The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company

by William Dalrymple

The tables were being turned. It was now Company troops who learned what it meant to be defeated, to be taken prisoner, to be mistreated. Munro, whose failure to rescue Baillie had been a major factor in the disaster, and who on his return to Madras with what was left of his panic-stricken army, was jeered and hooted at in the streets, called the Battle of Pollilur ‘the severest blow that the English ever suffered in India’.123 Worse was to follow. There were so many Company amputees that there were not enough Indian medical orderlies to bear them away from the front lines. Surgeon Thomas Davis wrote, ‘I have been as sparing of Limbs as possible’, but was compelled to remove many of them for lack of adequate medical supplies.124 Of the 7,000 prisoners Tipu captured in the course of the next few months of warfare against the Company, around 300 were forcibly circumcised, forcibly converted to Islam and given Muslim names and clothes. By the end of the year, one in five of all the British soldiers in India were held prisoner by Tipu in his sophisticated fortress of Seringapatam. Even more humiliatingly, several British regimental drummer boys were made to wear dresses – ghagra cholis – and entertain the court in the manner of nautch (dancing) girls.