discovered and which I left out, I apologize. I must also thank my agent, Toby Eady, who went above and beyond the call of duty by accompanying me to Sriringapatna. Research has rarely been more enjoyable. As usual, when writing Sharpe, I owe gratitude to Lady Elizabeth Longford for her superb book Wellington, the Tears of the Sword, and to the late Jac Weller for his indispensable Wellington in India.

Sriringapatna is still dominated by the Tippoo's memory. He was an efficient ruler whom Indians revere and the British consider a callous tyrant. That tyrannical reputation was caused, above all, by his execution of thirteen British prisoners before the assault (only eight of them had been captured in the night skirmish, the others were already prisoners). It is unlikely that the executions took place at the Summer Palace, but they were carried out by the Tippoo's jettis who did kill in the manner described in the novel. Those murders are reprehensible, yet they should not blind us to the Tippoo's virtues. He was a very brave man, a considerable soldier, a talented administrator and an enlightened ruler and he makes a worthy foe for young Richard Sharpe, who still has a long road to march under his cold, but very clever, Sepoy General.